Editor’s note: The following article is an op-ed, and the views expressed are the author’s own. Read more opinions on theGrio.
Things are happening in Mississippi and not in a good way. Multiple white Rankin County deputies were fired after two Black men filed a federal lawsuit alleging the deputies illegally entered their home and tortured them for almost two hours. Michael Corey Jenkins, 32, and Eddie Terrell Parker, 35, claim the deputies entered their residence without a warrant, hurled racial epithets, waterboarded, cuffed, tased and attempted to sexually assault them. Jenkins claims one of the deputies put a gun into his mouth and shot him.
And this is just the tip of the iceberg. Authorities in Taylorsville, Miss., have come under fire for slow-walking the investigation into the death of Rasheem Carter, whose dismembered and decapitated remains were discovered in the Mississippi woods after he had told his mother about “racist white men trying to kill me.”
Mississippi, also known as the Magnolia State and the Hospitality State, is emblematic of the challenges and opportunities Black people face for justice in America.
Mississippi ranks at the very bottom of the barrel or near the bottom in every socioeconomic index, including 50th in life expectancy, 49th in health and the economy, 47th in infrastructure and 41st in education. The home of Fannie Lou Hamer — the civil rights leader who was brutally beaten and forcibly sterilized— is one of the worst in maternal mortality and infant mortality and has one of the widest pay gaps for Black women, who make only 55 cents for every dollar a white man earns. And for all the talk about family values, Mississippi ranks 48th in child well-being and 50th in family and community.
This reality reflects a long history of human rights violations in Mississippi — of not treating people right, of mistreating poor and Black people and refusing to invest in communities, of enslavement and Jim Crow.
The Blackest and poorest state in the union is deep red due to racial gerrymandering and voter suppression. More than 15% of Black people in Mississippi are permanently barred from voting because of an 1890 Jim Crow law designed to disenfranchise Black men convicted of certain crimes.
“We came here to exclude the negro. Nothing short of this will answer,” said the president of the 1890 state constitutional convention that enacted the law, along with a poll tax and literacy tests for voting, and stripped Black people of their political and social rights and gave all the power to the White man. No Black person has held statewide office in Mississippi since 1890. Recently, the U.S. Supreme Court allowed the Mississippi voter disenfranchisement law to stay in place.
And the poorest state is rife with corruption and embroiled in a welfare fraud scandal where $77 million in welfare funds were misappropriated. The scandal included the misuse of $5 million in federal welfare money for a volleyball facility at the University of Southern Mississippi, where former NFL star Brett Favre attended, and his daughter played the sport.
The capital city of Jackson, one of the country’s Blackest cities, has a water crisis and the white nationalist state legislature is taking greater control over the city’s police and court system in a colonial fashion.
The Hospitality State always was inhospitable to Black folks. Nina Simone had something to say about the state in her iconic song, “Mississippi Goddam,” which captured the hot Jim Crow mess that the state was in 1963, the year NAACP leader Medgar Evers was assassinated in his driveway in Jackson:
Alabama’s gotten me so upset
Tennessee made me lose my rest
And everybody knows about Mississippi, goddamn
Can’t you see it, can’t you feel it
It’s all in the air
I can’t stand the pressure much longer
Somebody say a prayer
In 2023, Jim Crow is alive in a state that has not addressed its legacy of racial oppression and injustice. A white district attorney named Doug Evans just resigned after 30 years of prosecuting a Black man six times for murder and excluding Black jurors. As a result, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the man’s conviction and death sentence. Mississippi executes death row prisoners by lethal injection, with other options including nitrogen hypoxia, electrocution and firing squad.
Between 1880 and 1940, Mississippi had the highest per capita rate of lynchings in the country, according to the Equal Justice Initiative. In the state where the Black teen Emmett Till was lynched seven decades ago and three civil rights workers were lynched six decades ago, the lynchings never stopped.
And yet, Brandon Presley — Elvis Presley’s cousin and member of the Mississippi Public Service Commission — could win for governor as a Democrat, in light of the poverty plaguing the state and the rampant government corruption associated with the unpopular current governor, Tate Reeves.
Mississippi, the Blackest state in the country is paradoxically one of the reddest, but like other Southern states only artificially so. Like America as a whole, the white nationalist establishment in Mississippi is clinging to the status quo of decades of systemic racism and racial hierarchy. As the melanin count increases, white Mississippi responds as it always has — through racial backlash, Jim Crow apartheid and running the state like a plantation. Bet on the people organizing in Mississippi that this will not last forever.
David A. Love is a journalist and commentator who writes investigative stories and op-eds on a variety of issues, including politics, social justice, human rights, race, criminal justice and inequality. Love is also an instructor at the Rutgers School of Communication and Information, where he trains students in a social justice journalism lab. In addition to his journalism career, Love has worked as an advocate and leader in the nonprofit sector, served as a legislative aide, and as a law clerk to two federal judges. He holds a B.A. in East Asian Studies from Harvard University and a J.D. from the University of Pennsylvania Law School. He also completed the Joint Programme in International Human Rights Law at the University of Oxford. His portfolio website is davidalove.com.
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