Feb. 2, 1955

Less than a year after the U.S. Supreme Court had desegregated public schools, U.S. Rep. Adam Clayton Powell Jr. rose on the House floor. 

A Baptist preacher to a congregation of 10,000 in Harlem, he was one of only three Black Americans in Congress. Since getting elected to Congress a decade earlier, he had introduced many civil rights bills. None had passed. After introducing legislation to desegregate the armed forces, then-President Harry Truman wound up doing it through an executive order. 

As Powell stepped to the microphone, he chastised Congress for failing to make a difference. He and others had introduced civil rights bills, “pleading, praying that you good ladies and gentlemen would give to this body the glory of dynamic leadership that it should have, but you have failed, and history has recorded it,” he said. 

“This is an hour for boldness. This is an hour when a world waits breathlessly, expectantly, almost hungrily for this Congress, the 84^th Congress, through legislation to give some semblance of democracy in action. … We are derelict in our duty if we continue to plow looking backward.” 

He noted that when a House committee was considering legislation to end segregation in interstate travel, Lt. Thomas Williams was arrested and jailed, even though the Supreme Court had told bus carriers to end such segregation. 

“About two weeks ago, while flying a jet plane, he was killed serving his country before he had a chance to see democracy come to pass,” Powell said. 

Although his legislation failed, he kept pushing for change, telling crowds, “Keep the Faith, Baby!” The civil rights rider he introduced became part of the historic Civil Rights Act of 1964, which helped change America.

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Feb. 1, 1960

Four Black freshmen students from North Carolina A&T — Franklin McCain, Joseph A. McNeil, David L. Richmond and Ezell A. Blair Jr. — began to ask themselves what they were going to do about discrimination. 

“At what point does a moral man act against injustice?” McCain recalled. 

McNeil spoke up. “We have a definite purpose and goal in mind,” he said, “and with God on our side, then we ask, ‘Who can be against us?’” 

That afternoon, they entered Woolworth’s in downtown Greensboro. After buying toothpaste and other items inside the store, they walked to the lunch counter and sat down. 

They ordered coffee, but those in charge refused to serve them. The students stood their ground by keeping their seats. 

The next day, they returned with dozens of students. This time, white customers shouted racial epithets and insults at them. The students stayed put. By the next day, the number of protesting students had doubled, and by the day after, about 300 students packed not just Woolworth’s, but the S.H. Kress Store as well. 

A number of the protesting students were female students from Bennett College, where students had already been gathering for NAACP Youth Council meetings and had discussed possible sit-ins. 

By the end of the month, 31 sit-ins had been held in nine other Southern states, resulting in hundreds of arrests. The International Civil Rights Center & Museum has preserved this famous lunch counter and the stories of courage of those who took part in the sit-ins.

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

At least 96 Mississippians died from domestic violence. Bills seek to answer why

by Mina Corpuz, Mississippi Today
January 31, 2025

Nearly 100 Mississippians, some of them children, some of them law enforcement, died last year in domestic violence-related events, according to data Mississippi Today collected from multiple sources. 

Information was pulled from local news stories, the Gun Violence Archive and Gun Violence Memorial and law enforcement to track locations of incidents, demographics of victims and perpetrators and any available information about court cases tied to the fatalities. 

But domestic violence advocates say Mississippi needs more than numbers to save lives. 

They are backing a refiled bill to create a statewide board that reviews domestic violence deaths and reveals trends, in hopes of taking preventative steps and making informed policy recommendations to lawmakers.

A pair of bills, House Bill 1551 and Senate Bill 2886, ask the state to establish a Domestic Violence Fatality Review Board. The House bill would place the board in the State Department of Public Health, which oversees similar existing boards that review child and maternal deaths, and the Senate version proposes putting the board under the Department of Public Safety.

“We have to keep people alive, but to do that, we have to have the infrastructure as a system to appropriately respond to these things,” said Stacey Riley, executive director of the Gulf Coast Center for Nonviolence and a board member of the Mississippi Coalition Against Domestic Violence. 

“It’s not necessarily just law enforcement, just medical, just this,” she said. “It’s a collaborative response to this to make sure that the system has everything it needs.”

Mississippi is one of several states that do not have a domestic violence fatality review board, according to the National Domestic Violence Fatality Review Initiative. 

Without one, advocates say it is impossible to know how many domestic fatalities and injuries there are in the state in any year. 

Riley said data can tell the story of each person affected by domestic violence and how dangerous it can be. Her hope is that a fatality review board can lead to systemic change in how the system helps victims and survivors. 

Last year, Mississippi Today began to track domestic violence fatalities similar to the way the board would be tasked to do. It found over 80 incidents in 2024 that resulted in at least 100 deaths.

Most of the victims were women killed by current and former partners, including Shaterica Bell, a mother of four allegedly shot by Donald Demario Patrick, the father of her child, in the Delta at the beginning of that year. She was found dead at the home with her infant. One of her older children went to a neighbor, who called 911. 

Just before Thanksgiving on the Coast, Christopher Antoine Davis allegedly shot and killed his wife, Elena Davis, who had recently filed a protection order against him. She faced threats from him and was staying at another residence, where her husband allegedly killed her and Koritnik Graves. 

The proposed fatality review board would have access to information that can help them see where interventions could have been made and opportunities for prevention, Riley said. 

The board could look at whether a victim had any domestic abuse protection orders, law enforcement calls to a location, medical and mental health records, court documents and prison records on parole and probation. 

In 2024, perpetrators were mostly men, which is in line with national statistics and trends about intimate partner violence. 

Over a dozen perpetrators took their own lives, and at least two children – a toddler and a teenager – were killed during domestic incidents in 2024, according to Mississippi Today’s review. 

Some of the fatalities were family violence, with victims dying after domestic interactions with children, parents, grandparents, siblings, uncles or cousins. 

Most of the compiled deaths involved a firearm. Research has shown that more than half of all intimate partner homicides involve a firearm. 

A fatality review board is meant to be multidisciplinary with members appointed by the state health officer, including members who are survivors of domestic violence and a representative from a domestic violence shelter program, according to the House bill. 

Other members would include: a health and mental health professionals, a social worker, law enforcement and members of the criminal justice system – from prosecutors and judges to appointees from the Department of Public Safety and the attorney general’s office. 

The House bill did not make it out of the Judiciary B Committee last year. This session’s House bill was filed by the original author, Rep. Fabian Nelson, D-Byram, and the Senate version was filed by Sen. Brice Wiggins, R-Pascagoula. 

The Senate bill was approved by the Judiciary A Committee Thursday and will proceed to the full chamber. The House bill needs approval by the Public Health and Human Services Committee by Feb. 4. 

“The idea behind this is to get at the root cause or at least to study, to look at what is leading to our domestic violence situation in the state,”  Wiggins said during the Judiciary A meeting. 

Luis Montgomery, a public policy and compliance specialist with the Mississippi Coalition Against Domestic Violence, has been part of drafting the House bill and is working with lawmakers as both bills go through the legislative process. 

He said having state-specific, centralized data can help uncover trends that could lead to opportunities to pass policies to help victims and survivors, obtain resources from the state, educate the public and see impacts on how the judicial system handles domestic violence cases. 

“It’s going to force people to have conversations they should have been having,” Montgomery said.

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.