Mississippi Today
Speaker White’s Holmes County background colors his views on Medicaid expansion
There is a reason first-term House Speaker Jason White has been more out front in his support of Medicaid expansion than perhaps any other Mississippi Republican leader.
Granted, Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann for years has talked favorably about Medicaid expansion, but he was slow to act – primarily because he knew getting a bill out of his conservative Senate would be difficult.
But even before White was officially selected as the Republican nominee to serve as speaker during the current 2024-2028 term, he made it clear that Medicaid expansion would be seriously debated and considered during his first year as the House’s presiding officer. White’s commitment was stunning since other leaders in his party, such as his predecessor former Speaker Philip Gunn, and Gov. Tate Reeves, had publicly opposed Medicaid expansion and even blocked debate on the issue.
But true to his word, a bill to expand Medicaid to provide health care for the working poor was one of the first measures passed by the House – by an overwhelming 99-20 margin with a vast majority of White’s Republican caucus voting for the legislation.
The proposal later died during the final days of the 2024 session when the House and Senate could not reach consensus on what would have been a landmark measure.
But both White and Hosemann have said they expect Medicaid expansion again will be on the table in the 2025 legislative session.
Late in the 2024 session White was asked why he was a supporter of Medicaid expansion.
White smiled and shrugged before saying “I don’t know, Maybe I see it differently. Maybe it is because my wife is in the health care industry. She is a nurse practitioner. She sees patients in Holmes and Carroll counties where there is a lot to be desired. They do a great job, but it is tough. So you see that.”
White went on to say he has seen the negative impact of possible hospital closures in some of the communities in his district.
In addition, he said he is a small town lawyer who has served in various capacities, such as youth court judge.
“You get a great cross section of Mississippi in those environments,” he said.
“I would like to tell you it is because I am brave, but it comes more from voters and constituents saying it is time to do this,” White continued.
While most of the recent Republican leaders hail from the more affluent suburbs of the metro Jackson area, White is from rural Holmes County, one of the poorest areas of the country on the edge of the Mississippi Delta. District 48 that he represents is a large rural area of central Mississippi.
READ MORE: Speaker White eyes major cuts to Mississippi grocery, income taxes for 2025 session
Make no mistake about it – White is conservative, Republican, and proud of it.
The House under White’s leadership passed legislation touted by Republicans to restrict trans people from using the bathroom of the sex they identify with on college and high school campuses and to prevent citizens from gathering signatures to place on the ballot proposals to ease Mississippi’s near total abortion ban.
He said he supports school vouchers, which are the holy grail to many Republicans. But he adds the Republican-dominated House as a whole is not as supportive of sending public funds to private schools as he is.
White points out he got almost 80% of the vote in the 2023 party primary election.
But White also could be described as a bridge between the so-called rural white Democrats who controlled the Mississippi House for decades and the modern-day Republicans who currently have more than a two-thirds majority in the House.
There are some similarities between the Republicans and those rural white Democrats. Many of the Mississippi Democrats who controlled the House before Republicans wrestled control away were social conservatives – opposed to abortion rights and in favor of gun rights. But through decades, those rural white Democrats expanded the state’s role in health care by growing the state’s original Medicaid program because they saw the money the federal government was willing to offer to the state for a more robust Medicaid program as good for Mississippi and its people.
In 2011, rural white Democrats were making a last stand to maintain control of the House. The 2011 election is the only election in the state’s history where it was uncertain which party would end up controlling the Mississippi House.
White ran for election that year as one of those rural white Democrats.
Republicans won a narrow majority in 2011 – taking over the House for the first time since the 1800s. White also won and before his first year in the House was completed, he switched to the Republican majority.
But some of the principals of those conservative rural Democrats might remain in his political DNA.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
A Mississippi town moves a Confederate monument that became a shrouded eyesore
GRENADA (AP) — A Mississippi town has taken down a Confederate monument that stood on the courthouse square since 1910 — a figure that was tightly wrapped in tarps the past four years, symbolizing the community’s enduring division over how to commemorate the past.
Grenada’s first Black mayor in two decades seems determined to follow through on the city’s plans to relocate the monument to other public land. A concrete slab has already been poured behind a fire station about 3.5 miles (5.6 kilometers) from the square.
But a new fight might be developing. A Republican lawmaker from another part of Mississippi wrote to Grenada officials saying she believes the city is violating a state law that restricts the relocation of war memorials or monuments.
The Grenada City Council voted to move the monument in 2020, weeks after police killed George Floyd in Minneapolis. The vote seemed timely: Mississippi legislators had just retired the last state flag in the U.S. that prominently featured the Confederate battle emblem.
The tarps went up soon after the vote, shrouding the Confederate soldier and the pedestal he stood on. But even as people complained about the eyesore, the move was delayed by tight budgets, state bureaucracy or political foot-dragging. Explanations vary, depending on who’s asked.
A new mayor and city council took office in May, prepared to take action. On Sept. 11, with little advance notice, police blocked traffic and a work crew disassembled and removed the 20-foot (6.1-meter) stone structure.
“I’m glad to see it move to a different location,” said Robin Whitfield, an artist with a studio just off Grenada’s historic square. “This represents that something has changed.”
Still, Whitfield, who is white, said she wishes Grenada leaders had invited the community to engage in dialogue about the symbol, to bridge the gap between those who think moving it is erasing history and those who see it as a daily reminder of white supremacy. She was among the few people watching as a crane lifted parts of the monument onto a flatbed truck.
“No one ever talked about it, other than yelling on Facebook,” Whitfield said.
Mayor Charles Latham said the monument has been “quite a divisive figure” in the town of 12,300, where about 57% of residents are Black and 40% are white.
“I understand people had family and stuff to fight and die in that war, and they should be proud of their family,” Latham said. “But you’ve got to understand that there were those who were oppressed by this, by the Confederate flag on there. There’s been a lot of hate and violence perpetrated against people of color, under the color of that flag.”
The city received permission from the Mississippi Department of Archives and History to move the Confederate monument, as required. But Rep. Stacey Hobgood-Wilkes of Picayune said the fire station site is inappropriate.
“We are prepared to pursue such avenues that may be necessary to ensure that the statue is relocated to a more suitable and appropriate location,” she wrote, suggesting a Confederate cemetery closer to the courthouse square as an alternative. She said the Ladies Cemetery Association is willing to deed a parcel to the city to make it happen.
The Confederate monument in Grenada is one of hundreds in the South, most of which were dedicated during the early 20th century when groups such as the United Daughters of the Confederacy sought to shape the historical narrative by valorizing the Lost Cause mythology of the Civil War.
The monuments, many of them outside courthouses, came under fresh scrutiny after an avowed white supremacist who had posed with Confederate flags in photos posted online killed nine Black people inside the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015.
Grenada’s monument includes images of Confederate president Jefferson Davis and a Confederate battle flag. It was engraved with praise for “the noble men who marched neath the flag of the Stars and Bars” and “the noble women of the South,” who “gave their loved ones to our country to conquer or to die for truth and right.”
A half-century after it was dedicated, the monument’s symbolism figured in a voting rights march. When the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders held a mass rally in downtown Grenada in June 1966, Robert Green of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference scrambled up the pedestal and planted a U.S. flag above the image of Davis.
The cemetery is a spot Latham himself had previously advocated as a new site for the monument, but he said it’s too late to change now, after the city already budgeted $60,000 for the move.
“So, who’s going to pay the city back for the $30,000 we’ve already expended to relocate this?” he said. “You should’ve showed up a year and a half ago, two years ago, before the city gets to this point.”
A few other Confederate monuments in Mississippi have been relocated. In July 2020, a Confederate soldier statue was moved from a prominent spot at the University of Mississippi to a Civil War cemetery in a secluded part of the Oxford campus. In May 2021, a Confederate monument featuring three soldiers was moved from outside the Lowndes County Courthouse in Columbus to another cemetery with Confederate soldiers.
Lori Chavis, a Grenada City Council member, said that since the monument was covered by tarps, “it’s caused nothing but more divide in our city.”
She said she supports relocating the monument but worries about a lawsuit. She acknowledged that people probably didn’t know until recently exactly where it would reappear.
“It’s tucked back in the woods, and it’s not visible from even pulling behind the fire station,” Chavis said. “And I think that’s what got some of the citizens upset.”
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Crooked Letter Sports Podcast
Podcast: New Orleans sports columnist and author Jeff Duncan joins the podcast to talk about his new Steve Gleason book and the new-look New Orleans Saints.
Jeff Duncan went from the Mississippi Book Festival in Jackson on Saturday to Jerry World in Dallas on Sunday where he watched and wrote about the Saints’ total dismantling of the Dallas Cowboys. We talk about both events and also about what happened in high school and college football last weekend and what’s coming up this weekend.
Stream all episodes here.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
On this day in 1899
Sept. 18, 1899
Scott Joplin, known as “the King of Ragtime,” copyrighted the “Maple Leaf Rag,” which became the first song to sell more than 1 million copies of sheet music. The popularity launched a sensation surrounding ragtime, which has been called America’s “first classical music.”
Born near Texarkana, Texas, Joplin grew up in a musical family. He worked on the railroad with other family members until he was able to earn money as a musician, traveling across the South. He wound up playing at the World’s Fair in Chicago in 1893, where he met fellow musician Otis Saunders, who encouraged him to write down the songs he had been making up to entertain audiences. In all, Joplin wrote dozens of ragtime songs.
After some success, he moved to New York City, hoping he could make a living while stretching the boundaries of music. He wrote a ragtime ballet and two operas, but success in these new forms eluded him. He was buried in a pauper’s grave in New York City in 1917.
More than six decades later, his music was rediscovered, initially by Joshua Rifkin, who recorded Joplin’s songs on a record, and then Gunther Schuller of the New England Conservatory, who performed four of the ragtime songs in concert: “My faculty, many of whom had never even heard of Joplin, were saying things like, ‘My gosh, he writes melodies like Schubert!’”
Joplin’s music won over even more admirers through the 1973 movie, “The Sting,” which won an Oscar for the music. His song, “The Entertainer,” reached No. 3 on Billboard and was ranked No. 10 among “Songs of the Century” list by the Recording Industry Association of America. His opera “Treemonisha” was produced to wide acclaim, and he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1976 for his special contribution to American music.
“The ragtime craze, the faddish thing, will obviously die down, but Joplin will have his position secure in American music history,” Rifkin said. “He is a treasurable composer.”
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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