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      Can Brandon Presley Help Mississippi Break from the Past?

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      It’s been 23 years since a Democrat was elected governor of Mississippi and 41 years since a Democrat was elected one of the state’s U.S. senators. The Republican lock on the state — along with the policies and noxious traditions that have kept it in the basement among U.S. states for most indicators of social health — sometimes seems impenetrable.Mike Espy, the former Democratic congressman from Mississippi and U.S. agriculture secretary, tried twice to become senator, in 2018 and 2020, but never got more than 46 percent of the vote. Jim Hood, then state attorney general, did a little better in the 2019 governor’s race, getting nearly 47 percent of the vote, but the current Republican governor, Tate Reeves, prevailed.This year, with Mr. Reeves up for re-election in November, there are once again hopes that Mississippi could take a few steps up from the bottom and elect a governor willing to make a break from the past. And even though Donald Trump won the state by more than 16 percentage points in 2020, there are reasons to think it could happen.For one thing, thanks to a significant scandal involving the misappropriation of welfare funds, Mr. Reeves is extraordinarily unpopular for an incumbent Republican, with 60 percent of voters saying they would prefer another candidate, according to a Mississippi Today/Siena College poll that came out last week. For another, he has a promising and energetic Democratic opponent named Brandon Presley who has been polling fairly well and is making a strong case that the state desperately needs a change, advocating a series of popular policies that could make a real difference in the lives of Mississippians, particularly those on the lower economic rungs. The contest is already turning into one of the most interesting races of 2023.Mr. Presley, 45, is one of three elected members of the state Public Service Commission, which regulates utilities, and is the former mayor of Nettleton, a small town in the bright-red northeast section of Mississippi. He talks energetically about the need to expand Medicaid and save rural hospitals, and why it’s important to eliminate the extremely regressive state grocery tax, and would rather discuss the lives of poor families than his own family ties to a certain popular singer of the same last name from Tupelo, up the road from Nettleton. (Elvis was his second cousin.)His most effective tactic is his unrelenting attack on Mr. Reeves and the welfare scandal that has swirled around him and the previous Republican governor, Phil Bryant. A 2020 state audit found that as much as $94 million in federal anti-poverty money was improperly diverted to two nonprofit groups that used it for favors to lobbyists, celebrities and some lawmakers. The celebrities included Brett Favre, the former N.F.L. quarterback, who, according to text messages uncovered by the nonprofit news site Mississippi Today, arranged to spend $5 million in welfare funds for a volleyball stadium at the University of Southern Mississippi, his alma mater. At the same time, the state was rejecting a large majority of requests from families for Mississippi’s meager $170 a month in welfare payments.Mr. Reeves was lieutenant governor when all this was going on, and several people at the center of the scandal have been his friends and supporters. Last summer, his administration fired the lawyer who had been officially assigned to investigate the scandal and recoup the money, after the lawyer issued a subpoena to the university’s athletic foundation regarding the volleyball money. Though Mr. Reeves hasn’t been implicated in the diversion of most of the money, Mississippi Today published text messages in August showing that the former state welfare director, who pleaded guilty to federal and state fraud and theft charges last fall, said he was acting on behalf of Mr. Reeves when he siphoned $1.3 million of the welfare money to a fitness program run by the governor’s longtime personal trainer, Paul LaCoste.That was all Mr. Presley needed.“I got in this when I saw, as all Mississippi did, millions of dollars aimed at working families got diverted by Tate Reeves and his cronies,” he told me last week. “His own personal trainer, who taught Tate Reeves how to do jumping jacks, got a $70,000 vehicle and was paid $11,000 a month, while we’ve got children going hungry in Mississippi. Well, it made me want to puke.”Mr. Presley is funny and garrulous and is often described as the best natural politician in the state, with an easygoing manner that appeals to voters of all types. He grew up as the son of a low-income single mother and speaks with real empathy about the tens of thousands of poor families, Black and white, who can’t get clean drinking water, proper health care or broadband internet after decades of largely racist neglect by the state.His most significant plan is to fully expand Medicaid in Mississippi, which Mr. Reeves — along with Republicans in nine other states, mostly in the South — refuses to do. As The New York Times recently reported, health care is in a serious crisis in the state, where five hospitals have closed since 2005 and 36 percent of the remaining rural hospitals are at risk of closing from lack of funds. Mississippi’s stubbornness has cost it about $1.35 billion a year in federal funds to hospitals and health care providers, money that could be used for 100,000 poor adults who now have no guaranteed health coverage.“This will go down in history one of the dumbest decisions ever made in this state,” Mr. Presley said. “Our health care system is on fire because Tate Reeves is not willing to help working Mississippians, just because of some petty, cheap, childish politics.”The state has a $3.9 billion budget surplus and could easily afford its 10 percent share of the expansion cost, but Mr. Reeves would rather use the money to help prosperous earners by getting rid of the income tax, which most low-income people do not pay. Mr. Presley, on the other hand, is campaigning to eliminate the grocery tax, which at 7 percent is the highest in the nation and hurts poor people the most. Though he is too politic to say so, the grocery tax is yet another legacy of Mississippi’s structural racism, which helps explain why there is more hunger in the state than in any other.Polling shows that nearly 60 percent of state voters say they will support only a candidate for governor who wants to get rid of the grocery tax, and 55 percent will support only a candidate who wants to expand Medicaid. But that same poll shows Mr. Reeves ahead of Mr. Presley by 11 points. (The Presley campaign says its internal polling shows the race to be within the margin of error.) To a large degree, that contradiction can be explained by rote party identification in the state, but it’s also because nearly two-thirds of voters don’t know enough about Mr. Presley yet, particularly in African American areas.“In those neighborhoods, he’s still a white guy that nobody knows,” said State Representative Robert L. Johnson III, the House Democratic leader, who is Black and has been supportive of Mr. Presley. “But he’s not afraid to embrace the African American vote in this state. He’s made commitments to do things that other candidates don’t do. It’s early yet, but the governor has been so bad that I think this time might be different.”Mr. Presley has won the endorsement of Bennie Thompson, the Democratic congressman from Jackson who carries a lot of weight among Black voters, and he has one new advantage: In 2020, voters abolished the Jim Crow-era requirement that candidates for governor have to win not only the popular vote but also the most votes in a majority of the 122 state House districts, a law intended to keep Black candidates out of statewide offices. (Mr. Reeves did not support the repeal.)“I think he can win,” Mr. Espy told me. “He’s very likable, a good retail politician, and Tate Reeves is so very, very unpopular. But he’s got a big job. He needs to raise the money and do more Black outreach.”Mr. Presley said his campaign would do everything possible to get a high turnout among Black voters, noting that the issues he cares about, particularly Medicaid and the grocery tax, resonate well in those precincts.One thing that he doesn’t bring up that much, unless asked, is his support for Mississippi’s extremely restrictive abortion law, which bans abortion unless the mother’s life is in danger or the pregnancy was caused by rape. That law has an outsize effect on low-income women who can’t afford to travel outside the state for an abortion.Mr. Presley described himself as “pro-life and Christian.” But he quickly said that to him, being “pro-life” means being pro-hospital, pro-doctor and pro-emergency room, supporting full funding of the state education budget and ending the scams that have prevented federal and state welfare money from going to the families who need it.His position on abortion and his support for gun rights will not win him many friends in the national Democratic Party, but Mississippi is not like the rest of the nation. Winning there and finally beginning to reverse the detestable policies of the past — an enormously difficult task — will require a candidate who can bring together an unusual coalition of voters with very different interests, and Mr. Presley may be the one to do it. It’s been done next door in Louisiana, where Gov. John Bel Edwards is a Democrat in a similar mold, and if it can happen in Mississippi, it might bring hope to thousands of other voters who have ceaselessly struggled for better lives in the Deep South.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Biden pleads with Congress to pass gun control after six killed in Mississippi

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      Biden pleads with Congress to pass gun control after six killed in MississippiPresident says ‘thoughts and prayers aren’t enough’ after Richard Crum, 52, suspected of carrying out mass shooting in Arkabutla Joe Biden is once again pleading for Congress to pass meaningful gun control after a man shot six people to death – including his ex-wife and stepfather – at three different locations in a small, rural Mississippi community on Friday.“Enough,” the president’s statement said, noting that there had been at least 73 shootings in which at least four victims were wounded or killed in the first 48 days of this year.Michigan professor calls for tighter gun control after students fatally shotRead moreInvoking a phrase that pro-gun advocates often use to deflect from discussing action after mass shootings, Biden’s statement added: “Thoughts and prayers aren’t enough. Gun violence is an epidemic and Congress must act now.“We need – need – commonsense gun law reforms.”Biden specifically mentioned requiring background checks on all gun sales, banning firearms with high capacities for ammunition, prohibiting domestic abusers from legally having weapons regardless of their relationships to those they have preyed on, requiring the safe storage of guns, and allowing firearms manufacturers to face civil liability for “knowingly [putting] weapons of war on our streets”.“We owe action to American communities being torn apart by gun violence,” Biden said.Biden’s remarks came after authorities alleged that 52-year-old Richard Crum unleashed a deadly rampage in Arkabutla, an unincorporated community with fewer than 300 people in Mississippi’s Tate county.Armed with a shotgun and two handguns, Crum, authorities said, went to a convenience store about 11am on Friday and fatally shot a 59-year-old man named Chris Boyce, who was sitting in the driver’s seat of a pickup truck outside. Boyce’s brother was sitting next to him but ran away without being physically harmed.As Tate county sheriff’s deputies arrived at the store, they received emergency calls from the home of Crum’s 60-year-old former wife, Debra. Crum had shot her to death shortly after returning from the office of a doctor treating her for a stroke she suffered recently, according to the local TV news station WMC, based about 45 miles north in Memphis, Tennessee.Debra Crum’s husband, George Drane, described to WMC how he tried to – but couldn’t – fight off the attacker.“I wrestled with him, and I lost, as you can see,” Drane said, with his head wrapped in a bandage and holding back tears. “We had a good day at the doctor’s office. We ate some soup when we got home and we were going to go into town.”Deputies tracked Crum down to the home of his stepfather, 73-year-old George McCain. Crum allegedly shot dead McCain, his stepfather’s 78-year-old sister Lynda McCain, and two repair workers who happened to be there: John Rorie, 59, and Charles Manuel, 76.One of the murdered repair workers was in the road, and the other was in a car, authorities said. Police said they found Crum inside a car, and he was arrested after surrendering to them, though not before businesses and a school had to temporarily lock down.The local coroner’s office said Friday that five of the dead were from Coldwater, a community that neighbors Arkabutla. Boyce was from Lakeland, Florida.Arkabutla sits on a reservoir that is a popular fishing and recreation spot. It is also known for being the home town of James Earl Jones, the Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony-winning actor.The local sheriff, Brad Lance, said investigators had not immediately determined a motive. Lance could not recall any prior encounters between his agency and Crum, who is facing charges of capital murder and was being held without bond.Later on Friday, Biden said he and first lady Jill Biden were grieving with the families of the victims, who were murdered four days after three were killed in an unrelated shooting on the campus of Michigan State University.“We are … mourning … as we have for far too many Americans,” the president’s statement said.Biden last year signed bipartisan legislation passed by Congress that expanded background checks for the youngest gun buyers while funding mental health and violence intervention programs.But mass shootings persist despite what was hailed as the first major firearms safety bill to pass Congress in nearly three decades. The president has long argued that much more must be done to curb gun violence in the US.Chances of more gun control measures passing on Capitol Hill seem slim, however. Biden’s fellow Democrats hold only a slender numerical advantage in the Senate, and their Republican opponents have a thin majority in the House of Representatives.TopicsJoe BidenUS politicsMississippiUS gun controlnewsReuse this content More

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      Mississippi Republicans pass bill to create separate, unelected court in majority-Black city

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      Mississippi Republicans pass bill to create separate, unelected court in majority-Black cityMayor of Jackson, Mississippi, calls proposed law ‘some of the most oppressive legislation in our city’s history’ The Republican-dominated Mississippi house of representatives has passed a bill to create a separate, unelected court system in the city of Jackson that would fall outside the purview of the city’s voters, the majority of whom are Black.The bill, which local leaders have likened to apartheid-era laws and described as unconstitutional, would also expand a separate capitol police force, overseen by state authorities. The force would expand into all of the city’s white majority neighborhoods, according to Mississippi Today. Jackson’s population is over 80% Black.‘This is no way to live’: Mississippians struggle with another water crisisRead moreSpeaking after House Bill 1020 passed on Tuesday evening, Jackson’s mayor Chokwe Lumumba branded the proposed law “some of the most oppressive legislation in our city’s history”.“It’s oppressive because it strips the right of Black folks to vote. It’s oppressive because it puts a military force over people that has no accountability to them. It’s oppressive because there will be judges who will determine sentences over people’s lives. It’s oppressive because it redirects their tax dollars to something they don’t endorse nor believe in,” Lumumba said.The bill passed largely along party lines in a 76-38 vote and will now travel to the state senate, where Republicans also hold a significant majority. The passage was preceded by an intense, four-hour floor debate in which members of the state’s Black caucus made impassioned pleas to reject the legislation and compared the bill to the state’s Jim Crow-era constitution of 1890.The legislation was proposed by house Republican Trey Lamar, who is white and represents a district in the state’s north-west, which is majority white.Lamar, who does not live in Jackson, has cited county court backlogs and crime rates in the city as his motivation for the proposed law. During floor debate, Lamar was asked if any of his constituents had asked for the bill. He replied: “I don’t live in Jackson … but you know what I like to do … I like to come to Jackson because it’s my capital city.”The bill, which is over 1,000 pages long, would expand Jackson’s existing capitol complex improvement district, which is patrolled by the state’s capitol police and currently covers parts of the city’s downtown that house state government buildings. The district’s expansion would cover areas in the city’s north, which, according to local press, include entertainment and shopping neighborhoods.The new court district would feature two judges directly appointed by Mississippi’s supreme court chief justice, Michael K Randolph, who is white. There would be two prosecutors, appointed by the state attorney general, Lynn Fitch, a white Republican. And two public defenders appointed by the state defender’s office.Proposed amendments offered on Tuesday included calls to make the judges residents of the Jackson area and to compel elections for the positions. Both amendments failed.The proposed bill is the latest in a line of extreme legislation in the state, which last year introduced a sweeping anti-critical race theory law, which met vocal opposition from the state’s Black caucus.Jackson has also suffered from a series of water outages due to ailing infrastructure, which has been chronically underfunded by the state for years. Black residents in the poorest parts of the city have been disproportionately affected.In November last year, the city’s water system was taken under federal government oversight after the Environmental Protection Agency found the city in violation of the Safe Drinking Water Act.TopicsMississippiRepublicansUS politicsRacenewsReuse this content More

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      3 Races for Governor to Watch This Year

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      Rogelio V. Solis/Associated PressIn Mississippi, the Republican governor, Tate Reeves, appears to have avoided a rugged Republican primary field, despite his lackluster approval ratings and a water crisis in Jackson. Two potential G.O.P. challengers skipped the race: Philip Gunn, Mississippi’s House speaker, and Michael Watson, the secretary of state. More

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      The Key Elections Taking Place in 2023

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      Among the races to watch are governors’ contests in Kentucky, Louisiana and Mississippi and mayoral elections in Chicago and Philadelphia.It might be tempting to focus on the 2024 presidential election now that the midterms are in the rearview mirror, but don’t sleep on 2023: key races for governor, mayor and other offices will be decided.Their outcomes will be closely watched for signs of whether Democrats or Republicans have momentum going into next year’s presidential election and congressional races — and for what they signal about the influence of former President Donald J. Trump.Virginia and New Jersey have noteworthy state house elections, and in Wisconsin, a state Supreme Court race will determine the balance of power in a body whose conservative majority routinely sides with Republicans. Here’s what to watch:Kentucky governorOf the three governors’ races this year, only Kentucky features an incumbent Democrat seeking re-election in a state that Mr. Trump won in 2020. The race also appears packed with the most intrigue.Gov. Andy Beshear won by less than 6,000 votes in 2019, ousting Matt Bevin, the Trump-backed Republican incumbent in the cherry-red state that is home to Senator Mitch McConnell, the Senate G.O.P. leader.A growing field of Republicans has ambitions of settling the score in 2023, including Daniel Cameron, who in 2019 became the first Black person to be elected as Kentucky’s attorney general, an office previously held by Mr. Beshear. Mr. Cameron, who is seen as a possible successor to Mr. McConnell, drew attention in 2020 when he announced that a grand jury did not indict two Louisville officers who shot Breonna Taylor. Last June, Mr. Trump endorsed Mr. Cameron for governor, but there will be competition for the G.O.P. nomination.Attorney General Daniel Cameron, signing the papers for his candidacy last week, is among Republicans seeking to challenge Gov. Andy Beshear this year.Timothy D. Easley/Associated PressKelly Craft, a former ambassador to the United Nations under Mr. Trump, is also running. So are Mike Harmon, the state auditor of public accounts, and Ryan Quarles, the state’s agricultural commissioner, and several other Republicans. The primary will be on May 16.Louisiana governorGov. John Bel Edwards, a Democrat who narrowly won a second term in 2019, is not eligible to run again because of term limits. The open-seat race has tantalized some prominent Republicans, including Jeff Landry, the state’s attorney general, who has declared his candidacy.Two other Republicans weighing entering the race are John Schroder, the state treasurer who has told supporters he will run, and Representative Garret Graves.Shawn Wilson, the state’s transportation secretary under Mr. Edwards, is one of the few Democrats who have indicated interest in running in deep-red Louisiana.Electing a New Speaker of the HouseRepresentative Kevin McCarthy won the speakership after a revolt within the Republican Party set off a long stretch of unsuccessful votes.Inside the Speaker Fight: Mr. McCarthy’s speaker bid turned into a rolling disaster. “The Daily” has the inside story of how it went so wrong and what he was forced to give up.A Tenuous Grip: By making concessions to far-right representatives, Mr. McCarthy has effectively given them carte blanche to disrupt the workings of the House — and to hold him hostage to their demands.Looming Consequences: Congressional gridlock brought on by far-right Republicans now seems more likely to lead to government shutdowns or, worse, a default on debt obligations.Roots of the Chaos: How did Mr. McCarthy’s bid become a four-day debacle? The story begins with the zero-sum politics of Newt Gingrich.Mississippi governorGov. Tate Reeves, a Republican, is running for a second term. But the advantage of incumbency and a substantial campaign fund may not be enough to stop a primary challenge, especially with his job approval numbers among the lowest of the nation’s governors.Philip Gunn, Mississippi’s House speaker, has been coy about possible plans to enter the race after announcing in November that he would not seek re-election to the Legislature. Among the other Republicans whose names have been bandied about is Michael Watson, the secretary of state. But Mr. Reeves is the only Republican to have filed so far; the deadline is Feb. 1.A Democrat hasn’t been elected governor of Mississippi in two decades, since a contest was decided by the Legislature because the winning candidate did not receive a majority of votes. Not surprisingly, few Democrats have stepped forward to run. One name to watch is Brandon Presley, a public service commissioner. Mr. Presley is a relative of Elvis Presley, who was from Tupelo, Miss., according to Mississippi Today, a nonprofit news website.U.S. House (Virginia’s Fourth District)The death in late November of Representative A. Donald McEachin, a Democrat from Virginia, prompted Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, to schedule a special election for Feb. 21.In December, Democrats resoundingly nominated Jennifer McClellan, a state senator, to represent the party in the contest for Virginia’s Fourth District, which includes Richmond and leans heavily Democratic. She could become the first Black woman elected to Congress in Virginia, where she would complete the two-year term that Mr. McEachin won by 30 percentage points just weeks before his death.Republicans tapped Leon Benjamin, a Navy veteran and pastor who lost to Mr. McEachin in November and in 2020.Chicago mayorMayor Lori Lightfoot of Chicago, a Democrat who in 2019 became the first Black woman and first openly gay person to lead the nation’s third-most populous city, faces a gantlet of challengers in her quest for re-election.That test will arrive somewhat early in the year, with the mayoral election set for Feb. 28. If no candidate finishes with a majority of the votes, a runoff will be held on April 4.Mayor Lori Lightfoot of Chicago faces several challengers in her re-election bid.Jim Vondruska/ReutersThe crowded field includes Representative Jesús G. García, a Democrat who is known as Chuy and who was overwhelmingly re-elected to a third term in his Cook County district in November and previously ran unsuccessfully for mayor. In the current race, Ms. Lightfoot has attacked Mr. García over receiving money for his House campaign from Sam Bankman-Fried, the criminally charged founder of the collapsed cryptocurrency exchange FTX.Ms. Lightfoot’s other opponents include Kam Buckner, a state legislator; Brandon Johnson, a Cook County commissioner; Sophia King and Roderick T. Sawyer, who both serve on the City Council; Paul Vallas, a former chief executive of Chicago public schools; and Ja’Mal Green, a prominent activist in the city.Philadelphia mayorAn open-seat race for mayor in Pennsylvania’s foremost Democratic bastion has attracted an expansive field of candidates. The office is held by Jim Kenney, a Democrat who is not eligible to run again because of term limits.Five members of the City Council have resigned to enter the race, which city rules require. They are Allan Domb, Derek Green, Helen Gym, Cherelle Parker and Maria Quiñones Sánchez.The field also includes Rebecca Rhynhart, the city’s controller, who has likewise resigned in order to run; Amen Brown, a state legislator; Jeff Brown, a supermarket chain founder; and James DeLeon; a retired judge.Wisconsin Supreme CourtConservatives are clinging to a one-seat majority on Wisconsin’s Supreme Court, but a retirement within the court’s conservative ranks could shift the balance of power this year. The court’s justices have increasingly been called on to settle landmark lawsuits involving elections, gerrymandering, abortion and other contentious issues.Two conservative and two liberal candidates have entered what is technically a nonpartisan election to succeed Judge Patience D. Roggensack on the seven-member court.Daniel Kelly, a conservative former justice on the state Supreme Court who lost his seat in the 2020 election, is seeking a comeback. Running against him in the conservative lane is Jennifer Dorow, a circuit court judge in Waukesha County who drew widespread attention when she presided over the trial of Darrell E. Brooks, the man convicted in the killing of six people he struck with his car during a Christmas parade in Waukesha, Wis., in 2021.Janet Protasiewicz and Everett Mitchell, judges from Milwaukee County and Dane County, which includes Madison, the capital, are seeking to give liberals a majority on the court.The two candidates who receive the most votes in the nonpartisan primary on Feb. 21 — regardless of their leanings — will face each other in the general election on April 4.Legislature (Virginia and New Jersey)Virginia is emerging as a potential tempest in 2023, with its divided legislature up for re-election and elected officials squarely focused on the issue of abortion — not to mention a Republican governor who is flirting with a run for president.Gov. Glenn Youngkin wants to ban most abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, emboldened by the Supreme Court’s repeal last summer of Roe v. Wade, the 50-year-old constitutional right to an abortion.His proposal is expected to resonate with Republican lawmakers, who narrowly control the House of Delegates. But it is likely to run into fierce opposition in the Senate, where Democrats are clinging to a slender majority. All seats in both chambers are up for election.Another Mid-Atlantic state to watch is New Jersey, where Republicans made inroads in 2021 despite being in the minority and are seeking to build on those gains. More

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      Republicans oppose social spending – will it cost them in the midterms?

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      Republicans oppose social spending – will it cost them in the midterms? In Mississippi, poverty is high and water problems blight the state. But Republicans seem adamantly against spending to help their constituentsIn his four decades as mayor of Glendora, a Mississippi Delta town surrounded by creeks, fields and not much else, Johnnie B Thomas has gotten used to bad news.He’s seen the town’s main drag grow desolate as its few businesses closed down, and the sole clinic follow suit. He’s watched storms drop trees on to houses – including his own, mortally wounding his wife. He pleaded for help as the seemingly unstoppable force that was Covid infected and killed his neighbors, a younger brother among them.And time and time again, he’s turned on the taps at home to find that the water was brown and silty, or didn’t flow at all.“Any time there’s storms, pretty much, our lights around here would go out,” Thomas said. “When we have bad weather, we can count on our water system breaking down.” If the power goes off when he’s awake, Thomas will scramble to switch on a generator so the town’s water pressure doesn’t slow to a trickle. If he’s not, the mayor or one of the city’s four employees will have to go door-to-door, warning Glendora’s population of 154 to avoid drinking the water without boiling it first.Two hours south, the nearly 150,000 residents of Mississippi’s largest city and capital Jackson were given a similar warning in late July, when tests found its water wasn’t safe to drink. A month later, the taps stopped running entirely – but unlike in Glendora, the response was immediate. A state of emergency was declared and the national guard and volunteer groups deployed to hand out water to residents. By the middle of last month, water pressure had been restored and the boil water notice lifted.A network of leaky pipes fed by a treatment plant that has repeatedly broken down, Jackson’s water system is far from fixed, and it’s not clear who will pay to repair it for good. Mississippi has the highest poverty rate in the country, and in Jackson, a quarter of residents live below the poverty line in neighborhoods where burned-out husks of houses and businesses are a common sight and some potholes have grown so deep traffic cones are stuffed in them to ward off drivers.Jackson’s Democratic mayor Chokwe, Antar Lumumba, estimates a cost of $1bn to solve its water issues, yet the city hasn’t had much luck getting help from the GOP-led state government, and only a tepid response from its majority Republican congressional delegation.As midterm elections loom in November, the Biden administration has touted its $1.2tn infrastructure agenda as a way of creating jobs and fixing exactly the sorts of problems that bedevil places like Glendora and Jackson. Yet Republicans – even as they ask for votes at the coming polls – have largely stood in opposition to those measures, despite the fact it is often their own constituents that could benefit.In few places are the stark contrasts between dire need and Republican intransigence as visible as Mississippi, one of the reddest states in the US.During his time as state treasurer, Tate Reeves, now the Republican governor, declined to authorize a $6m low-interest bond to pay for water repairs in Jackson after it was beset by a streak of pipe breaks, the Jackson Free Press reported.Other efforts to finance the city’s infrastructure needs have died in the Republican-controlled legislature, even though parts of the city lost water pressure for weeks last year. Lawmakers did, however, approve the state’s largest-ever tax cut this year, which will mostly benefit Mississippi’s highest earners.Reeves and Lumumba made cordial appearances together during Jackson’s most-recent water outage, but the governor changed his tone a day after the boil water notice was lifted, saying it was, “as always, a great day to not be in Jackson. I feel like I should take off my emergency management director hat and leave it in the car, and take off my public works director hat and leave it in the car.”Reeves’s office did not respond to a request for comment.In Washington, the Democratic-led Congress has spent big on infrastructure, with the approval of a massive plan to fund renovations to roads, bridges, drinking water systems and other projects nationwide last year. But only one of Mississippi’s Republican senators, Roger Wicker, and the lone Democrat in its House delegation, Bennie Thompson, voted for the bill.Wicker and the state’s other Republican in the Senate, Cindy Hyde-Smith, last month voted for a short-term federal funding measure that allocated $20m specifically for Jackson’s water needs. But their three fellow Republican members in the House said no to that bill, too, including Michael Guest, whose district includes part of Jackson but said the funds “did not address the situation on a long-term basis”.And while Guest has asked for money to repair a Jackson water treatment plant as part of this year’s congressional appropriation’s process, he has not included two other projects the city asked him to seek funding for, one of which would have replaced pumps at the treatment plant blamed for this summer’s water outage.Guest’s communications director, Rob Pillow, said lawmakers could only make 15 requests in total, “and the congressman chose to include the top-priority water infrastructure request from the city of Jackson out of the dozens of submissions received from cities and stakeholders across the district”.The NAACP civil rights group sees another motivation for Jackson’s problems: racial discrimination. Last month, it filed a formal complaint with the Environmental Protection Agency alleging that Mississippi was diverting money meant for the upkeep of Jackson’s drinking water systems to white communities.While Jackson is majority Black, many of its suburbs adjacent to the city limits – where the water was running and clean during the summer weeks when Jackson’s was not – are predominantly white. So is the state government: an African American has not been elected to a statewide office in Mississippi since the late 19th century.Among the NAACP’s claims was that Jackson had only three times in the past 25 years received a drinking water state revolving loan, one of Mississippi’s main ways of paying for infrastructure upgrades. A utility serving mostly white rural areas of an adjoining county had been awarded the funds nine times over the same period, the NAACP said.Stephanie Showalter-Otts, director of the University of Mississippi’s National Sea Grant Law Center, said there is much more money available for the drinking water state revolving loans than is being given out, even though there is probably no shortage of uses for it.A large, rural state with a spread-out population, Mississippi has more than a thousand water systems, and Showalter-Otts said some serve only a few hundred people and struggle to meet their needs. Hundreds of boil water notices were issued in the 2016 and 2017 fiscal years, the American Society of Civil Engineers found, and in the Mississippi Delta, Showalter-Otts said a study by her team found detectable levels of lead in more than two-thirds of water samples taken from homes.The state’s revolving loan fund has ended recent fiscal years with tens of millions of dollars left over, and Showalter-Otts wonders if those funds don’t represent missed opportunities for local governments dealing with spotty water systems.“The federal government is providing resources to the state to distribute to address drinking water issues in the state and that money is left on the table every year,” she said.Showalter-Otts cautioned that some municipalities may not be able to afford to repay a loan, or have the manpower to apply for one successfully. “There’s not a lot of information out there about how to apply, or guides for how to apply. Mississippi just doesn’t have those kind of resources. It feels like it’s not a priority of the state to help communities apply for those funds.”Glendora’s Mayor Thomas can sympathize. The town’s water problems have gone on for years, with little attention or success in getting help.The mayor’s solution is to build a water tower, like so many rural communities in Mississippi have done. But Thomas, in office since 1982 in a town where census data estimates more than 91% of the population lives in poverty, has never been successful in winning a grant from the state for its construction, which he estimates would cost $600,000 – nor can the town afford to borrow from the revolving loan fund.As for its residents, many say they have had too many encounters with dry taps or brown water that stains their bath tubs and clogs water filters, and rely on bottled water exclusively, even though nearest store selling it is about an hour’s round-trip drive.“Don’t nobody drink this water. People buy water,” William Willingham, 64 and unemployed, said as he sat outside one of many shuttered businesses on Glendora’s commercial strip.Located just off a rural highway, the lonely drag begins with a sign commemorating the killing of African-American fuel station attendant Clinton Melton, and ends with a museum dedicated to the lynching of Emmett Till, which residents say partially took place in the town.Beyond just keeping the taps running for days when the power goes out, a tower could help lower insurance rates for the municipality, and also alleviate the constant financial burden buying bottled water places on Glendora’s residents.Thomas’s vision for Glendora extends beyond its water system. In 2005, he turned the site of a former cotton gin into the Emmett Till Historic Intrepid Center, which is dedicated to the town’s place in the teenager’s murder by two white men who thought he had flirted with one of their wives. Thomas believes a disused bridge on the edge of Glendora was where Till’s body was tossed into a tributary of the Tallahatchie river – and the cotton gin fan found tied around his neck came from the building where the museum now sits.His father, Henry Lee Loggins, was even named as being made to accompany Till’s killers, but denied involvement until his death in 2009.There’s a long-running campaign to convince the federal government to create a national park where Till was killed. Thomas hopes Glendora would act as a gateway for that park, the visitors it brings, and the tour guides it would employ.“That’s what I see through the museum and the community,” Thomas said. “There’s several things to happen here, as a result of a museum, could happen, to create a sustainable community.”TopicsUS midterm elections 2022MississippiRepublicansDemocratsUS politicsfeaturesReuse this content More

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      ‘It’s good to think strategically’: Thomas E Ricks on civil rights and January 6

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      Interview‘It’s good to think strategically’: Thomas E Ricks on civil rights and January 6Martin Pengelly in Washington In his new book, the historian considers the work of Martin Luther King and others through the lens of military thoughtThere is a direct connection from Freedom Summer to the January 6 committee,” says Thomas E Ricks as he discusses his new book, Waging a Good War: A Military History of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1968.‘Now is a continuation of then’: America’s civil rights era – in picturesRead moreFreedom Summer was a 1964 campaign to draw attention to violence faced by Black people in Mississippi when they tried to vote. The House January 6 committee will soon conclude its hearings on the Capitol riot of 2021, when supporters of Donald Trump attacked American democracy itself.But the committee is chaired by Bennie Thompson. In his opening statement, in June, the Democrat said: “I was born, raised, and still live in Bolton, Mississippi … I’m from a part of the country where people justify the actions of slavery, Ku Klux Klan and lynching. I’m reminded of that dark history as I hear voices today try and justify the actions of the insurrectionists of 6 January 2021.”Ricks is reminded of the insurrectionists as he retells that grim history. Watching the January 6 hearings, he says, he “was looking at Bennie Thompson. And I realised, his career follows right on.“Summer ’64, you start getting Black people registered in Mississippi. A tiny minority, about 7%, are able to vote in ’64 but it rises to I think 59% by ’68. Bennie Thompson gets elected alderman [of Bolton, in 1969], mayor [1973] and eventually to Congress [1993]. And then as a senior member of Congress, chairs this January 6 committee.“Well, there is a direct connection from Freedom Summer, and [civil rights leaders] Amzie Moore, Bob Moses, Fannie Lou Hamer and Dave Dennis, to the January 6 committee. And I think that’s a wonderful thing.”Under Thompson, Ricks says, the January 6 committee is acting strategically, “establishing an indisputable factual record of what happened”, a bulwark against attempts to rewrite history.“It’s always good to think strategically,” Ricks says. Which brings him back to his book.As a reporter for the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal, Ricks was twice part of teams that won a Pulitzer prize. His bestselling books include Fiasco (2006) and The Gamble (2009), lacerating accounts of the Iraq disaster, and The Generals (2012), on the decline of US military leadership. In Waging a Good War, he applies the precepts of military strategy to the civil rights campaigns.He says: “This book, I wrote because I had to. I had to get it out of my head. The inspiration was I married a woman who had been active in civil rights.”Mary Kay Ricks is the author of Escape on the Pearl (2008), about slavery and the Underground Railroad. In the 1960s, she was “president of High School Friends of the SNCC [Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee], Washington DC chapter.“She would pick people up at Union Station and drive them wherever they needed to be. So her memory of [the late Georgia congressman] John Lewis is him arriving, saying, ‘I’m hungry, take me to McDonald’s.’ All our lives we would be driving along, and somebody would be on the radio, and she’d say, ‘Oh, I knew that guy’ or ‘I dated that guy. Oh, I thought he was crazy.’“So I was reading about the civil rights movement to understand my wife and the stories she told me. And the more I read, the more it struck me: ‘Wow. This is an area that can really be illuminated by military thinking.’ That a lot of what they were doing was what in military operations is called logistics, or a classic defensive operation, or a holding action, or a raid behind enemy lines. And the more I looked at it, the more I thought each of the major civil rights campaigns could be depicted in that light.”In 1961, campaigners launched the Freedom Rides, activists riding buses across the south, seeking to draw attention and thereby end illegal segregation onboard and in stations. It was dangerous work, daring and remote. Ricks compares the Freedom Rides to cavalry raids, most strikingly to civil war operations by the Confederate “Gray Ghost”, John Singleton Mosby.“The Freedom Rides as raids behind enemy lines. What does that mean? Well, it struck me again and again how military-like the civil rights movement was in careful preparation. What is the task at hand? How do we prepare? What sort of people do we need to carry out this mission? What kind of training do they need?“Before the Freedom Rides they sent a young man, Tom Gaither, on a reconnaissance trip, where he drew maps of each bus station so they would know where the segregated waiting rooms were. He reported back: ‘The two cities where you’re going to have trouble are Anniston, Alabama, and Montgomery, Alabama.’ There are real race tensions in those cities.”Activists faced horrendous violence. They met it with non-violence.“They did months of training. First of all, how to capture and prevent the impulse to fight or flee. Somebody slugs you, spits on you, puts out a cigarette on your back. They knew how to react: non-violent.“But this is a really militant form of non-violence. Gandhi denounced the term passive resistance. And these people, many of them followers of God, devoted readers of Gandhi, understood this was very confrontational.”In 1965, Selma, Alabama, was the scene of Bloody Sunday, when white authorities attacked a march on the Edmund Pettus Bridge and southern racism stood exposed.Ricks says: “A line I love comes from Selma. People said, ‘What are we doing when the sheriff comes after us?’ The organisers said, ‘No, you’re going after the sheriff.’ A good example: CT Vivian, one of my heroes, a stalwart of civil rights, is thrown down the steps of the county courthouse at Selma by Jim Clark, the county sheriff. And Vivian looks up and yells, ‘Who are you people? What do you tell your wives and children?’“It is such a human question. And in this confrontational form of non-violence, I think they flummoxed the existing system, of white supremacism, which the world saw was a system built on violence inherited from slavery.”Bloody Sunday remembered: civil rights marchers tell story of their iconic photosRead moreRicks has written about his time in Iraq and post-traumatic stress disorder. At the end of Waging a Good War, he considers how those who campaigned for civil rights, who were beaten, shot and imprisoned, struggled to cope with the toll.“If you want to understand the full cost, it’s important to write about the effect on the activists and their families, their children. Dave Dennis Jr, the son of one of the people who ran Freedom Summer, he and I have talked about this a bit. We believe the Veterans Administration should be open to veterans of the civil rights movement. There aren’t a lot of veterans still alive. Nonetheless, it would be a meaningful gesture that could help some people who have had a hard time in life.”In a passage that could fuel a whole book, Ricks considers how Martin Luther King Jr, the greatest civil rights leader, struggled in the years before his assassination, in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1968.Like many PTSD sufferers, King sought refuge in drink and sex. But for Ricks, “the moment that captures it for me is he’s sitting in a rocking chair in Atlanta, with his friend Dorothy Cotton. And he says, ‘I think I should take a sabbatical.’ This is about 1967. This guy had been under daily threat for 13 years. I compare him to [Dwight] Eisenhower and the pressures he was under as a top commander in world war two … yet King does this for well over a decade. The stress was enormous. I only wish he had been able to take that sabbatical.”The campaign took its toll on others, among them James Bevel, a “tactically innovative, strategically brilliant” activist who abused women and children, moved far right and died in disgrace.Ricks hopes his book might help make other activists better known, among them Pauli Murray, Diane Nash – a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom – and Fred Shuttlesworth, “a powerful character, a moonshiner turned minister”.Shuttlesworth lived in Birmingham, Alabama, scene of some of the worst attacks on the civil rights movement, most of all the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in 1963, in which four young girls were killed.To Ricks, “If there’s a real moment of despair in Martin Luther King’s life, it’s the Birmingham church bombing. He says, ‘At times, life is hard, as hard as crucible steel.’ That was the focal point for how I think about what King went through.”But there is light in Birmingham too. Ricks recounts the time “the white establishment calls Fred Shuttlesworth up and says, ‘We hear Martin Luther King might be coming to town. What can we do to stop that?’ And he leans back and smiles and says, ‘You know, I’ve been bombed twice in this town. Nobody called me then. But now you want to talk?’“Shuttlesworth threw himself into things. He believed in non-violence as an occasional tactic, not as a way of life. He sent a carloads of guys carrying shotguns to rescue the Freedom Riders from the KKK in Anniston.“Then there’s Amzie Moore. I wish I could have written more about him. He came home from world war two, worked at a federal post office so he would not be under control of local government. He starts his own gas station and refuses to have whites-only bathrooms. ‘Nope, not gonna do it.’ To me, he’s like a member of the French Resistance but he does it for 20 years. When Bob Moses and other civil rights workers go to Mississippi, he’s the guy they look up. ‘How do I survive in Mississippi?’ And he tells them and helps them.”Waging a Good War also considers how campaigners today might learn from those who went before. Ricks says: “Some of the people in the Black Lives Matter era have reached back. I talked to one person who went to James Lawson, the trainer of the Nashville sit-ins in 1960, and asked, ‘How do you go about this? How do you think about this? What about losses? Instructions?’“A demonstration is only the end product, the tip of an iceberg. There has to be careful preparation, consideration of, ‘What message are we trying to send? How are we going to send it? How are we going to follow up?’ So James Lawson conveys that message. Similarly, Bob Moses, who recently died, attended a Black Lives Matter meeting. There are roots by which today’s movements reach back down to the movements of the forefathers.”Democrats see hope in Stacey Abrams (again) in a crucial US election – if she can get voters to show upRead moreHe also sees echoes in two major strands of activism today.“Stacey Abrams’ work on voting rights is very similar to a lot of the work Martin Luther King did with the SCLC [Southern Christian Leadership Conference]. Fighting voter suppression, finding ways to encourage minorities to register and to vote, looking to expand the franchise.“Black Lives Matter reminds me of SNCC, if somewhat more radical, more focused not on gaining power through the vote but on abuses of power, especially police brutality.“It’s sad that the problems the movement tried to address in the 1950s and 60s still need to be addressed. We have moments of despair. Nonetheless, one of things about writing the book was to show people who went through difficult times, and usually found ways to succeed.“The more I learned, the more I enjoyed it. It was a real contrast. Writing about the Iraq war? It’s hard. This felt good. I was hauled to my writing desk every morning. I loved writing this book.”
      Waging a Good War: A Military History of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1968 is published in the US by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
      TopicsBooksCivil rights movementUS politicsRaceThe far rightProtestBlack Lives Matter movementinterviewsReuse this content More