State Sen. Dean Kirby on Thursday night opened the eighth redistricting hearing on his committee’s schedule, the last one currently set, by telling the room what his committee does and does not do. The Joint Legislative Committee on Reapportionment and Redistricting draws state House and Senate districts. Congressional maps, Kirby said, move through Judiciary A in the Senate and Judiciary B in the House.

Twenty minutes later, the first member of the public to reach the microphone asked the committee to redraw a congressional district.

State Auditor Shad White told the committee members that he wanted them to take up congressional redistricting, whether in a special session or a regular one. His reason, he said: “The Delta has been at the bottom of far too many rankings for far too long, and the Delta deserves better leadership than Bennie Thompson. It just does.”

White’s remarks were an overt call to use redistricting to target a political candidate—specifically, the only statewide elected official who is Black.

Thompson has represented the Second Congressional District since 1993 and is the only Black member of Mississippi’s congressional delegation.

The room booed.

White kept talking.

“That’s fine, you can boo if you want, that’s totally fine,” White said. “But I’ll just tell you, not a lot of people want to stand up in a room like this and speak for a majority of people who want to see our congressional districts changed.”

White said there is “a silent majority of people who want better representation for the Mississippi Delta”—people, he added, who want “somebody who is not focused on running the January 6th committee.”

Kirby cut in to say that if the hearing got too disrespectful he would adjourn it and nobody else would speak.

White returned two weeks ago from a National Guard deployment to the Middle East and has said publicly that he is weighing a run for governor. He told the committee he worked as a Senate staffer during the 2011 redistricting.

More than 40 people spoke after him over the next three hours at the New Capitol, allotted two minutes each, with a bell sounding at 90 seconds.

Jesse Otto Smith went to the podium and said he had heard the auditor.

“My father was born in 1926. He couldn’t vote,” Smith, who is 76 and lives in Jackson, told the committee. “My grandfather was born in 1891. He couldn’t vote. My great-grandfather was born as an enslaved man, considered less than a human, in 1861. He couldn’t vote. He was a piece of property. That’s why I am here.”

Smith expressed gratitude to Thompson for road resurfacing and healthcare in the district and said he hoped the congressman would keep the seat as long as he wants it.

State Rep. Kabir Karriem of Columbus, who chairs the Mississippi Legislative Black Caucus, came wearing the caucus lapel pin, which carries the image of Robert G. Clark Jr., the first Black Mississippian elected to the Mississippi Legislature since Reconstruction. Karriem told the committee he sees echoes of 1876 and 1890 in 2026, and that after the last Black legislator of the Reconstruction era left office, 73 years passed before another was elected.

“On behalf of the 1.2 million people that we represent, we’re totally against this,” Karriem said.

A dozen speakers asked the committee to draw new maps. Most came from Madison, Rankin and Simpson counties, several identified themselves with the Mississippi Federation of Republican Women, and their arguments ran along the same line: Draw to traditional criteria, compactness and contiguity and county boundaries, and treat voters as individuals and not by race. Karen Mosley of Simpson County put it this way. “A good candidate is a good candidate. They will get elected regardless of race or gender.”

Kyari Davis, a sophomore political science major at Jackson State University, asked when in the history of this United States that had ever been true.

A rally billed as Rally for Fair Maps had gathered on the Mississippi Supreme Court lawn two hours earlier, and its flyer told people to wear black and bring signs. Several speakers said they had come from the rally. Malik Ross of the Mississippi Votes Action Fund gestured at the room and pointed out “all these black and white shirts here out in the crowd.”

The students were the largest group that signed up. They came from Tougaloo College, Jackson State and the University of Southern Mississippi, and several said they had stood outside in the heat for hours before the doors opened, one of them wearing a suit in “feels-like” temps bumping 100 degrees. Several focused their two minutes on people who had organized in Mississippi before them, including Bob Moses and the citizenship schools, Stokely Carmichael, the Tougaloo Nine, Medgar Evers and James Meredith.

Aznii Welchlin, the 94^th student government president at Tougaloo, spent the end of her two minutes repeating one sentence eight times. “Leave our maps alone.”

Arianna Brumfield of Tougaloo used her time to ask what the hearings are for.

“Public participation cannot end with just giving us two minutes here at a mic,” Brumfield said. “Are Mississippians being consulted or are they exercising political agency? How will testimony affect maps?” A mapmaker knows what a census population looks like, she said, and residents know where their children go to school and where their churches are. “If this here is democratic participation, show us where the people answered the decision.”

The committee has not released any draft maps. Members took no questions Thursday, as they have not at any of the eight hearings.

Robert James, president of the Mississippi State Conference NAACP, asked the committee directly whether it is weighing changes to Senate District 45, Senate District 2 and House District 22, three districts redrawn in 2025 under a federal court order. He got no answer, which is how the hearings have been run.

State Rep. Zakiya Summers of Hinds County had the last word of the night, and spent it on the vote counts from that 2025 session. The House adopted the Senate plan with 62 Republicans, five Democrats and three independents in favor. The Senate approved the plans 41 to 8 and 45 to 7.

“That’s bipartisanship,” Summers said. “Let us just go forward with the work that we have done in a bipartisan manner and let us not do anything with these districts.”

The committee took no questions and adjourned before 9 p.m. Written comments may be sent to the committee’s counsel, Ted Booth, at ted.booth@peer.ms.gov.

Image: Hearing in the state Capitol (credit Derrion Arrington)

I saw X-Man walking back toward his cell, shaking his head. There was something different about his expression. I smiled and asked, “You OK, man?”

With a look of frustration he said, “No. And you’re not, either.”

I smiled again and asked, “What’s wrong with us, then?”

He let out a deep breath and said, “The lawmakers killed a bill that would have helped us get to a parole hearing. As soon as it hit the floor, it was snuffed out.”

The bill, he explained, would have provided the possibility of parole for people like us who have spent years, even decades, trying to prove to ourselves and to society that we are not the same people who committed the crimes that landed us in prison. X-Man pointed out that many of us have changed the course of our lives. We have taken responsibility and worked to better ourselves and others, and we simply want the opportunity to stand before a parole board and demonstrate who we have become.

Yet a measure to provide that possibility had failed.

Even hearing about the bill, I felt a familiar, brief spark of excitement. There were still possibilities. Then, just as quickly, it faded. I have lived with that feeling for decades. For people serving long sentences, it is not so much “wars and rumors of wars” as “progress and rumors of progress.”

Every legislative session prompts conversations inside the prison walls about criminal justice bills. Someone hears about a new bill. Someone says lawmakers are finally looking at sentencing reform. Someone says there may be an opportunity for people serving life or lengthy mandatory sentences to have their sentences reevaluated. Hope begins to spread. Men begin to wonder. Families begin to dream.

Then the session ends without any change and many of our hopes and dreams evaporate.

For 25 years, I have watched this cycle repeat itself. I have seen men cling to the hope that Mississippi will recognize what many of us have spent decades trying to prove: that people can change. The Mississippi Second Chance Act, House Bill 1517, was the latest failure. Introduced during the 2026 legislative session, it would have granted violent offenders and others who face long sentences, including life, the chance to appear before a parole board, with certain stipulations. But it died in committee. For people like X-Man and me, it would have provided an opportunity to demonstrate that we have turned our lives around, and its failure was deeply disappointing.

I understand and respect the responsibilities that Mississippi lawmakers carry. Criminal justice decisions are not easy. Legislators must consider public safety, victims, communities and the concerns of the people they represent. For that reason, I am particularly grateful to the legislators who supported this measure and were willing to fight for it, specifically its cosponsors, state Rep. Cheikh Taylor and state Rep. Fabian Nelson. Regardless of the outcome, they were willing to start a difficult conversation, to ask whether Mississippi’s criminal justice system should recognize the possibility of transformation after decades of accountability and change.

A second chance does not mean forgetting the past. It does not erase victims or minimize the pain caused by crime. It does not discount responsibility. A second chance means recognizing that accountability is not only about punishment—it should also address growth, change and the process of transforming convicted criminals. I am acutely aware of this process. I am not the same 21-year-old man who committed the crime that landed me in prison. The choices I made damaged many lives, including my own, and I have spent the last 25 years accepting responsibility for those choices and working to become a different man. Through faith, education, ministry, mentorship and service, I have tried to make my life mean something beyond my most grievous mistake, which I do not seek to minimize. I have watched other men do the same. I have seen them pursue education, mentor younger offenders and dedicate themselves to ministry, rehabilitation and helping others to avoid the mistakes they made.

We cannot change the past, but our hard-fought accomplishments should matter when considering the future. Rehabilitation is based upon the belief that people can change. If a person is never given the opportunity to demonstrate that change, we must ask ourselves what rehabilitation—and, on a more profound level, what redemption—truly mean. The Mississippi Second Chance Act did not ask society to forget. It asked society to evaluate new possibilities—for itself and for people like us who strive for the opportunity to become productive members.

I have spent enough time in prison to understand that people do change within these walls. Some change for the better. Others change for the worse. Some lose pieces of themselves that they may never recover. Some become harder, more suspicious and more willing to respond to everything with anger. Others spend years trying to undo the thinking that brought them to prison in the first place. That process is not easy. Sometimes the hardest part is learning how to live differently in an environment that does not always reward change.

Mississippi stands at a critical crossroads in its criminal justice system. While other states have embraced bold reforms that recognize the power of rehabilitation, Mississippi has chosen instead to double down on outdated policies that keep behind bars the very people who have proven they are capable of change while releasing others who are far more likely to return.

The irony is clear: Mississippi has a three-year inmate recidivism rate of a little more than 34 percent, which means that more than one in three individuals who leave prison will come back. National research shows that recidivism declines significantly with age and that lifers who have served 20 years or more and maintained strong institutional records are among the least likely to reoffend. Many of these people are men and women who have spent decades reshaping their lives, mentoring younger inmates and preparing, hopefully, for a future outside the prison walls. Yet, Mississippi offers no real path for them to parole.

I know this firsthand. I am 46 years old and have been incarcerated in Mississippi since the age of 21, serving a life sentence for a violent offense. I am currently incarcerated at the Wilkinson County Correctional Facility, a privately run state prison near the town of Woodville that houses more than 900 offenders. At the time I committed my crime, I was a young man lost in the chaos of my own brokenness. But since then, like many others in my position, I have refused to let my worst mistake define the rest of my life.

By the age of 25, I had earned my GED. From there, I began a long journey of rehabilitation and growth. I entered and completed several faith-based programs, became a model inmate, and began mentoring younger men who were just beginning their sentences. I joined the prison choir and eventually became a choir director. I trained as a character coach, completed multiple vocational classes, and most proudly, earned a bachelor’s degree in Christian ministry from the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary.

Today, I am enrolled in Southwest Community College and serve as a program facilitator for two mentorship programs at my facility. I have had no rule violation reports during the entire 25 years of my incarceration. I have completed a restorative justice program called Bridges to Life, which focuses on helping victims heal, rehabilitating offenders and making our communities safer. I am currently working on my own victim-offender dialogue initiative aimed at healing and accountability. I serve as a field minister responsible for planting and pastoring churches inside correctional institutions and work as an editor of an inhouse magazine, using my words to speak the truth about healing and hope.

Despite my nearly two and a half decades of transformation, mentorship and service, the State of Mississippi provides no legal mechanism for someone like me—even with an impeccable record—to be considered for parole.

In Louisiana, where Mississippi’s current corrections commissioner Burl Cain once served as warden at Angola prison, he introduced innovative reentry and educational programs, faith-based initiatives, vocational training and structured release opportunities that reduced violence inside the prison and helped prepare incarcerated people for success on the outside. Other states took notice: New York and California have since established parole review processes for long-term offenders that carefully evaluate rehabilitation and community support networks. These programs are not lenient. They are pragmatic. And they work.

Mississippi has not followed suit. Despite Cain’s efforts to bring proven reforms from Louisiana to Mississippi prisons, lawmakers have consistently shut down legislation that would allow long-serving offenders even a chance at review. From the inside, it feels as if the state is disinclined to lose its “livestock”—individuals who are kept in the system, filling beds and fueling a prison economy—rather than acknowledge that they have paid their debt and turned their lives around.

Here lies the true paradox: Mississippi often releases individuals who have shown little evidence of change, who “check the boxes” in reentry programs but return to society still battling addictions, untreated trauma or criminal thinking. Unsurprisingly, many of these people reoffend, sometimes committing worse crimes. Meanwhile, people who have served two, three or even four decades with exemplary records, who have earned degrees, taught classes and mentored others, are told that there is simply no legal pathway for considering their release. I have watched this happen over and over. And each time, it reinforces a painful truth: Mississippi is releasing the least prepared while continuing to incarcerate the most reformed.

This approach carries both a financial and a moral price tag. Housing one incarcerated individual costs Mississippi taxpayers about $51 per day, which adds up to tens of thousands of dollars per year. For someone who has spent 25 years in prison without a single disciplinary infraction, the continued expense borders on absurd. More importantly, though, it ignores the very ideals of justice and redemption.

Other states provide examples of how second chances, when properly structured, do not jeopardize public safety, and in fact enhance it. California’s Elderly Parole Program allows inmates over the age of 50 who have served 20 years to be considered for release. New York has programs for granting parole hearings to those who demonstrate extraordinary rehabilitation after having served long sentences. Mississippi does not. These programs are not aimed at blanket releases. They provide for structured, evidence-based reviews.

Mississippi could take a bold step forward and change the narrative though initiatives whose success is proven by doing the following:

• Creating a long-term rehabilitation review board to allow individuals with life sentences to apply for parole consideration after 20 years of clean institutional conduct.

• Expanding geriatric parole and making compassionate release a meaningful public policy rather than simply a discretionary tool.

• Following successful models in Louisiana, California and New York—not for leniency but for accountability rooted in fairness, financial sensibility and common sense.

At its core, this is not just a policy debate, it is a moral question. Does Mississippi believe in redemption? Does it believe that a person who has served decades, changed his life and prepared for release deserve at least the opportunity to stand before a parole board? Or will the state continue to pour resources into a system that recycles the unready and cages the reformed? Does Mississippi even care?

Lawmakers should listen to Cain. Prisons should not be warehouses of despair but seminaries of hope and redemption.

Mississippi has the opportunity to prove that rehabilitation is more than rhetorical jargon. Many of us offer living proof of its success. I have undoubtedly changed. I have lived under the supervision of the Mississippi Department of Corrections for longer than I have lived in society, and I am a better man. Yet I am left to wonder, year after year: When will people like me be seen? When will we be heard? When will we be given an opportunity to contribute to society, rather than to drain its resources through incarceration?

It is time to open the door to change, not recklessly, but through a judicious approach to those who have done the work and earned the opportunity for a second chance, and who are ready to serve their communities on the outside.

I recently found out that some of the men held here at the Wilkinson prison have been donating money to St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital. Think about that for a moment. Men sitting inside a prison, serving sentences so long that we sometimes refer to it as “dinosaur time,” who have been separated from society for years, even decades, are taking what they have and giving it to an organization whose mission is to help children fight cancer. Their efforts remind me that redemption isn’t always loud or dramatic. Sometimes it is personified by a man sitting in a prison cell, looking at the limited amount of money he has and deciding that a sick child needs it more than he does. Sometimes redemption looks like an inmate searching for an address because he wants to send a donation to a children’s hospital. Shouldn’t such a person at least be given the opportunity to make his case for redemption before a parole board?

I have spent the last five years at Wilkinson and during this time I have seen men arrive angry, frightened and broken, and many remain unchanged by the circumstances that brought them to prison, still ignorant of the severity of their actions in their own lives and the lives of the victims of their crimes. I have watched others leave with hope in their eyes after being given an opportunity to prove that they are no longer the people they once were. I have also watched men who have spent decades behind prison walls transforming their lives with little hope that anyone will recognize the changes that they have worked so hard to bring about. This raises a fundamental question: Why is redemption not seen as an incentive to give such people a second chance?

Mississippi is a state built on faith, family and resilience. We proudly speak of redemption in our churches. We teach our children that people deserve forgiveness when they sincerely repent. We celebrate stories of lives turned around after addiction, violence and failure.

Yet when the conversation shifts to people serving life sentences—especially those convicted of violent crimes—our belief in redemption often comes to an abrupt halt. I recognize that some mistakes deserve severe punishment. I know that better than most because I am serving a life sentence. Nothing I write here is intended to excuse anyone’s crime or discount the pain of victims and their families. Accountability matters. Justice matters. I have accepted responsibility for my actions, and I live every day understanding that one terrible decision changed countless lives forever. But I also believe something else: That people can change.

Not everyone will. Some refuse to confront the harm they have caused. Others spend years blaming everyone except themselves. But there are men and women who choose a different path, who confront their pasts honestly and seek forgiveness, even when they know it may never come. They educate themselves. They mentor others. They become better parents to children whom they can show love for only through letters, phone calls and intermittent, supervised visits. They serve in ministries, teach classes, encourage others to abandon gangs and violence, and dedicate themselves to becoming the kind of people they wish they had been before they committed the crimes that led to their incarceration.

These people exist in every Mississippi prison. I know because I live among them.

I have watched other men sacrifice comfort for growth. I have watched them enroll in every class available, earn certificates, study scripture, become mentors and pour into the lives of others without any guarantee that their efforts will ever benefit them personally. Many participate in these endeavors because they genuinely believe transformation is possible and that it is the right response to the mistakes they have made, and not simply because it offers the potential for parole. Yet parole is a powerful endorsement of transformation, and each of us quietly hopes that one day someone will notice. That possibility has been out of reach for men like me.

The Mississippi Legislature has taken some important steps toward parole reform in recent years. The Mississippi Earned Parole Eligibility Act, signed into law in 2021, expanded eligibility for many incarcerated people, including some convicted of violent offenses after they served a significant portion of their sentences. These reforms recognized an important truth: People are capable of change, and public safety can coexist with meaningful parole review.

Still, certain convictions make a person permanently ineligible for parole, no matter how much time they have served or how strong their institutional record is. The excluded categories are broader than many people realize, most of which involve murder or sentencing under habitual offender laws. As a result, many of us continue to serve time without a realistic possibility to demonstrate who we have become, as opposed to who we once were. We have no pathway to show a parole board that the person standing before them bears little resemblance to the person who was originally sentenced for their crime.

If rehabilitation is one of the purposes of incarceration, when happens when it actually occurs? If society encourages change but refuses to recognize it, what message does that send to those still striving to become better? At what point does continued incarceration stop serving justice and contribute to hopelessness—with all the negative possibilities that entails?

During my years at Wilkinson, I have watched countless men prepare for parole hearings. I have celebrated with those who received another chance. But I have also watched men who have devoted decades to changing their lives continue waiting without any realistic expectation that their transformation will ever matter. Many of the men who have labored the hardest to become examples for others know that they may never have a chance to demonstrate that they no longer pose a threat to society.

That uncertainty hangs over every prison yard in Mississippi. It affects how incarcerated men and women think about the future. It affects whether they continue believing their efforts have meaning. Hope is one of the greatest motivators for change. I have seen enough to believe hope is worth fighting for.

When Burl Cain came to Mississippi after leading the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, he brought with him a philosophy that challenged traditional thinking about incarceration. He stressed that prisons should hold people accountable while also creating opportunities for transformation. Faith-based programming, education, mentoring and servant leadership became central to that vision.

Importantly, Cain brought people into the system whose lives had already proven that such transformation was possible—men who were living examples of what can happen when a prison system refuses to define a person solely by the worst decision they ever made. Most of these men had served more than 25 years in Louisiana prisons, some of whom received life sentences before being given an opportunity to prove that rehabilitation was real. Today, they serve throughout Mississippi’s correctional system as chaplains, program directors, mentors and ministers of hope. Their lives—and their contributions—are more persuasive than any statistic.

These men know what it feels like to hear steel doors slam shut behind them. They know what it is like to live with regret, to wrestle with shame and to wonder whether society will ever believe they have changed. Their message carries credibility because they have lived it. Every day, they remind others that redemption is not measured by what happened yesterday but by the choices made today.

As grateful as I am for their leadership, I cannot help wondering why Mississippi cannot produce its own examples, like these men who came from Angola. Why must Mississippi depend upon another state’s successes when our prisons are filled with people who have spent decades preparing themselves to serve their communities, if given the chance? Why should hope stop at the prison gates simply because a sentence was labeled “life” decades ago?

As a field minister, I have devoted my life to serving others. I have taught classes, served as a mentor, encouraged men who had lost hope, and tried to help create a prison culture built on accountability rather than violence. None of that erases my crime, nor should it. But it does illustrate the man I have worked to become.

That man still faces a life sentence. I have now spent more than half my life incarcerated. Prison has been my address for longer than any neighborhood I ever called home. The young man who entered prison is gone. Experience, accountability, faith and time have shaped someone entirely different.

I cannot change the past. I cannot bring back the life that was taken or erase the suffering my actions caused. Every day I live with the consequences of my choices, as do many others. Accountability is not something that ends when a sentence is handed down. It is something a person must carry for the rest of their life. Yet accountability and redemption are not enemies. They can go hand in hand.

A parole hearing is not a guarantee of freedom. It is simply a process by which evidence of change, rehabilitation, potential risk and accountability can be reexamined. We should endorse reform—both of individuals and of the criminal justice system itself. We should not conclude that people cannot change because some refuse to. We should build a system that can separate those who remain a danger to society from those who have spent decades proving they are capable of becoming productive citizens.

Among the questions Mississippi should ask is: What is the purpose of a life sentence? Is it only punishment, or should it also be a way to give a person time to change? If someone demonstrates genuine transformation, accepts responsibility, makes amends where possible, and proves over decades that they are no longer the same person who committed the crime, shouldn’t the system have a way to recognize that change?

Wesley Ellis Jr. is an incarcerated writer, field minister, mentor and program facilitator at Wilkinson County Correctional Facility. Sentenced to life in prison, he has spent more than two decades helping others pursue personal growth, faith and rehabilitation. He facilitates mentoring and faith-based programs focused on accountability, leadership, fatherhood and successful reentry. He writes about incarceration, redemption and the enduring capacity for change, and is working on a memoir that chronicles his life, the consequences of his choices and his journey toward purpose behind prison walls. He appears in the podcast “Hidden Mirrors,” about an inmate book club at the Wilkinson prison hosted by Mississippi Independent editor Alan Huffman.

Image: Wesley Ellis (credit Wilkinson County Correctional Facility)

I’m in my office alone, working. Papers and open books bloom across the floor. My desk is crowded with drafts, notes and other routine disorder related to my job as a writer.

You, the bug man, arrive with your spray rig and canister of poison.

“Hi, Jason,” I say, and get up from my desk. “How about I go outside and water while you spray.” I apologize for the mess, though you know by now that I am always in the middle of some writing project.

We are not the same, you and I. I have always known that. But until today, I mistook politeness for peace.

On the porch, you ask me what I’m working on.

“Historical fiction.”

That is all the invitation you need. You begin to lecture me about World War II, about how Jews really did control global finances, how your daughter discovered she was part Jewish and you told her not to worry about it, how it was the Democrats who started the KKK and they wouldn’t even back Abraham Lincoln if he were alive today. It’s an endless reel of absurd falsehoods and distortions dressed up as historical facts.

“Wake up,” you say you want to tell Democrats.

Wake up, as if Republicans have not spent years setting the house on fire and blaming people who are down on their knees coughing in the yard.

I was taught that how one approaches the truth should not be dictated by political party affiliation. On the contrary. Ours are old divisions and disagreements. What is different now, which you, the bug man, so willingly personify, is that many people have lost the capacity to differentiate between right and wrong, regardless of party. And your poison is so pervasive and persistent it’s getting harder even for Democrats like me, with open minds, to separate being a Republican from being willfully blind to what this administration is doing to our country.

Maybe because I’m a white woman of a certain age in South Mississippi, you assume I’m one of your own. Someone who will nod through the sermon and call it neighborliness.

I would understand if you said all politicians lie, or that you were finished with the whole ruined carnival. I could meet you there. But to stand in my yard railing against Democrats while lauding Republicans? That is not skepticism. That is delusion. Standing there watering my zinnias, I want to say: Do you understand who and what you’re defending? Patriotism is not a flag, a pin or a slogan on a hat. Patriotism is when you love your country and refuse to excuse what is wrong. Refusing to admit what is wrong—that is the opposite.

If you’re still defending this administration, still insisting that only Democrats need to wake up, then you’re obviously willing to sleep through any alarm. I’m done smiling while your poison gets sprayed into the body politic.

How’s all that winning going, anyway? Gas is way up. Groceries are way up. Even wars are up. If you vote for people who govern by grievance, you do not get to pretend the consequences fell from the sky.

You start telling me about how smart Hitler was, about how he wrote in prison. You’re all in on the fascism. “You should watch some shows about Hitler,” you say. I stand there with the hose on the oleanders, thinking: I write about World War II. My mother lived through it. Some of her family survived Hitler. Most did not.

You come to spray away pests. I’ve listened to your lectures about the Civil War, space aliens and “facts” that you learn from cable news and internet folklore. Correcting you would feel like turning my garden hose onto a house fire.

In 2026, we are still fighting for voting rights in Mississippi—the same rights my parents recognized as urgent when they lived here in 1958. The past is not past here. It simmers in the heat while people like you polish old lies until they shine like new policy.

Here in South Mississippi, termites are known to take down a house. There are also cockroaches, fire ants, wasps and all manner of things that bite, burrow, swarm and sting. We need pest control. The metaphor is hard to ignore: Poison can be useful in the right application, dangerous when used recklessly and disastrous when it’s seen as the answer to everything.

Your job is to spread poison, but you’ve poisoned yourself with your own poison.

I watch you amble up the driveway, bent under the weight of your equipment, hauling your chemical gospel. Afterward, my husband emails your company to say we don’t want to see you on our property again. There’s only so much poison a person can take.

Back in my office, I return to a poem my great-aunt Hattie wrote in 1954 for a women’s club in Mississippi. “The Man Versus the Party” urged members to vote for candidates with character instead of surrendering judgment to blind party loyalty. Imagine that now: character as a civic duty, conscience heavier than a party line.

Seventy-two years later, that sounds radical. And crucial.

Wake up, you said.

Believe me, I have.

The question I have for you, poison man, is what it will take to wake you up.

Image: Poison sign (via Pixabay.com)

When the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Sept. 25, 2026, that the state of Missouri must run its November congressional elections on the map the state drew in 2022, it blocked for the third time a replacement map the state’s legislature passed in 2025 that would have made incumbent U.S. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver’s Kansas City district more Republican.

The order in People Not Politicians v. Onder was unsigned, and no justice noted a dissent. The ruling did not decide whether Missouri’s new map was legal. The justices cited the principle that courts should not change election rules once voting has begun, noting that ballots had already been printed and mailed under the old lines.

U.S. Rep. Robert Onder, the sitting Republican congressman in Missouri’s Third District, and another Republican candidate, Richard Brattin, had sued in federal court saying they would be harmed by having to campaign in districts different from the ones where they won their August primaries. They won at that stage. The state court had ruled for the 2022 map, but a federal judge then said the opposite and ordered Missouri to use the 2025 map.

What kept the new map off the ballot and got the U.S. Supreme Court involved was a provision of the Missouri Constitution that Mississippi voters no longer have—the right to put a referendum to statewide voters, which in Mississippi’s case was struck down by its state supreme court in 2021.

Under Missouri law, citizens who gather enough signatures can suspend a statute until voters approve it at the next election. Opponents of the state’s new congressional map did just that. On Sept. 3, 2026, the Missouri Supreme Court placed the referendum on the November ballot and held that the 2022 map governs until Missourians vote on it. The referendum group went to the U.S. Supreme Court to attempt to block the federal order to use the 2025 map, and the court ruled in their favor.

Mississippi had a comparable referendum mechanism for 29 years. The state supreme court struck it down in 2021, ruling that the signature requirement written into the 1992 amendment could no longer be met because Mississippi’s congressional representation had dropped from the five designated in the measure to four.

Lawmakers have not restored the ballot provision. State Sen. Jeremy England filed a measure during the 2026 session that would have required referendum signatures from 10 percent of active registered voters, or roughly 189,000 people, with no more than a third from any one congressional district. The bill died in the state Senate on Feb. 13, 2026, without a House companion bill. Senate Republicans who opposed earlier versions cited the risk of out-of-state money driving petition campaigns.

Mississippi’s ballot initiative history has come up at redistricting hearings that the legislature has been holding across the state. State Rep. Jeffrey Hulum III, who represents state House District 119 and is the Democratic nominee in the Fourth Congressional District race, was the first speaker at the Sept. 22, 2026, hearing on the Gulf Coast.

“Legislators should not choose their electors. The electors should choose their legislators,” Hulum told the joint committee. “If we want to do this, let’s go back to the ballot initiative. Put it on the ballot. Let the people of Mississippi decide if they want to redistrict in the state of Mississippi.”

Jim Smith spoke later the same night. “Mississippi state Republicans have refused to restore the people’s constitutional right to petition our government through the ballot initiative for three years,” Smith said. “They certainly do not trust the people who elected someone else to represent them, but now they want us to trust them to conduct a redistricting that is not even necessary until the year 2030.”

In Mississippi, legislative districts are adopted by a joint resolution that never reaches the governor’s desk. Congressional districts pass as a conventional statute that the governor can veto and the legislature can override with two-thirds of both chambers. If lawmakers deadlock on congressional lines, the courts step in, as federal judges did in 2002 and again in 2011. None of those paths includes a vote by state residents.

The legislature’s Joint Committee on Reapportionment and Redistricting holds the last of its eight public hearings on Thursday, Oct. 1, 2026, at the New Capitol in Jackson. It has released no proposed maps and published no criteria. England has not said whether he will sponsor another referendum bill in the upcoming session.

Written comments about the legislature’s redistricting may be sent to the committee’s counsel, Ted Booth, at ted.booth@peer.ms.gov.

Image: Redistricting protesters in the Missouri Capitol on Sept. 10, 2026 (Creative Commons credit Ceilidh Kern/The Beacon)

The Joint Legislative Committee on Reapportionment and Redistricting holds the last of its eight public hearings on Thursday, Oct. 1, 2026, at the New Capitol in Jackson. Speakers at the first seven hearings asked the committee repeatedly what comes next and were told at every stop that the members were there to listen and would not answer questions.

State law and the record of the last two times Mississippi redrew its congressional map answer some questions.

The committee itself is a permanent body created by Mississippi Code Section 5-3-91. It seats the chair and vice chair of the House apportionment and elections committee, the chair and vice chair of the Senate elections committee, 10 additional House members appointed by the speaker and 10 additional senators appointed by the lieutenant governor, two from each congressional district in each chamber. Nothing passes the committee without a majority of its House members and a majority of its Senate members.

The two kinds of maps follow different processes.

Legislative districts are adopted by joint resolution. A joint resolution does not go to the governor, so the House and Senate can redraw their own seats without Gov. Tate Reeves signing anything. He has no veto power over it.

Congressional districts are different. They are enacted as an ordinary statute, which means the governor can veto the map, and overriding him takes two-thirds of both chambers.

Mississippi law already sets criteria for legislative districts, several of which speakers at the hearings asked the committee to adopt. Districts must be contiguous and compact and must cross political boundaries as little as possible, with county lines given priority. Federal law adds equal population and the Voting Rights Act on top of that.

If the legislature cannot agree on legislative districts, the job passes to a five-member commission, made up of the chief justice of the state Supreme Court, the attorney general, the secretary of state and the majority leaders of the House and Senate. That commission has 180 days to produce a plan.

There is no equivalent backstop for congressional districts.

In 2002, the legislature could not agree on a congressional map. A three-judge federal panel drew one instead and released it on Feb. 26 of that year. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld that in Branch v. Smith on March 31, 2003, confirming that a federal court may impose an interim congressional map when a state fails to produce a usable one before candidates have to qualify.

The legislature deadlocked again in 2011, and a federal court drew the congressional districts a second time.

State legislative seats next go before voters in 2027. Congressional primaries for this year were held in March 2026, and the general election is in November, so a congressional map redrawn now would first be used in 2028. Nothing the committee does this fall changes the ballot Mississippians will receive in six weeks.

State law sets no deadline for congressional redistricting. The practical limit is candidate qualifying, which falls on March 1 of an election year. For legislative districts, the legislature’s own deadline runs to the end of the regular session in the second year after a census.

The committee has not produced the material many of the speakers asked for. No proposed maps have been released. No criteria have been published. The committee’s website carries no meeting notice for any session after Oct. 1, and its page describing the committee’s own authority and duties reads, in full, “More info coming soon.”

Written comments may be sent to the committee’s counsel, Ted Booth, at ted.booth@peer.ms.gov.

Image: Redistricting committee members via Mississippi Legislature site

Opponents of a plan to remove 28 protected trees in Biloxi posted a social media call to action on Sept. 23, 2026, in preparation for a public hearing to be held by the city council.

According to Facebook posts on the pages for Biloxi Politics Uncensored and the Mississippi Plant Guy, the Biloxi City Council will hold an appeal hearing over the proposed removal of the protected trees for the Black Marlin Casino on Tuesday, Oct. 6 in the second floor council chambers in city hall at 140 Lameuse Street.

The post notes: “This will be the public’s opportunity to speak directly to the seven Council members who will ultimately decide whether the tree-removal decision stands. The Council can affirm, modify, or reverse a decision brought before it on appeal.”

Biloxi’s Planning Commission on Sept. 3, 2026, voted unanimously to approve the removal of the trees, including 25 mature live oaks, some of which are believed to be more than a century old, from the property near U.S. 90 and Veterans Avenue. According to the post, “Opposition has continued to grow since that vote, with residents amassing 784 signatures on a Change.org petition opposing the removal as of this morning.” The post says the issue “is not about whether Biloxi should have economic development or whether another casino should ever be built. The question before City Council is whether development of this particular site requires removing all 28 protected trees, or whether more of the existing trees can be incorporated into the project, including within the parking lot. Biloxi created its tree protections to preserve live oaks, Southern magnolias and other important parts of the city’s natural landscape while still allowing responsible development. Ultimately, City Council will decide whether RW Development is meeting that standard.”

If the city council upholds the planning commission vote, the developer will be required to mitigate the destruction by planting as many as 209 trees, making payments into the city’s tree fund, or a combination of the two.

The Mississippi Independent previously reported that the city council was expected to take up the matter at its Sept. 15, 2026, meeting. The issue was subsequently discussed at its Sept. 22 meeting and the public hearing was set for Oct. 6.

Images: Threatened trees (posted on Biloxi Politics Uncensored Facebook page); opponents’ call to action (via Facebook)

When the full Fifth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals ruled on Sept. 4, 2026, that four Jackson residents could not sue the city or its former officials over lead in their drinking water, the decision made national news, usually under headlines announcing that the court had ruled there is no constitutional right to clean water.

In reality, the appellate judges’ majority opinion notes that the plaintiffs had dropped their initial claims that such a right existed.

“Despite beginning the complaint with the assertion that ‘[a]ccess to clean, poison-free water is a fundamental human right,’ Plaintiffs now disclaim reliance on a right to clean water and a right to the provision of competent municipal services,” Judge Kurt Engelhardt wrote for the majority in the ruling.

The Fifth Circuit, based in New Orleans, is one of 13 federal appellate courts and covers cases in parts of Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas.

The ruling’s lack of bearing on the right to clean water was further muddied by reports referencing a previous United Nations resolution recognizing “the right to safe and clean drinking water and sanitation as a human right that is essential for the full enjoyment of life and all human rights.” That resolution was unrelated to the Fifth Circuit case.

The case at issue was Sterling v. City of Jackson. Priscilla Sterling, Raine Becker, Shawn Miller and John Bennett sued in 2022 on behalf of a proposed class of Jackson residents. The defendants included the city, former mayors Chokwe A. Lumumba and Tony Yarber, former public works officials Kishia Powell, Robert Miller and Jerriot Smash, and Trilogy Engineering Services. Judges Leslie Southwick and James Graves recused themselves from the case. Federal judges aren’t required to explain why they choose to recuse themselves and neither Southwick nor Graves did.

By the time the case reached the full court, the plaintiffs’ argument was based on two established, substantive due-process theories. The first was bodily integrity, the principle that a government may not physically intrude upon a person without justification. The second was state-created danger, the doctrine that a government which affirmatively puts someone in harm’s way can be required to answer for what follows.

The Fifth Circuit’s majority described the claims differently, as asserting rights “(1) to not be exposed to water that was contaminated as a result of the acts or omissions of public officials and (2) to truthful information from public officials about the presence of contaminants in municipally supplied drinking water.” Judge Catharina Haynes, writing for the five members who would have let the case go forward, said that description left out half the case.

“If one were to read only the en banc majority opinion, they could be forgiven for misunderstanding Plaintiffs’ allegations,” Haynes wrote. En banc—French for “on bench”—means all the judges of a court sit to hear a case. What the plaintiffs filed, she said, was “a class action asserting two substantive due process claims—bodily integrity and state-created danger.” Her dissenting opinion notes that the state-created danger theory is never mentioned in the majority ruling.

The majority addresses why any of this ran through the Constitution at all. “Our sympathies cannot be the basis for transforming quintessential tort claims into 42 U.S.C. § 1983 claims,” Engelhardt wrote.

Section 1983 is the Reconstruction-era statute that lets people sue state and local officials for violating federal rights. It creates no rights on its own but supplies a vehicle for enforcing rights that come from somewhere else. For plaintiffs in the Jackson water case, that somewhere else had to be the Fourteenth Amendment. Strip out the federal right and the federal case goes with it, which is what happened. The plaintiffs had also brought state tort claims. Once the constitutional claims failed, the district court declined to keep the tort claims in federal court and dismissed them without prejudice, and the Fifth Circuit affirmed that too. A dismissal without prejudice means the claims were never ruled on one way or the other, so the plaintiffs can bring them again in state court.

The majority applied the history-and-tradition test the Supreme Court used in Washington v. Glucksberg and again in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Under that test, an unenumerated right must be deeply rooted in the nation’s history before a court will recognize it. On bodily integrity, the court ran through the cases where the right has applied, which involve forced surgery, forced stomach-pumping, involuntary medication and sexual assault by an officer, and found lead exposure “wholly different.” As for truthful information, it leaned on two Second Circuit decisions about federal statements on air quality in New York City after Sept. 11, 2001, and declined “to expand substantive due process to render public officials liable for statements made during an evolving public crisis.”

Matthew Steffey, a professor at Mississippi College School of Law who teaches constitutional law, described how that test works. “They apply a test that basically says, would people a hundred years ago have considered this a constitutional right, and the answer to that is almost always no,” Steffey told The Mississippi Independent. “That’s the whole purpose of employing that legal standard, because it gives the answer no.”

The court also held that qualified immunity would have protected the individual officials in any event. Haynes agreed with that part. The dissenters split from the majority on whether the claims were cognizable, which is legalize for knowable, and on whether the case should have been thrown out before discovery.

Steffey described qualified immunity as a second barrier that operates even when a claim is otherwise valid. “All the official has to say is, well, now we know we can’t do this, but at the time that wasn’t clearly established,” he said. “Qualified immunity is like the one free bite rule. The first time they violate your rights in a particular way, they’re still off the hook.”

The state-created danger claim drew no judicial analysis. Haynes places that silence in a longer pattern. Ten of the Fifth Circuit’s sister circuits have adopted the doctrine, she wrote, while the Fifth Circuit “stands practically alone in its decades-long fence-sitting, declining to either adopt or definitively rule out the state-created danger doctrine.”

In Fisher v. Moore, in 2023, the Fifth Circuit passed on the doctrine again and cited the absence of “meticulous briefing on how state-created danger liability meets today’s reinvigorated test.” The Sterling plaintiffs, according to Haynes, told the court they “readily accept[ed]” that invitation and briefed it. The court heard argument on the question, including from outside parties. The majority opinion does not take it up.

Lily M. Reed documented the same pattern five months before the ruling in a Baylor Law Review article titled “Deliberately Out of Step,” tracing the court’s refusals across two decades and arguing that the result is unequal constitutional protection for people living in Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi.

On bodily integrity, the decision creates a direct conflict. In 2019, in Guertin v. Michigan, the Sixth Circuit allowed Flint residents to proceed on that theory against officials who switched the city’s water source, calling the right indispensable, a first among equals, and possessed of an impressive constitutional pedigree. That court reaffirmed the approach last year in Mitchell v. City of Benton Harbor. Engelhardt addressed Guertin in a footnote. “We are not bound, nor persuaded, by Guertin.”

A resident who brings a bodily-integrity claim over contaminated municipal water in Michigan can get past a motion to dismiss. A resident who brings the same claim in Mississippi cannot.

Jonathan Adler, the Tazewell Taylor Professor of Law at William and Mary Law School, wrote four days after the decision that the split “would seem to create an opportunity for Supreme Court review,” He added a second point: “It is difficult to see the Supreme Court being any more sympathetic to the plaintiffs’ claims here than was the Fifth Circuit.”

The majority made that argument itself. It noted that the EPA and the Mississippi State Department of Health have monitored the city’s water for years and that the federal government now manages the system, and it pointed the plaintiffs toward tort suits, toward petitioning their legislatures and toward electing officials “who will better manage the water system.”

Steffey addressed both. “The Fifth Circuit is the worst place in the country to try to make a claim like this,” he said. “And just like the Mississippi Legislature is the worst place in the country to go looking for help.”

Haynes’s account of the record runs differently. She writes that Yarber was aware the city’s treatment plants “were incapable of adequately treating the water” to prevent corrosion of the pipes and scrapped plans to fix it; that the city made a “catastrophic” switch from high-pH well water to low-pH surface water that caused a serious increase in lead levels; that officials told the press the water was “not unsafe” to drink while knowing otherwise; and that the city sat on a 2020 EPA emergency order documenting numerous violations for a year. Several of Sterling’s children, the complaint says, have been diagnosed with lead poisoning.

Mark Chalos of Lieff Cabraser, who represents the residents, has not said publicly whether he will seek U.S. Supreme Court review. A petition would be due roughly 90 days from the Sept. 4 judgment, putting the deadline in early December.

The decision leaves untouched the other litigation over Jackson’s water system. The 2022 Safe Drinking Water Act action brought by the U.S. Justice Department remains before U.S. District Judge Carlton Reeves, along with the federal third-party manager installed under it, and the majority opinion cites that case approvingly. A separate NAACP suit filed in August 2025 over the distribution of federal water money is also pending.

The holding is not limited to lead or to Jackson. It reaches sewage, industrial exposure and any claim that a Mississippi, Louisiana or Texas local government injured someone through the way it ran a public utility and then described it inaccurately. For those claims the federal option has narrowed to what a statute specifically provides, and what is left belongs in state court under a tort law written to limit what governments pay.

“Whatever the remedy for the water problem is, that remedy does not lie in a federal court action for damages,” Steffey said. “That door is closed to citizens and all these other municipalities or small water jurisdictions.”

Photo illustration by Derrion Arrington

Carl Boyanton, an independent candidate for Mississippi’s Fourth Congressional District, filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission on Sept. 21, 2026, alleging that U.S. Rep. Mike Ezell’s campaign accepted contributions above the legal limit from the family that owns two of the Gulf Coast’s largest shipbuilders.

Ezell’s campaign called the filing a political stunt in a statement issued after it was filed and said it would report Boyanton to the FEC for making false statements. The campaign did not respond to questions from The Mississippi Independent.

Boyanton has filed against this seat before. On Jan. 17, 2020, he filed the complaint that became Matter Under Review 7680 against then-Rep. Steven Palazzo, who held the same seat. The commission found reason to believe Palazzo’s committee had converted campaign funds to personal use, citing $24,000 in rent paid on Palazzo’s own property, $65,893.51 in vehicle leases and thousands more in undocumented reimbursements. Palazzo and his committee signed a conciliation agreement in January 2025, paying a $13,500 civil penalty and reimbursing $16,500. Boyanton’s allegations also triggered a House Ethics Committee investigation that found substantial evidence of wrongdoing. Palazzo lost his 2022 primary runoff to Ezell.

The current complaint rests on a single day of giving. FEC records attached to the filing show that on Aug. 26, 2025, seven members of the Chouest family each gave $7,000 to the Committee to Elect Mike Ezell, the legal maximum across the primary and general elections. The same seven gave $25,000 that day to Ezell’s leadership PAC, New Sheriff PAC, and $150,000 to the Ezell Victory Fund, a joint fundraising committee Ezell shares with the leadership PAC and the National Republican Congressional Committee.

Three weeks later, on Sept. 18, 2025, the Victory Fund sent $73,867.54 to the NRCC, $24,298.53 to New Sheriff PAC, and two transfers of $23,812.56 each back to Ezell’s campaign.

The complaint’s first count concerns that pair of contributions, totaling $47,625.12. Joint fundraising committees have to divide what they raise according to how much each donor can still legally give to each participating committee. Every Chouest who gave to the Victory Fund had already reached the ceiling with Ezell’s campaign the same day.

“They’re not allowed to go to a PAC or Super PAC or joint fundraising committee and add any more money than that $7,000 they’ve given,” Boyanton told The Mississippi Independent. He said he called the FEC repeatedly while preparing the filing. “They said, no, if you gave to him directly, you can’t. You can give to the joint fundraising committee, but your money has to, if you’re already over the $7,000, has to go to another member of the joint fundraising committee.”

The family behind the contributions is the Chouest family of Louisiana, which owns Edison Chouest Offshore and, with Bollinger chief executive Ben Bordelon, acquired Bollinger Shipyards in 2014.

Ezell chairs the House Subcommittee on Coast Guard and Maritime Transportation, which oversees Coast Guard procurement.

The Coast Guard has awarded Bollinger three contracts since early 2025. On March 25, 2025, the agency awarded Bollinger Mississippi Shipyards a $951 million contract modification for the Polar Security Cutter program. Ezell issued a statement the same day calling it “a major win for America’s maritime strength and Arctic presence.”

Six weeks later, Bollinger and Edison Chouest announced the United Shipbuilding Alliance, a partnership formed to answer the Coast Guard’s April request for information on Arctic Security Cutters. The Chouest contributions came on Aug. 26, 2025.

On Dec. 29, 2025, Bollinger signed a contract to build four Arctic Security Cutters, an award reported at $2.14 billion. Boyanton said a further $95 million contract came in September 2025, putting the total near $3 billion.

“The $951 was just the start of the money,” Boyanton said.

Boyanton’s press release named only the March award.

Boyanton stepped back from two of the complaint’s four counts when asked about them.

Count three alleges a violation of the federal ban on contributions by government contractors. Every contribution in the complaint’s exhibits came from a named individual, and FEC regulations state that nothing in the contractor rules prohibits stockholders, officers or employees of a corporation from giving out of personal assets. Asked about it, Boyanton agreed. “They are legally, independently, they can donate to the campaign,” he said. His concern, he said, is whether one person wrote the checks and distributed them under seven names, which would be a separate violation. He said he has no evidence of that.

“This would have to be investigated by the FEC, which is the reason why I filed it,” Boyanton said. “And they can figure that out.”

The complaint also names Edison Chouest Offshore and Bollinger Shipyards as respondents. No contribution from either company appears in its exhibits.

The filing’s headline figure is also wrong. The complaint alleges $217,000 in contributions, but its own itemization adds up to $224,000. Boyanton said he caught the error himself and told his publicist the day before the interview.

“I think I left out one of the Chouest families,” he said. “It’s actually 224.”

Boyanton said he prepared the complaint alone, beginning with FEC records he pulled in January 2026. He is a Diamondhead businessman who founded Farmer Fresh Produce and has run twice before in Republican primaries for the seat.

“If I could go through all 535 guys’ FEC filings, I would probably be filing violations against probably half of them,” he said. “I’m running to get rid of corrupt politicians.”

The Ezell’s campaign statement said the campaign “is in compliance with the law.”

“While Mr. Boyanton’s allegations are obviously a political stunt, making a false statement to a federal agency, such as the FEC, is illegal and we will be reporting him for doing that,” the statement said. The campaign did not answer questions about how the Victory Fund allocated the Chouest contributions or whether any portion was refunded or redesignated.

An FEC complaint is not a finding. The commission notifies respondents, takes their replies and votes on whether there is reason to believe a violation occurred, a process that in the Palazzo matter ran five years from filing to settlement.

Ezell, Boyanton and Democratic nominee Jeffrey Hulum III are all on the ballot in November.

Image: Carl Boyanton (L) and Mike Ezell (via Facebook and the U.S. House of Representatives)

BILOXI—Sonya Williams-Barnes told the Joint Legislative Committee on Reapportionment and Redistricting on Tuesday night that she did not learn about House District 119 from a map.

“I knew them by name,” Williams-Barnes said of the district’s constituents. “They called when their sons and daughters were sick inside our state prisons and could not get medical care. They called when conditions in one prison unit was so deplorable that they were unfit for an animal.”

Williams-Barnes, who represented District 119 from 2012 until she resigned in May 2022 to take a job with the Southern Poverty Law Center, and who ran for mayor of Gulfport last year, closed with four words that other speakers returned to throughout the hearing: “Leave our maps alone.”

Fifty-five people signed up to speak at Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College, the seventh stop on the committee’s eight-hearing tour. State Sen. Dean Kirby, the committee’s chair, told the room it was the largest sign-up list of the tour.

“This is not the largest crowd we’ve had, but it’s the most people that want to make comments of any place we’ve been, and we’ve been all over the state,” Kirby said.

Comments were held to two minutes. Ryan Morgan, an attorney with the legislature’s PEER committee, rang a bell at 90 seconds and twice more when time ran out.

The first speaker was state Rep. Jeffrey Hulum III, who holds the District 119 seat Williams-Barnes left and won the Democratic nomination in March for the Fourth Congressional District seat held by Republican U.S. Rep. Mike Ezell.

“I’m totally against any midterm redistricting,” Hulum said. “The Callais decision did not say we have to redistrict in the state of Mississippi.” He said the legislature should instead restore the ballot initiative and let voters decide.

Most speakers took that position. A larger number than at the committee’s earlier stops asked the legislature to redraw the maps, framing the request around the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais and a standard they described as race-neutral.

Rob Maness opened his remarks with a disclaimer. “Since I am a retired military officer, I’ll just do a disclaimer right now. Nothing I say represents the Department of War or any other government entity that I may be working with.”

Maness retired from the Air Force as a colonel in 2011 after more than 30 years and ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate in Louisiana before moving to Mississippi. He sits on the Harrison County and Gulfport Republican executive committees. The Washington Post reported this year that he holds an undisclosed role in the office of the undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness. He told the committee that Callais “returns authority to the states” and that Mississippi’s Second Congressional District “has been among the poorest in America for years.”

“Those outcomes did not happen by accident,” Maness said. “They have persisted under the current lines.” He said he supported redrawing congressional districts “to respect communities of interest” and opposed “maps drawn that protect incumbents or to serve an outside agenda.”

Mark Brody spoke later in the evening and identified himself as with the Conservative Coalition of Mississippi and the same Harrison County Republican Executive Committee.

Brody’s remarks tracked Maness’s closely. He said the Second District “has remained one of the poorest in the entire country for years” and that “these outcomes have persisted under the current district lines.” He said the maps should not “protect any particular incumbent or outside agenda,” that Callais “returns one more authority to the states,” and that the committee should “take bold action,” a phrase Maness also used.

Brody cited a median household income of $47,495 for the Second District and a poverty rate of 23.6 percent. He said the Conservative Coalition was circulating a redistricting pledge for legislators and candidates to sign. The Second District, which covers many of Mississippi’s westernmost counties, does not encompass the Gulf Coast.

Vivian Daly, an educator born in Biloxi, described a specific redistricting method. “Draw four districts of equal population that are contiguous, reasonably compact, respect county and precinct lines, and keep communities of interest together with no racial data in the room.”

Most speakers rejected that framing directly.

Monica Thomas-Hurst said the phrase troubled her. “I’ve heard a few say that they don’t see color. Now that statement alone troubles me, because what that means is you don’t see me and many others in this room.”

Noelle Nolan Ryder, a resident of Ocean Springs, identified herself as a fifth-generation Mississippian from Natchez and the granddaughter of William A. Geiger, whom she described as an active member of the Silver Dollar Group of the Ku Klux Klan during the civil rights movement.

“I say that so this panel understands I know what white supremacy in Mississippi is and how it operates,” Ryder said. She referenced the state’s 1890 constitution and its poll taxes and literacy tests, and noted that lawmakers were now redrawing districts in Forrest County, “named after the founder of the KKK.”

Betty Sparkman of Pass Christian told the committee her ancestors enslaved people and that eight of her forefathers fought for the Confederacy.

“They fought to preserve a system that denied Black Americans their freedom, their rights, and their voice,” Sparkman said. “And here we are, 156 years later, discussing a new version of that same oppression.”

Alan Jenkins, who said he has been a Baptist pastor for 26 years, gave the committee numbers from the same period. At least 142,000 Black men were registered to vote in Mississippi before the 1890 constitution, he said, and only 8,615 remained on the rolls by 1892.

“Do you think those men suddenly decided they didn’t want to vote anymore?” Jenkins said.

Cost came up repeatedly. Warren Conway told the committee a special session would run $100,000 per day. Chantrelle Graham-White, a Gulfport voter, said the money should go to problems that residents had actually raised.

Several speakers asked for something the committee has not provided at any stop. Angela Ellis of Gulfport asked for the court order she said would justify the redistricting effort.

“Show us the order. Show us the specific legal requirement that says Mississippi must redraw these districts right now,” Ellis said. She asked the committee to release proposed maps with racial voting-age population data attached, and to say how many majority-Black districts exist now and how many would exist afterward.

Mohamed Hardy, a Harrison County voter and a leader in what he called the largest Islamic community on the Coast, said his members were watching the precedent.

“Are we going to draw the lines based on religion?” Hardy said. “If it bothers my constituents, it probably bothers yours as well.”

Carrissa Corbett, the Ward 6 councilwoman in Gulfport, said the committee could not speak for her constituents without having been among them. “You cannot speak for us, especially without listening to us.”

John Whitfield, pastor of Morning Star Baptist Church in Gulfport, said he believed the effort originated outside the state. “You can move the line, but you should not, and you will not, silence the voices.”

The last speaker was Mitch Ellerby of Moss Point, a Vietnam veteran who represented Jackson County’s District 110 in the state House and told the committee he served from 1984 to 1992.

“I’ve done redistricting,” Ellerby said. “Listen to your heartbeat, listen to your mind, most of all, listen to the voters, because we know best, too, but you have the last say.”

The committee took no questions and adjourned. One hearing remains, at the New Capitol in Jackson on Oct. 1, 2026. Written comments may be sent to the committee’s counsel, Ted Booth, at ted.booth@peer.ms.gov.

Image: Participants in the Biloxi hearing (credit Derrion Arrington)

HATTIESBURG — Clarence Magee told the Joint Legislative Committee on Reapportionment and Redistricting that he came to Hattiesburg in 1956, after the Korean War, wanting to be a full citizen of the country he had served.

Magee said he took the literacy test then required for voter registration five times and failed it all five times. He finally got his voter registration card in 1963. Written across it, he said, were the words “by order of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.”

Magee said his ability to vote was ensured by judicial design, and the state’s current district maps are in keeping with that.

“Keep the 2025 lines,” Magee told the committee. “That was progress.”

Roughly three dozen people spoke on Thursday night at the Mannoni Performing Arts Center at the University of Southern Mississippi, the sixth stop on the committee’s eight-hearing tour. The majority of them asked the committee to leave the state’s existing district maps alone.

State Rep. Noah Sanford of Covington County, the committee’s vice chair, opened the hearing by telling participants that the maps displayed at the front were for review only. “They are not proposals,” he said. “No maps have been drawn or considered at this point.”

Speakers were required to limit their comments to three minutes, with Ben Collins, the legislature’s GIS and redistricting bureau chief, ringing a bell at 30 seconds and again when the speaker’s time was up.

Forrest County has a specific stake in the outcome. The legislative maps adopted in 2025 under federal court order created additional Black-majority districts, Senate District 45 among them. Johnny DuPree, who was mayor of Hattiesburg from 2001 to 2017, won the seat in a November special election with about 71 percent of the vote over Republican Anna Rush. Republican Sen. Chris Johnson, who had held District 45, ran in neighboring District 44 instead and won. Several speakers at Thursday’s hearing identified themselves as District 45 residents.

“I live in District 45, and I am grateful that we finally have someone who represents the concerns of the people who live in my community,” said Deborah Delgado, who represented Ward 2 on the Hattiesburg City Council for 24 years before retiring in 2025. “What we wanted was someone who did more than drove down Main Street. We wanted someone who turned off into the communities to see how we actually live.”

Speaker after speaker made the same three arguments. The Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais does not require Mississippi to redraw its maps. The 2025 maps are legal. The next census is in 2030.

Kenan Walker, a Forrest County voter, put a price on it. Eight hearings means eight sets of per diem reimbursements, eight venue rentals, security and insurance, he pointed out, and a special legislative session runs $100,000 a day. “I think that myself and anyone else in this room can find other ways to spend that money,” he said.

Deborah Gambrel Chambers said she and Percy Watson were the first African Americans elected in Forrest County, in 1979. She served 30 years as a justice court judge and 12 as a chancery court judge.

“It was difficult to see my campaign materials run over by my opponent,” Chambers said. “It was difficult to see the trials and tribulations that we went through, the preclearance, Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which allowed districts to be established so people like me could run and be elected.”

Chambers said the money would be better spent elsewhere. “Do you know how heartbreaking it is to stand behind somebody in a grocery store picking up a package of ground beef and agonizing as to whether or not they can buy it?” she asked.

Kathy McNair reminded the committee that it was sitting on the campus where Clyde Kennard began trying to enroll in 1955, and was denied, imprisoned on a false charge and died in 1963. She noted that Vernon Dahmer Sr. was killed in January 1966 after Klansmen firebombed his home, and that his voter registration card arrived in the mail 15 days later.

McNair referenced biblical David slaying Goliath with a slingshot, and described voter suppression as a modern-day version of the same type of contest, with “Jim Crow, poll taxes, literacy tests, redlining, voter suppression, and redistricting” representing Goliath. He added: “But if Goliath has cousins, David has cousins too. You’ve got giant slayers in this room, and we are not going down without a fight.”

Not everyone came to argue about race or whether to redraw district lines. Two speakers from Petal asked only that the city be kept in one district. Drew Brickson, the town’s Ward 5 alderman, said Petal has about 12,000 residents and was split between Senate districts 42 and 45 under earlier plans. He said Ward 3 Alderman Blake Nobles joined him in the request.

“When you divide a 12,000-person municipality, nobody wins,” Brickson said. “Keep the city of Petal whole in District 42.”

Kay Clay, a retired educator from the Petal area, made the same request without naming a district. “We want Petal area to speak with one voice, with one senator,” she said.

A speaker from Jones County asked that his county be kept as intact as possible.

Several people spoke in favor of the committee’s work, including one who alluded to political ideology. A Purvis resident addressed himself to the Republican members and said he supports “any redistricting that most supports and allows to prosper the conservative ideals of our state.” Elizabeth Alford of Walthall County said the objections had “little to do with race” and everything to do with “the Democratic Party needing help getting more representation.”

Ron Swindle, of Jones County, criticized the committee from a different direction, faulting the Senate leadership for how it drew former state Sen. Chris McDaniel out of his district. “You’ve disenfranchised a white man,” he said, adding that “what the white man did to the Black man in Mississippi is also equally ungodly.”

Vince Thorpe brought printed congressional maps going back to 1973 and argued that the Second District was redrawn repeatedly in the 1980s to raise its Black voting-age population. Thorpe ran as an independent against U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson in 1994, in a three-way race that also included Republican Bill Jordan.

“I knew I didn’t have a prayer of winning because they racially gerrymandered that district against me,” Thorpe said. He told the room he was not with the rest of the crowd and that the committee was doing the right thing. “Callais was right.”

Alex Pickle, a Hattiesburg resident who said he is a seventh-generation Mississippian descended from Confederate soldiers and enslavers, cited math: Republicans held 115 of the legislature’s 174 seats before the 2025 special elections and 112 afterward, he said, a drop from 66.1 percent to 64.4 percent.

Pickle then asked how many Republicans on the committee faced a Democratic challenger in 2023. “It was zero, none,” he said. “In fact, in 2023, 99 Republicans ran for House or Senate seats in Mississippi without a Democratic challenger.”

Paul James Blackman, a Gulfport resident, 20-year Navy veteran and 2026 Democratic candidate in the Fourth Congressional District, asked whether the hearings were authentic. “Is this a true public hearing or kabuki theater meant to dress up an outcome set beforehand as public consent?” he asked.

Raylawni Branch, who gave her age as 85, told the committee this was the third time she had sat through such a hearing. Branch and Elaine Armstrong became the first Black students to enroll at what was then Mississippi Southern College in September 1965. She later made lieutenant colonel in the Air Force Reserve and taught nursing at the university until 2004. She ran for the state Senate as a Republican in 2003 and said her district was split just before the election.

“I never thought I would have to go through this again,” Branch said.

The committee took no questions and adjourned. Two hearings remain, in Gulfport on Sept. 22 and Jackson on Sept. 24. Written comments may be sent to the committee’s counsel, Ted Booth, at ted.booth@peer.ms.gov.

Image: Redistricting committee on stage in Hattiesburg (credit Derrion Arrington)

Derrick Johnson, the CEO of the NAACP and a Jackson resident, has been a mainstay on cable news networks in the Trump era as the administration and its allies have taken aim at rolling back voting-rights protections and diversity initiatives.

Yesterday, Johnson took to a somewhat unusual platform for the head of the 120-year-old civil rights organization: ESPN’s flagship program, SportsCenter.

Specifically, Johnson joined the broadcast to explain the organization’s opposition to the Protect College Sports Act, congressional legislation that would regulate transfers, eligibility and—most importantly—money in amateur athletic programs.

The bill, which cleared a procedural hurdle in the U.S. Senate on Tuesday and could be debated in the next day or two, has bipartisan support in the Senate; its co-sponsors are Sen. Maria Cantwell, a Democrat from Washington state, and Ted Cruz, a Republican from Texas. It has also been endorsed by most NCAA conferences, including the Southwestern Athletic (SWAC), Sun Belt and Southeastern (SEC) conferences in which Mississippi’s Division I NCAA sports programs play.

“It takes away the rights of athletes,” Johnson, who formerly headed the Mississippi chapter of the NAACP, said of the bill. “It creates an opportunity for the sports leagues to commit what would now be illegal acts because they will have an exemption from antitrust legislation. It’s pretty bad and it’s unfortunate that players have been able to benefit from their ability on the field and now [it’s being] taken away.”

(More after the video)

Under the bill, schools and conferences would have a limited antitrust exemptions allowing conferences to enforce unified transfer and payment rules. Existing federal law prohibits companies from working together, or colluding, to set prices.

Since the beginning of the “name, image and likeness” (NIL) era, which cleared the way for college athletes to receive payment from university sports programs and endorsement deals, athletes have raked in hundreds of millions compared to the previous regime where the NCAA had strict prohibitions on student-athletes receiving compensation.

According to an analysis by The Athletic, the SEC, where Ole Miss and Mississippi State compete, leads the nation in total NIL compensation of an estimated $30.2 million as well as per school at approximately $18 million.

As of 2024, the SWAC, which includes Jackson State, Alcorn State and Mississippi Valley State universities, ranked No. 15 among all NCAA conferences for NIL payouts. In late 2024, the SWAC’s commissioner estimated the conference allocated $28 million over a two-year span to member institutions, which also includes schools in Louisiana, Alabama, Texas, Arkansas and Florida.

Johnson was invited on SportsCenter after Cruz appeared over the weekend on College GameDay, where he promoted passage of the Protect College Sports Act; critics panned ESPN for platforming political speech. The NAACP initially asked ESPN to have Johnson appear on air this coming weekend, when GameDay takes place in Oxford, where Ole Miss will face rivals LSU and the Rebels’ recently departed head coach, Lane Kiffin.

The bill includes a provision for HBCUs which creates grants for long-term upgrades for broadband, equipment and media infrastructure, which could also go toward supporting student journalism programs. Johnson characterized the provision as a last-minute addition, dismissing it as a “head fake” to obscure longstanding underfunding of HBCUs at the federal and state levels.

“We should not be tokenizing our Historically Black Colleges and Universities, in order for the major college universities to generate $14 billion in revenue annually,” Johnson said.

Image: NAACP CEO Derrick Johnson (via Wikimedia)

Mississippi’s public pension system remains heavily invested in one of the world’s largest asset managers even as the state accuses the company and two of its most prominent executives of concealing the extent of their ties to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, according to federal court filings that have never been publicly acknowledged or disclosed by the state.

The $37.6 billion Public Employees’ Retirement System of Mississippi, or PERS, joined a federal securities lawsuit against Apollo Global Management this spring, claiming its holdings in the company’s stock have been devalued by millions of dollars because its current CEO, Marc Rowan, and its former chief executive, Leon Black, misled investors about their relationships with the convicted sex offender.

PERS claims that these alleged misrepresentations eased investor sentiment in Apollo at the time and led to an artificial increase in its stock price, before leveling out years later, according to court filings.

Lawyers say those misrepresentations ultimately cost Mississippi’s pension system about $2.78 million.

It is not known whether PERS’ investment managers were duped by Apollo executives’ Epstein denial or were simply enticed to invest in what they thought was a well-valued stock, only to file suit years later when losses began to mount.

Apollo stock

Mississippi’s pension system began buying Apollo shares in June 2020, roughly a year after major news organizations had reported connections between Black, Apollo and Epstein and 10 months after the 66-year-old, longtime friend of President Donald Trump died. Apollo stock was $46 per share.

PERS continued buying company stock even as additional details emerged, according to court filings. PERS made its largest single purchase in late 2024, acquiring roughly $9.2 million worth of Apollo at $171 a share, about a week after it hit an all-time high.

PERS still held about 49,000 Apollo shares as of Feb. 21, 2026, according to court records.

In its lawsuit, PERS alleges that Apollo and its executives repeatedly made “materially false and misleading statements” about their connections to Epstein, including denials that Apollo itself had done business with him.

“Defendants denied that Apollo ever did business with Epstein and hired Dechert LLP to conduct an investigation into Black’s relationship with Epstein,” lawyers for PERS wrote in court filings, referring to a January 2021 Apollo-commissioned report about the allegations.

The lawyers contend that statements made in interviews, news releases and filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission concealed a substantially deeper relationship than investors had been led to believe existed.

PERS seeks to become lead plaintiff in the litigation, a position that would give the Mississippi pension system a central role in representing investors who say they were harmed by Apollo’s statements. Its lawyers argue that PERS is well suited to lead the case because it suffered one of the largest losses among investors seeking the role. Under federal securities law, investors with the largest financial interest, such as public pension systems, frequently become lead plaintiffs in class-action cases.

Davetta Lee, compliance counsel for PERS, declined to answer questions from The Mississippi Independent about why the pension system remains invested in Apollo or what due diligence it conducted before making its investments.

“We respectfully refer you to the Mississippi Attorney General’s office for questions about litigation,” Lee wrote in an email.

The state attorney general represents PERS in legal proceedings but can retain outside lawyers, often under contingency-fee agreements. The office of Attorney General Lynn Fitch did not respond to questions from The Mississippi Independent. Fitch, a Republican, announced in August that she is running for governor in 2027.

The case represents a rare Mississippi link to the sordid Epstein saga. Some of Epstein’s staff in the U.S. Virgin Islands sent their children to high school and college in Mississippi, but other potential links remain unexplained. Brad Wechsler, an Apollo board member who managed Black’s family office, sent Epstein an email in which he mentioned “Financial Planning” for a “Mississippi info request” in response to an email about Athene—an Apollo-owned company.

What the Epstein files revealed

The catalyst for the case against Apollo took on new significance after the U.S. Justice Department released millions of pages of records related to Epstein at the end of January 2026, including emails detailing previously undisclosed interactions involving Rowan, Black and other Apollo executives.

The records describe contact between Rowan and Epstein dating back to at least September 2013, when the two apparently met at Apollo’s offices. They met again five days later. Rowan and Black had breakfast with Epstein the following month.

By early 2016, Rowan and Epstein were exchanging messages about tax matters and business interests involving Apollo and related companies. Other correspondence concerned tax arrangements that could potentially have saved Apollo’s founders hundreds of millions of dollars.

In February 2026, after renewed scrutiny prompted by the document releases, the company said that neither Rowan nor anyone else at Apollo, other than Black, had a business or personal relationship with Epstein. Apollo said Rowan and other employees had provided information to Epstein only in connection with Epstein’s tax work for Black.

What PERS already knew

By the time PERS began investing in Apollo in June 2020, Black’s relationship with Epstein was already a matter of intense international news coverage. Bloomberg reporting in the summer of 2019 revealed that Epstein had visited Apollo’s New York headquarters, met Black there and pitched tax strategies to company executives. Black publicly acknowledged that Epstein had advised him personally on matters involving family trusts, taxes and philanthropy.

Those assurances did not satisfy every institutional investor. In mid-October 2020, Pennsylvania’s Public School Employees’ Retirement System, or PSERS, immediately suspended Apollo investments while it awaited the results of an outside investigation.

A little more than a week later, with scrutiny intensifying, Black addressed the relationship again during an Apollo earnings call. He called his continued association with Epstein after the 2008 conviction for soliciting prostitution from a minor a “serious mistake,” but maintained that Epstein had never done business with Apollo.

Though Pennsylvania froze its investments in Apollo in 2020 following the Epstein revelations and questions about his relationship with the company, and despite Black’s admission, Mississippi’s pension managers took a different course: They continued accumulating Apollo stock.

The January 2021 independent investigation also disclosed that Black had paid Epstein $158 million for tax, estate-planning and related services—far more than the $50 million and $75 million Black had previously declared. Black stepped down as Apollo’s chief executive in March 2021 with Rowan succeeding him.

PERS continued investing.

A profitable stock, until it wasn’t

Apollo shares climbed sharply during 2021, rising about 65 percent between January and October. PERS added several thousand shares during that period and more in 2022. The pension system appears to have made relatively few purchases during Apollo’s rapid appreciation in 2023 and early 2024.

Then came its biggest purchase.

In December 2024, after Apollo shares had just hit a record high, PERS purchased approximately 54,000 shares at about $171 each, an investment of roughly $9.2 million.

By early April 2025, Apollo shares collapsed to $108.

That decline matters because PERS now attributes about $2.78 million in investment losses to Apollo, Rowan and Black’s alleged misrepresentations about Epstein. PERS kept buying Apollo stock after the collapse.

Yet Apollo’s share price was moving amid forces that extended well beyond the Epstein controversy. By then, Epstein’s close friend, President Trump, had won the election and was promising to restart his global tariff wars. By April 2025, financial markets faced growing uncertainty about what those tariffs would look like, economic growth and the possibility of a recession. Apollo, whose sprawling businesses span private equity, private credit, insurance and other investments, would be heavily exposed to that level of global economic unrest. Analysts say that led to the selloff.

Apollo shares have recovered much of their 2025 decline, though they remain well below the steep price PERS paid at the end of 2024.

A federal court will ultimately determine how much of that money was lost because investors did not know the full story about Epstein and how much was lost for reasons that had nothing to do with him.

Image: Apollo Global Management headquarters and Jeffrey Epstein (via Wikimedia Commons/U.S. Department of Justice)

This article includes a correction: Amir Badat is no longer voting special counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. He is now voting rights attorney and political strategist for Fair Fight Action. In addition, the date for the Jackson hearing is now Oct. 1, 2026, not Sept. 22.

MERIDIAN, Miss.—An attorney with a voting rights group who grew up here stood before the state’s redistricting committee on Sept. 10, 2026, and told the members he expected them to redraw Mississippi’s maps no matter what they heard, then listed in advance the three defenses he said they would offer and called each one a lie.

“I think y’all hosting these public hearings is a little bit of a dog and pony show,” said Amir Badat, voting rights attorney and political strategist for Fair Fight Action, who said he was born and raised in Meridian. He argued that the first claim would be that the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais compelled the state to act. “The decision doesn’t require Mississippi to do anything. Doesn’t talk about Mississippi. Doesn’t talk about our maps,” Badat said. The second, he said, would be fear of a lawsuit. He noted the state enacted a map in 2022 that Black voters warned would discriminate, was sued, and lost. “When white voters might sue you, you have to redistrict to take away Black political power. But when Black voters might sue you, who cares?” The third would be that the committee is weighing partisanship and not race. “You know full well that race and party are intertwined in Mississippi.”

Badat addressed the chair and vice chair by name. “Senator Kirby, Representative Sanford, if and when y’all get onto the floor of the House to defend new maps,” he said, “we want you to know that we know that you are lying to our faces.” He closed with local history, saying his parents came to Meridian almost 50 years ago and were taken in by Charles Young Sr., among the first Black Mississippians elected to the state legislature since Reconstruction, and elected from a Black-majority district a federal court had ordered the state to draw. “If the thinking that is motivating this redistricting process today were allowed to prevail back then, Charles Young would have never been elected.”

The hearing at Meridian Community College’s McCain Theater was the fifth of eight the Joint Committee on Reapportionment and Redistricting is holding before the Mississippi Legislature takes up new maps. Sen. Dean Kirby of Rankin County, the chair, opened as he has at every stop, saying the panel had come to listen and would not answer questions. He added a request he had not made before, asking speakers to avoid federal issues and healthcare after earlier hearings drifted into them.

Meridian produced something the first four hearings had not, a substantial bloc of speakers asking the state to redraw its lines. Rosemary Robinson of Neshoba County said the Supreme Court had rejected the assumption that citizens of a race vote alike and said that new maps should establish race-neutral boundaries. Tamara Ward, an anesthesia provider from Neshoba County, argued that the current alignment erases individual voters, and asked whether the state might as well draw districts by height or by gender. “Don’t define us by our color,” she said. Beverly Maxwell Cotton, a citizen of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians speaking in her personal capacity, said tribal citizens hold a political relationship with the United States that should not be reduced to a racial category, and asked the committee to apply compactness, contiguity and respect for county lines consistently statewide.

Lucy Hurst Gordon, a retired Mississippi Department of Transportation engineer who said she was among the first women to work at the agency, told the committee the congressional map has been built around a racial target for decades and that Callais had removed the legal reason for it. She asked the committee to consider partisanship in place of race, and to show its work. “Don’t fold the map out there and say, this is it,” she said. “Show the people why you’re dividing it the way you’re dividing it.”

Speakers opposing a redraw returned to the 2025 maps. Carolyn Rash Hampton of Winston County, an NAACP member and interim president of her local voters’ league, listed a series of recent changes she considered needless and placed the maps among them. “Replacing the 2025 map is unnecessary and will have consequences,” she said, noting that her high school class will mark its 60^th graduation anniversary this weekend, one year after the Voting Rights Act became law. “Please don’t take us back to that era.” Ramona Sanders of Lauderdale County called the effort a power grab and said the state has never corrected itself without federal pressure.

State Rep. Cheikh Taylor, who chairs the Mississippi Democratic Party and whose District 38 covers Starkville, West Point and Columbus, posed an argument about the record of the majority that drew the maps. He said federal courts had to intervene in Mississippi’s congressional redistricting after both the 2000 and 2010 census cycles, that a federal court ordered a Senate district redrawn in 2019, and that a federal panel in 2024 found Section 2 violations in the 2022 maps and ordered additional Black-majority districts. When those districts went before voters, he said, Democrats flipped two Senate seats and a House seat and broke the Republican supermajority in the Senate. He then ran through the state’s poverty rate, median household income and rural hospital closures. “Mississippi doesn’t need safer districts,” he said. “We need safer hospitals.”

State Rep. Gregory Elliott of Lauderdale County, who officially welcomed the committee, told the audience the night belonged to them. “Tonight is the people’s night, because they will not have a chance to speak to the legislature after tonight,” he said, and yielded his time. Michael Roberts, a veteran from Lauderdale County, said the effort amounted to a war on Black political power. Johnny Henry of Laurel, who said he had run for office twice in a district that split the Black community, asked why the state would redraw before a census.

The committee took no questions and adjourned. Three hearings remain, in Hattiesburg on Sept. 17, Gulfport on Sept. 22 and Jackson on Sept. 24. Written comments may be sent to the committee’s counsel, Ted Booth, at ted.booth@peer.ms.gov.

Image: State Rep. Cheikh Taylor at the mic in Meridian (credit Derrion Arrington)

At a time when the global trend is to preserve urban trees to enhance quality of life and mitigate climate change, Biloxi, Mississippi is in retrograde.

Despite vocal opposition, the Biloxi Planning Commission on Sept. 3, 2026, voted unanimously to permit the destruction of a waterfront grove of mature live oak trees for a planned Black Marlin casino development—despite the fact that the trees are officially protected under a city ordinance.

“These trees were granted protection status for a reason—to ensure our landscapes remain resilient and vibrant against the pressures of increasing development,” Coast resident Preston Martin noted in an online petition opposing the move that has so far garnered more than 600 signatures. The petition calls for city officials to follow through on protecting the 25 mature live oaks, one magnolia and two hickory trees estimated to be more than a century old.

If the trees are destroyed, it would be part of a pattern: In June 2026, numerous venerable live oaks in Biloxi and nearby Long Beach were cut down before a judge could hear an appeal to save them. As the Sun Herald reported, government boards agreed to the trees’ removal despite local opposition and the protective ordinance. Residents in both cities appealed the decisions to circuit court, but developers removed the trees before a judge could review the cases. Among the trees lost was one known as the Gruich Oak, which was felled to make way for a Chick-fil-A.

The Gulf Coast is known for its monumental, spreading live oaks, which have withstood hurricanes and human development for centuries. Before Hurricane Katrina decimated the region, local beachfront promenades were lined with historic homes in groves of old live oaks, magnolias, camellias and other ornamental plants, but in many areas, all that survived the storm were the live oaks, including the grove now in the path of the planned casino.

Larry Tucei of Gulfport, who has been measuring and cataloguing large live oaks across the South for 20 years, said local officials sometimes recognize the need to preserve the region’s signature trees, and Gulf Coast cities frequently plant live oaks for aesthetic reasons. Other development projects over the years have incorporated existing live oaks into their site plans, including at the Ohr-O’Keefe Museum of Art. But “protected” is a relative term, as the Biloxi ordinance allows approved removal if fees are paid and other trees are planted, Tucei said.

“I’m not against cutting trees when necessary, or against development when it’s done right,” Tucei said. His position, he said, is that in many cases, including this one, the trees could be incorporated into site plans. Tucei said developers have been eyeing the site for a casino since 2008 but their proposals have been repeatedly shot down, and so, the current permit application was expedited. Getting the site cleared was to be the next step toward getting other approvals, including from the Mississippi Gaming Commission.

In addition to their aesthetic value, Tucei said, such trees are important for capturing carbon dioxide that contributes to climate change. “One big live oak can pull in 50 to 100 pounds of carbon a year,” he said. “That’s more than five acres of little trees.”

Tucei is considered an expert at aging live oaks, some of which on the Mississippi Coast are estimated to be more than 500 years old. The Friendship Oak in Long Beach reportedly dates to the year 1487, meaning it was around when Christopher Columbus first visited the New World. Live oaks are capable of withstanding hurricane winds and surges due to their deep and broad root systems and strong, twisting growth patterns. But as the Biloxi Planning Commission action illustrates, even locally revered live oaks granted official protection are vulnerable to developers and accommodating government officials.

In an email, Martin said, “I’m not an opponent of the fine folks that are working hard to put food on their tables for their families. I just want everyone to recognize that ‘progress’ doesn’t always have to mean ‘destruction.’ We can find a balance and that should be our standard going forward. What a developer might see as an obstacle that needs to be removed, I see as an opportunity to give your customers some shade while enjoying their time at the business.”

Removing the trees was included in a site application submitted to the planning commission by Encompass Develop Design and Construct, which is headquartered in LaGrange, Kentucky. RW Development plans to build the casino and is scrambling to meet a deadline to start construction and will ask the Mississippi Gaming Commission for permission to proceed before late December, a date set when the commission granted site approval.

“An application for approval to proceed with development has not been submitted for that location yet,” Jay McDaniel, executive director of the gaming commission, told the Sun Herald. “Any applicant would be required to show the commission that city and county governments do not oppose the proposed development, so it would make sense that those steps are being taken.”

The proposal to remove the trees now goes to the Biloxi City Council, which is expected to include the proposal in the agenda for its Sept. 15 meeting.

Tucei said the deadline for submitting appeals of the planning commission ruling to the city council is Sept. 11. Comments can be sent by email to KCampbell@biloxi.ms.us.

Image: Live oaks and a magnolia at the proposed casino site (courtesy Larry Tucei)

NATCHEZ, Miss.—The state’s redistricting hearings reached this Mississippi River city on Sept. 8, 2026, and the sharpest objection came from a Black legislator who told the committee its maps were indefensible even before their planned redrawing.

“This map ain’t worth a damn,” said state Rep. Robert Johnson III, the House minority leader, from the floor of the auditorium at Alcorn State University’s Natchez campus. “One congressional representative in a state that has 40 percent black population.”

Johnson said he opposed redrawing the lines now, before the 2030 census, then turned on the argument that the fight is partisan. He said he had been through three redistricting cycles and that in each of them white Democrats had told mapmakers the same thing Republicans did. “They tell you that this is about partisan politics. It’s not. It’s about race,” he said. He also disputed the premise that Black voters are the ones being packed into a single district. The 1st District is 73 percent white, he said; the 3^rd, 68 percent; and the 4^th, 78 percent; while the 2^nd is 61 percent Black.

The hearing was the fourth of eight that the Joint Committee on Reapportionment and Redistricting is holding before the Mississippi Legislature takes up new legislative, congressional and judicial maps in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais. It was the first held at a historically Black university, on a campus in Adams County at the southern end of the Second District. State Sen. Dean Kirby of Rankin County, the chair, opened the hearing as he has at every stop, telling the audience the committee came to listen and would not answer questions, and giving speakers five minutes to talk.

Speaker after speaker asked why the state is redrawing the maps at all. Joyce Arceneaux-Mathis of the Natchez NAACP asked whether Mississippi had ever engaged in mid-decade redistricting before and what the cost would be. “They do not heal, they reopen wounds,” she said of the older maps. She reminded the committee that it was in a city where George Metcalfe, then the local NAACP president, was maimed by a car bomb in 1965.

Walter Brown, a former legislator and Adams County supervisor, told the committee that seizing an opening to redraw lines mid-decade is “just bad policy,” whichever party did it. “I don’t think in the history of Mississippi since 1817 has there been a mid-cycle, mid-decade redistricting of the legislature,” he said.

Bob Strader asked the same question and added a request. If the committee does redraw, he said, “please make the legislature, Congress look like the face of Mississippi.”

Philip West, who was at one time president of the Natchez NAACP, an Adams County supervisor for 17 years, a state representative and later mayor of Natchez, told the committee he had nearly been killed by the Ku Klux Klan in 1965. “I don’t want to go back,” he said. “We have to admit to our mistakes and overcome our mistakes.”

Ben Tucker of the Natchez NAACP said any map that reduces Black voting power is racial discrimination. “I’m not going back,” he said, “and we as a people, we are not going back.”

State Rep. Jeffrey Harness, who represents House District 85 in southwest Mississippi, addressed the committee as colleagues. He said he had read Callais, disagreed with it yet respected it as a U.S. Supreme Court ruling, and noted that the decision did not order Mississippi to redraw anything. “If the purpose is political, we should not hide a political decision behind the language of a court decision,” he said.

He noted that state Rep. Willie Bailey had told the committee at its Cleveland hearing that the decisions had already been made, said he understood why, and argued the state should be spending its time focusing on beleaguered cattle producers, rural hospitals and schools. “Donald Trump does not live in Mississippi. We do.”

One speaker argued for redrawing. James P. McKinney, a retired U.S. Army Corps of Engineers mathematician and newly elected chair of the Warren County Republican Executive Committee, upriver in Vicksburg, said the Second District was created with race in mind and has grown from 22 counties to parts of 30 as the Black-majority Delta has lost population. He said conservatives that he canvassed across the district told him not to bother voting because the seat could not be won by a candidate of their choosing. “That is a form of voter suppression,” he said, and asked the committee to redraw the maps on race-neutral criteria.

Kathleen O’Byrne of Ridgeland delivered her entire statement in the form of sarcasm, saying it would be “fabulous” for Mississippi to gerrymander itself further and running through the state’s hospital closures, dismal farm economy and high infant mortality rate as evidence of what white lawmakers had already delivered.

Kathleen Bond, director of the National Park Service’s Natchez National Historical Park, who said she has lived in Natchez more than 30 years, took the opposite view of Johnson’s regarding the existing map and said the Second District had been good for the city, because it tied Natchez to Vicksburg, Greenville and Cleveland, and noted that the need to address racial injustice had prompted a recent local reckoning of the city’s dark history as the site of the second largest antebellum slave market in the Deep South.

Mary Jane Riggode, who said she taught at the segregated Sadie V. Thompson school in Natchez before it was integrated and whose father served in the legislature in the 1920s and 1930s, asked the committee why it was meeting at all. “Why, why waste one dime on a stupid redistricting in the middle?” she asked. Committee members did not respond, in keeping with Kirby’s comment about members not taking questions.

Kelvin Butler, a former state senator from southwest Mississippi, closed the testimony against redrawing. “The district belongs to the people, not the politicians,” he said.

The committee then adjourned. Four hearings remain, in Meridian on Sept. 10, Hattiesburg on Sept. 17, Gulfport on Sept. 22 and Jackson on Sept. 24. Written comments may be sent to the committee’s counsel, Ted Booth, at ted.booth@peer.ms.gov.

Image: Attendees at the Natchez hearing (credit Derrion Arrington)

When someone dies in a Mississippi prison or jail cell, sometimes the public knows about it; sometimes, they don’t.

Often, even loved ones don’t find out the tragic news for days.

A new database from the Southern Poverty Law Center aims to help the public keep track of in-custody deaths in local and state correctional facilities across Mississippi.

Emma Douglas, a senior staff attorney at the SPLC, said in a news release about the database that the organization wants to “shine a light on the deepest recesses of our society as we advocate for improved conditions in jails and prisons.”

Douglas added, “We want to connect survivors with resources and memorialize those lost behind bars while ensuring transparency and accountability in the criminal legal system.”

The 41-page database, which is available for download, spans 2019 to 2025, using information compiled through data requests to county sheriff’s offices, which oversee county jails. Of Mississippi’s 82 counties, 28 counties did not supply data to the SPLC, according to the release. Also included is information from the Mississippi Department of Public Safety related to in-custody deaths.

Over the past several years, the conditions in Mississippi’s jails and prisons have captured national headlines, with particular focus on the shroud of secrecy around the deaths that occur in detention facilities.

In one case, highlighted this spring by The Mississippi Independent, a woman learned of her brother’s death from a mystery caller inside prison, which a chaplain eventually confirmed.

Mississippi prisons have become places where people die with alarming frequency, from medical neglect, homicide or the sheer strain of incarceration. Relatives are frequently left to piece together their last hours, days and weeks on their own, sometimes with details provided by other inmates, sometimes from rumors, and often with little help from the Mississippi Department of Corrections.

Mississippi drastically underreports the deaths of people in law enforcement custody. It also incarcerates people at the second-highest rate in the nation, nearly double the national average, and the potential for deadly violence is everpresent.

The legislature has been slow to act. During the most recent legislative session, lawmakers waffled on what action the state should take to address the problem.

“Deaths in custody, particularly in jails, should be rare. When they occur, consistent and reliable data is critical to understanding the circumstances of each death and its implications for the operation of the facility,” Douglas said. “Simply being involved in the criminal legal system should not be a death sentence.”

Image: Monquel Nason (courtesy Angel Readus)

The joint legislative committee redrawing Mississippi’s districts is holding eight public hearings around the state, starting this summer and continuing into the fall, and at the first three the chair told each audience the same thing: the committee had come to listen and would not answer questions. Forty-five years ago, the legislature ran the same exercise, with the same number of hearings and much of the same types of testimony, and what moved the lines then is worth remembering now.

In the summer of 1981, following the 1980 census, a joint congressional redistricting committee held eight hearings across Mississippi. State Rep. Robert G. Clark Jr., then the state’s longest-serving Black legislator, reported afterward that the public had been strikingly consistent. “In most places we went, this is the one thing they suggested the committee look at,” Clark said, alluding to a district drawn to give Black voters a chance to elect a candidate of their choice. Clark sketched one himself, running from Wilkinson and Amite counties in southwest Mississippi and north along the river to Tunica County.

The committee rejected every plan that would have produced such a district. Its counsel, Jerris Leonard, told members that the Supreme Court had issued “no decision requiring this legislature to create a district for a minority group.” In August of that year, the committee approved what it called a least-change map, adjusting boundaries only enough to account for population shifts while preserving white majorities in all five congressional districts. The legislature ratified the districts with votes of 99 to 21 in the House and 42 to 9 in the Senate.

The sharpest exchange came at a hearing in Greenwood on Sept. 17, 1981. Clark appeared with David Jordan, Norman Smith, Willie Perkins and Owen Brooks. Jordan, then a science teacher and president of the Greenwood Voters League, accused the committee of having “wrongfully diluted thirty-six percent of Black votes in this state as though they didn’t even exist.” When Perkins challenged the committee’s chair, Rep. Tommy Campbell, directly, Campbell brought his gavel down hard enough to split it in two. Jordan won a seat on the Greenwood City Council four years later and went on to serve 32 years in the state Senate, retiring in June 2025 at age 92. He still lives in Greenwood. Sen. Justin Pope, who holds his old seat, sits on the committee running this year’s hearings.

What changed the map was federal enforcement. On March 30, 1982, the U.S. Justice Department rejected Mississippi’s congressional plan under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, finding that lines drawn horizontally across the Delta fractured Black communities and diluted their strength. Civil rights lawyers had already filed suit. Within two months a three-judge federal court threw out the state’s plan, adopted one that kept the Delta whole and ordered the 1982 elections held inside it. The new Second District ran from Tunica County south to Claiborne, following the river.

The hearings still mattered, though not in the way the committee described them. The record they produced, as well as who asked for what in which county and what the committee did with it, became evidence. Federal officials reviewing the plan under Section 5 could see that the public had asked for one thing and the legislature had done another.

The court-drawn district fell short at first. Frank Parker, the civil rights attorney who brought the case, called it a phantom majority-Black district. Its population was just under 54 percent Black, its voting-age population 48 percent, and whites remained a majority of its registered voters. Clark ran there in 1982 and lost. When the case returned to trial in December 1983, Tom Hofeller, the Republican redistricting expert testifying for the state, conceded that Black voters needed two more percentage points to balance the district. The state’s own witness had measured the disadvantage the state’s brief denied. On Dec. 21, 1983, a three-judge panel ordered the district redrawn, raising the Black share of the voting-age population to 52.8 percent and the total Black population to 57.8 percent. Clark ran again in 1984 and lost again. Mike Espy won the seat in 1986.

The pattern repeated following the 1990 census. The Justice Department rejected Mississippi’s maps, citing what it called clear evidence of racially discriminatory intent. The legislature deadlocked. White members dismissed the alternative as the Black Caucus plan, and a federal court ordered the state to run the 1991 elections under the old lines. Revised maps cleared federal review the following year. In special elections held under them in 1992, voters sent 33 Black members to the state House and 10 to the state Senate, roughly double the Black representation of two years earlier.

The most recent cycle is a close parallel. In 2021, the same standing joint committee, chaired by the same senator who chairs it now, Dean Kirby, held nine public hearings around the state between Aug. 5 and Aug. 23, 2021, and for the first time livestreamed them at Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann’s insistence. Hosemann later pointed to those hearings as evidence of an open process, saying the committee had met “in all regions of the state to hear from citizens about the map.” That December, as the committee approved new congressional lines, a coalition of groups filed a complaint with the state Ethics Commission alleging the committee had deliberated and made decisions outside properly noticed open meetings. The complaint said no public comment or citizen-drawn plan had been taken up in an open meeting.

The maps that emerged did not survive either. On May 7, 2025, a federal court ordered new state House and Senate lines after finding the 2022 maps diluted Black voting strength, which forced the special elections held that fall. The legislature had also failed to produce a congressional plan in the previous cycle, leaving a federal court to draw one on Dec. 30, 2011. Four cycles running, someone other than the Mississippi Legislature finished or fixed its maps.

Two things are different this time. The Supreme Court struck down the Voting Rights Act’s coverage formula in 2013, leaving Section 5 with no states to cover, so no Justice Department review now stands between a Mississippi map and an election. And on April 29, 2026, the court decided Louisiana v. Callais, holding 6 to 3 that Section 2 imposes liability only where the evidence supports a strong inference that a state drew its lines intentionally to give minority voters less opportunity because of race. Discriminatory effect—the standard that governed Mississippi’s cases for forty years—is no longer enough.

Speakers at all three hearings so far this year have argued that Callais requires nothing of Mississippi. Others have argued it requires everything. The committee has not said which reading it holds, because it has said almost nothing at all.

The new standard changes what a hearing record is worth, though not in the direction the committee may expect. What the 1981 record showed was “effect,” which was the question Section 5 asked. “Intent” is the question Section 2 now asks. A transcript establishing that residents of named counties asked for a particular district, that the committee heard them and that the map came back otherwise is the kind of evidence the Callais standard demands of anyone who sues.

Rep. Willie Bailey of Greenville, a veteran 34 years in the House but is not part of the redistricting committee [correct?], told the crowd at Delta State on Sept. 1, 2026, that the maps were already being drawn and that the testimony would go no further than the room. In 1981, that was true of the hearings but belied the record they left behind. Whether it is true of this one depends on who is writing it down and where they can take it.

Note on URLs: Some sources cited here are not available digitally, including quotes from newspaper archives and the Robert Clark papers at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History.

Image: Photo illustration featuring Robert Clark and attendees at recent hearings by Derrion Arrington

A petition circulating online is urging U.S. Rep. Bennie G. Thompson to force scrutiny of the Adams County Correctional Center, the CoreCivic-run immigration detention facility outside Natchez.

This comes on the heels of reporting from The Mississippi Independent and other outlets about conditions at the facility, including about the detention center having recently received its worst compliance report on record and corrective action that came in response to this outlet’s investigation highlighting allegations that released immigrants were threatened and charged exorbitant transportation fees.

The petition, posted to the website Action Network on Sept. 3, asks Thompson, a Democrat, to “investigate and act on the conditions” at the center. The petition asks Thompson, the ranking member on the U.S. House Homeland Security Committee, which oversees U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement for: an immediate unannounced inspection by the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General with public findings; full transparency from ICE and CoreCivic on population levels, staffing ratios, medical protocols and recent detainee deaths; congressional oversight hearings on conditions in for-profit ICE detention; and enforceable, independently monitored standards of care.

“As this facility is in your district, your office has the standing to demand accountability from ICE and CoreCivic on behalf of the people held at this facility and the broader Adams County community,” the letter reads.

The petition’s central premise—that conditions at the Adams County facility warrant federal examination—is supported by federal documentation. An ICE Office of Detention Oversight inspection conducted May 7–9, 2026, and released in June documented 26 violations at the facility, The Mississippi Independent reported.

Inspectors found that staff failed to follow required national detention standards procedures in four of the 15 use-of-force incidents they reviewed, leaving unresolved how much force was used, whether detainees had already been subdued and whether the video record was complete. They also found supervisors had not verified that detainees were placed in the correct housing units, that ICE responses to detainees were badly delayed, and that CoreCivic staff had not inventoried some detainees’ baggage and belongings.

The facility passed anyway. A year earlier it had drawn four deficiencies and a “superior” rating.

The clearest recent illustration of the gap between those standards and daily practice at Adams County involves what detainees face the moment they are released.

An investigation by The Mississippi Independent, reported in collaboration with the Spanish-language outlet El Molino Informativo, found that a senior CoreCivic detention officer had since at least 2020 helped steer released immigrants toward a taxi service operated by her husband. Former passengers and longtime immigration advocates said the driver, Otis Anderson, used threats and charged fares topping $300 per person, and that his service was repeatedly selected over cheaper options—including free rides offered by regional nonprofits.

One juvenile passenger said Anderson charged $900 in April to drive three released detainees roughly 75 miles to the airport in Baton Rouge, after the passenger had asked only to be taken to the bus station in Natchez, about 12 miles away. Uber estimated the Baton Rouge trip at about $110 at the time. The passenger said Anderson threatened to have him returned to detention if he refused to pay.

After the investigation, CoreCivic said that although it could not substantiate the allegations, the company had taken additional steps to prevent any conflict of interest, and that it had reviewed policy with the officer and confirmed no staff member holds an ownership stake in the company.

The petition describes recent protests inside the facility over inadequate meals, hot water and hot food cut off during maintenance to the gas system, and unexplained nighttime power interruptions. It says detainees have reported severe overcrowding, including three people housed in two-person cells and people sleeping on the floor, and that nearly 70 detainees submitted a petition to facility staff weeks before the most recent protest without adequate response.

The petition also cites the death of Delvin Francisco Rodriguez, a 39-year-old Nicaraguan man who died Dec. 14, 2025, at Merit Health Natchez. According to ICE, staff responded to a medical emergency on Dec. 4, 2025, and found Rodriguez unresponsive and without a pulse; lifesaving measures were performed before he was transferred to the hospital, where he was later removed from a ventilator. He was one of 33 people who died in ICE custody in 2025, the agency’s deadliest year on record.

The petition had collected 98 signatures as of time of publication, with a goal of obtaining 100 signatories.

Image: U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson (credit: J. David Cox via Wikimedia)

As if August in Mississippi wasn’t stressful enough, the state has also decided to start the process of redistricting.

So far it’s been interesting. Three Black legislators—Senate Democratic Leader Derrick Simmons, House Minority Leader Robert Johnson and Legislative Black Caucus Chairman Kabir Karriem—all called on the state not to redraw right now, warning against a return to lines that dilute Black voting strength.

On Aug. 21, Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann removed Simmons from the redistricting committee. No public reason. Simmons was replaced by another Democrat, Sen. Albert Butler.

The hearings are happening throughout the month, and lawmakers are expected to take this up in a special session later this year—which is exactly why now is the moment to pay attention.

(Keep reading after the video)

Redistricting sounds abstract right up until you realize your neighborhood is a political district and the people drawing those lines are deciding what your political power looks like for years.

If you live in Mississippi, don’t wait until the map is drawn to care. Go to the hearings. Listen. Speak. Know what they’re doing with your community. Because once those lines are drawn, we’re the ones who have to live inside them.

Image: Hannah Williams

CLEVELAND, Miss.—The state’s redistricting committee brought its third public hearing to the Mississippi Delta on Tuesday, and the first legislator to reach the microphone following the chairman’s opening told the crowd not to expect much from it.

“Nothing you’re going to say tonight is going to end up as a part of any plan. Nothing,” Rep. Willie Bailey, a Democrat from Greenville who has served 34 years in the Mississippi House, told several hundred people at Delta State University’s Bologna Performing Arts Center in Cleveland. “They’re already being drawn. They probably already know who they’re going to cut out.” Bailey added, “They’re up here to listen to you, but that’s as far as they’re going. It ain’t going no farther than this room tonight.”

Speaker after speaker followed Bailey, in a region that makes up the heart of the state’s only majority-Black congressional district, to urge the Joint Committee on Reapportionment and Redistricting to leave the current district maps alone. The hearing at Delta State was the third of eight the committee is holding across the state before lawmakers take up new legislative, congressional and judicial maps in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision this year in Louisiana v. Callais.

State Sen. Dean Kirby of Pearl, the chair, opened by saying the committee was there “to listen, not to talk,” and would take no questions.

The Delta’s legislators came out in numbers to take the microphone. Rep. John Hines of Greenville contradicted Kirby’s assurance that the hearings had nothing to do with local government.

“This redistricting starting here in the legislature will affect your municipalities, your counties, your school districts, your levee boards, everything,” Hines said. “Once they start up top, it works its way down.”

Rep. Timaka James-Jones of Belzoni, who served for more than 20 years as Humphreys County circuit clerk before her election to the legislature, told the committee that none of its members had ever run an election and warned that redrawing lines ahead of the January 2027 qualifying period would leave clerks and election commissioners without time to fix the state’s election management system. “You’re going to have mass confusion throughout this entire state,” she said, before closing with an observation about the panel in front of her. “Evidently we have not any ladies on this committee.”

Several speakers argued that the committee was asking the wrong questions. Mike Carr, a Cleveland trial lawyer on the Bolivar County Democratic executive committee, said he had read the Callais opinion and that it does not require Mississippi to take action. “There is no Supreme Court mandate that’s making us do this,” he said. “We’re not getting sued by anybody saying our lines are wrong.” He said the party in power already holds the governor’s office, both chambers and three of four congressional seats.

“What else do you want?” Carr asked.

Jaribu Hill, founder of the Mississippi Workers’ Center for Human Rights and an attorney, made the same point and said the maneuvers around Callais “only serve to reinforce what in fact so many people gave their lives to overturn.”

The most specific request came from Mary Tyes-Williams, the mayor of Itta Bena, who said that if the committee proceeds with redrawing districts, it should keep the Delta and Hinds County together in the Second Congressional District along with the state’s three public historically Black universities, Jackson State, Alcorn State and Mississippi Valley State. “We are not pawns to be played with,” she said.

Nathan Duff proposed a district built around all 18 counties of the Mississippi Delta National Heritage Area, DeSoto County included, running south along the river to Wilkinson County.

Melvin Young, a cartographer from Tunica County who has drawn maps for local governments, said the last redistricting cost the state $1,721,169 and asked that the committee not “resurrect outdated maps simply because they may produce a desired political result.”

Marvin Jones, the Humphreys County circuit clerk, said, “The people don’t want it. The law doesn’t require it. So, go back to the state and tell whoever sent y’all that you don’t even want to finish this process because it’s not needed.”

Effie Burt, 72, who said she had returned to Mississippi after 40 years away and claimed to find the racism she left still in place. She ended her remarks by singing a verse of “We Shall Overcome” to the committee.

Troy Brown Sr. thanked President Donald Trump for the large turnout. “He does not realize that he has unleashed the Kraken,” Brown said, pointing to the young people in the hall, referencing a legendary sea monster more recently evoked in internet memes to represent a sprawling, unsubstantiated set of voter fraud claims during the last U.S. presidential election.

A smaller group asked the committee to redraw the maps. Miller Green, 19, of the Second District, said districts should treat voters as individuals and that the current congressional map should change.

Susan Spiller of Greenwood, president of the LeFlore County Republican Women, asked for maps to be drawn on “traditional race-neutral criteria,” a phrase that recurred among Republican speakers at last week’s hearing in DeSoto County. Her husband, Rob Spiller, argued that the current lines give incumbents in all four congressional districts no reason to court voters of the other race, and that redrawing them would force candidates to “consider both white and black input.”

The night’s most candid account of the politics of redistricting came from a supporter of the effort. Shuwaski Young, a Republican who said he owns a home behind the Delta State campus, reported having spoken with legislators across the state and said the reason the legislature did not act before this year’s midterm primaries was fear of the result. “The hesitation was that, hey, if we’ve moved too fast, we actually might get more Democrat districts in the state,” Young said. He argued that lines drawn under the Supreme Court’s standard would give the state “full representation of what our state actually should look like.”

Willie Simmons, the Central District transportation commissioner and a Cleveland Democrat who served 26 years in the state Senate alongside many of the committee’s members, spoke last. He recalled Black and white lawmakers working together after Hurricane Katrina and through the COVID-19 recovery, and asked the committee to keep a legislature and executive branch “where we can sit across the table and work with each other.” He said he would put his faith in his former colleagues to produce a plan “with diversity that allows us to represent the 40 percent of Blacks, approximately, in the state of Mississippi.”

The committee took no questions and adjourned after roughly two hours. Five hearings remain, the next on Sept. 8 in Natchez, followed by Meridian, Hattiesburg, Gulfport and Jackson, where the series ends on Sept. 24. Written comments can be sent to the committee’s counsel, Ted Booth, at ted.booth@peer.ms.gov.

Image: Committee members and staff at the Cleveland hearing (credit Derrion Arrington)