The High Holy Days, the most sacred days in Judaism’s calendar, began at the end of September. In New York, the largest Jewish community in the world, everything stops. In Mississippi, there have never been many Jews, and recently, Jewish communities have been dwindling.
Read MoreAs elementary and high school students in Mississippi head back to school this month, they may not consider themselves lucky, but they are…
Read MoreCarolyn Bryant Donham’s error-filled attempt to absolve herself of guilt in the 1955 kidnapping and brutal murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till should come as little shock to those who have followed this story for years.
Read MoreJackson Women’s Health Organization, Mississippi’s sole remaining abortion clinic, will go out of business on July 7, pending its lawyers’ appeal to the Mississippi Supreme Court. But the scene out front on the last day that the clinic is open remains very lively: A young woman who supports the Pink House, as JWHO is called, holds up a neon pink poster proclaiming abortion is protected under the right to privacy.
Read MoreEmily*, 25, and her husband, Rick, are expecting their first child in a few weeks, after having lost previous pregnancies. But rather than this being the most exciting time in their lives, the Forrest County couple is stressed and scared because Emily is unable to receive prenatal care.
Read MoreJust 10 days ago, the archbishop of San Francisco publicly castigated House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. – the first woman to hold that office, a graduate of a Catholic women’s college, and a lifelong practicing Catholic – because she is pro-choice.
Read MoreOver Memorial Day weekend in 2017, Willie Cory Godbolt, then 34, decided to have things out with his estranged wife, Sheena May Godbolt. She had moved out of the family’s mobile home with their young daughter and son because her husband was violent. Sheena and the two children were staying at her mother’s house in Bogue Chitto, a small community near Brookhaven.
Read MoreMississippians have been going hungry for decades, as Robert F. Kennedy discovered 55 years ago this month.
Read MoreCLINTON, Miss. – Reading bookends my days. I start the morning with newspapers, including this one (News Journal), and turn in for the night with a book.
Read MoreThe night of May 14, 2020, in Canton, Jamarquis Black, 24, kidnapped his estranged girlfriend, Pheonecia Ratliff, 23. They had quarreled because he wanted custody of their baby daughter, Jordyn, barely 6 months old. Phoenicia had reported Jarmarquis’ stalking and threats to the police; he had been arrested, but bailed out of jail on May 11.
Read MoreI first heard Sweet Honey in the Rock’s rousing song, Fannie Lou Hamer, on a car radio a summer day in 1994 when Nelson Mandela addressed the United Nations General Assembly. The song and the moment were very powerful, but not as strong as Hamer’s own voice, raised in song or to protest conditions for Black Mississippians in the 1960s and 1970s.
Read MoreIf you don’t know much about Black history, or not as much as you’d like, all you have to do is watch two documentaries in February, Black History Month. Women with distinguished civil rights forebears made these both documentaries, and both films use innovative techniques.
Read MoreFor the last MCIR LIVE event of 2021, MCIR founder and host Jerry Mitchell talked to three guests who have made exploring experiences of hate in the Deep South the centerpiece of their work in new and surprising ways.
The Justice Department has closed the books on the lynching of Emmett Till, whose face — young and unblemished, then swollen and monstrous — has come to symbolize the unpunished killings of Black Americans.
Whatever hope there was for justice was dashed this week when the department pinned the blame on its inability to confirm a book’s explosive 2017 claim that the White woman at the center of the case recanted her story about Till’s actions that fateful day in Money, Mississippi.
Some historians of the civil rights movement think Bob Moses, who died in July 2021, was as influential as Martin Luther King Jr., if not more so.
Read MoreAngela Carpenter is a municipal court judge in Vicksburg, Mississippi. Twice a month on Tuesday afternoons, she presides over domestic violence court. She doesn’t want members of the public, who might be called to serve on juries or grand juries, to dismiss domestic violence cases with a shrug: Why didn’t she just leave??
Read MoreAdam Clayton Powell Jr., the tall, dapper congressman who represented Harlem, wanted to be sure the short, stout sharecropper from Mississippi in a borrowed dress understood how important and powerful he was.
“I know who you are,” Fannie Lou Hamer told him.
The U.S. Supreme Court has allowed Texas to effectively deputize its residents to block abortions after six weeks of pregnancy. At least eight other states, including Mississippi, are considering copy-cat laws.
Read MoreBooks, documentaries and an FBI investigation detail the abduction, torture and murder of Emmett Till 66 years ago, but one person who should have been charged in the case has never been fingered.
Read MoreEudora Welty, supreme 20th-century master of the short story, author of novels and essays, and winner of a Pulitzer Prize, spent almost all of her writing life in her family home in Jackson’s Belhaven neighborhood.
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