Mississippi sits in the middle of the fastest-growing region in the country, yet its population keeps shrinking. The final episode of Don’t Look Around sets out to ask a harder question than why people leave: What would it take to turn this around?
Start with the story of the state flag. For more than a century, Mississippi flew a banner carrying a Confederate battle emblem. The state Supreme Court confirmed in 2000 that it had not legally been the official flag since 1906. Voters kept it anyway in 2001, 64 percent to 36 percent. It took the 2015 Charleston church massacre, public universities lowering the flag, and finally a 2020 ultimatum from the SEC (change the flag or lose championship events) before the state acted.
Darren Schwindemann, who left the state, says the easiest step costs nothing: Tell the world everyone is welcome. “Any race, any interest, we want that here,” he said. “The beauty of it is they could do that Monday morning.” Back that message with real policy, he argues, and Mississippi stops exporting the people who build creative communities.
Reuben Burke knows what that welcome looks like. Hurricane Katrina displaced him when he was in the seventh grade, and he and his mother arrived as refugees at Emmanuel Baptist Church in Grenada. The congregation took them in, and his mother was soon cleaning houses for church members. Burke, a Honduran kid raised in Mississippi, now lives in New York but still calls the state home. Immigrants like him make up just 2.5 percent of Mississippi’s population, yet they’ve offset more than a third of native-born outmigration since 2010.
Jake McGraw of the Rethink Mississippi initiative says the math is simple: Concentrations of people drive growth. In a survey of more than 6,500 people, the top thing respondents wanted wasn’t more money. It was a job in their field. Those jobs multiply as population grows.
Mississippi does have a strong card to play: the second-lowest home prices in the country. But McGraw warns that cheap housing only works if people get what they pay for, meaning good schools, healthcare, safe streets and a sense of belonging. Decades of outmigration have also left much of the housing stock vacant or in disrepair.
Khari Johnson offers a concrete idea: a grip and electric trade school. The movie Sinners, set in Clarksdale, was shot in Louisiana partly because Mississippi lacks the local crews that big productions need. Train gaffers and grips here, Johnson says, and they could work sets from Atlanta to New Orleans as well.
“It’s trade school,” Johnson said. “That’s really what it is.”
Listen to Episode 3 here.
Image: Mississippi state flag (via Wikimedia)