FOCUS: H.B. 1020 • 2023 Elections • Voting • Fact Checks • #MSWelfare/TANF Scandal • Jackson Water • Abortion • Race & Racism
A Black FedEx driver says he was making deliveries in Brookhaven, Miss., late last month when two white men assailed him, including one who allegedly fired multiple bullets into his delivery truck.
In this Jackson Advocate-Mississippi Free Press collaboration, the BWC Project team has spent a year planning, reporting, hosting solution circles of Black women and doing deep historic research on, so far, three counties. Our big, hairy goal is to show why COVID-19 initially affected Black women in our state harder than any other group including even Black men.
Noxubee County mothers and educators, many of them resilient Black women, are determined to make it work and find solutions that their students and families deserve. But that is a challenge now, just as it was before the pandemic hit, due to long-term disparities and historic and intentional inequities that made the effects of the pandemic especially acute for the Black women of the county and their families.
Black businessman and voting-rights activist Lamar Smith arrived at the Lincoln County Courthouse on Aug. 13, 1955, as dozens of people milled about on the lawn. Walking up to the steps on the north side of the courthouse carrying his ballots, Smith encountered three white men who blocked his entry. Soon, he was lying on the ground dying from a gunshot wound. No one would help him.
Brookhaven, Miss., native Dick Scruggs was 9 when white men killed Black farm owner Lamar “Ditney” Smith due to his political organizing and campaign. Now, Scruggs wants a marker on the courthouse lawn where Smith died.
Sixty-six years later, and the fight for justice in Emmett Louis Till’s case continues and remains unsolved. Will there ever be justice? This dark spot in our history is painful enough, but to have our lawmakers and Justice Department silent on this is even more painful.
August 28, 2021 marks the 66th anniversary of Emmett Till’s gruesome murder in the Mississippi Delta. He would have turned 80 years old this year—just two years older than the current President of the United States. It is time for our region, state, and country to finally honor Emmett Till and his courageous mother with the creation of an Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley Mississippi Delta Civil Rights National Historic Park.Â
Just over an hour into the speeches at Moss Hill, a shot rang out. It touched off four days of violence in which white vigilantes and local leaders murdered as many as 50 Black residents of Hinds County. Thus began the Clinton Massacre—terrorism that upended Hinds County and Mississippi. Here is the real story of what began on Sept. 4, 1875.
Bob Moses, a civil-rights hero who fought white supremacy and sharecropper education with every tool at his disposal, died at age 86 on the same day that Emmett Till would’ve turned 80, had white supremacists not brutally murdered the 14-year-old in 1955. They both have long inspired young people to seek systemic change.
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