House Education Chairman Rob Roberson, a Republican from Starkville, outlines for Mississippi Today’s Geoff Pender and Michael Goldberg some of the top issues his committee will tackle this legislative session.

READ MORE: As lawmakers look to cut taxes, Mississippi mayors and county leaders outline infrastructure needs

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

Jan. 26, 1870

Virginia was readmitted to the Union after the state passed a new constitution that allowed Black men to vote and ratified the 14^th and 15^th Amendments. The readmission came five years after Black men first pushed to vote. 

A month after the Civil War ended, hundreds of Black men showed up at polling places in Norfolk to vote. Most were turned away, but federal poll workers in one precinct did allow them to cast ballots. 

“Some historians think that was the first instance of blacks voting in the South,” The Washington Post wrote. “Even in the North, most places didn’t allow blacks to vote.” 

Black men showed up in droves to serve on the constitutional convention. One of them, John Brown, who had been enslaved and had seen his wife and daughter sold, sent out a replica of the ballot with the reminder, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” He won, defeating two white candidates. 

Brown joined the 104 delegates, nearly a fourth of them Black men, in drafting the new constitution. That cleared the way not only for Black voting, but for Virginia’s senators and representatives to take their seats in Congress. 

But hope of continued progress began to fade by the end of the year when the Legislature began to create its first Jim Crow laws, starting with separate schools for Black and white students. Other Jim Crow laws followed in Virginia and other states to enforce racism on almost every aspect of life, including separate restrooms, separate drinking fountains, separate restaurants, separate seating at movie theaters, separate waiting rooms, separate places in the hospital and when death came, separate cemeteries.

Following Mississippi’s lead, Virginia adopted a new constitution in 1902 that helped to disenfranchise 90% of Black Virginians who voted. States continued to adopt Jim Crow statutes until 1964 when the Civil Rights Act became the law of the land.

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

This week marks the 25th anniversary of the landmark contribution of $100 million by Jim Barksdale to improve reading skills in Mississippi.

Standing with state education officials on Jan. 20, 2000, in the old Central High School auditorium in downtown Jackson, Barksdale and his late wife Sally announced their historic gift that would launch the Barksdale Reading Institute, which would create an innovative reading program that would be implemented in public schools across the state.

The contribution, still one of the largest in the state’s history, made headlines across America and the world. Slate Magazine listed the contribution by Barksdale, former head of internet software provider Netscape, as the sixth largest in the nation for 2000. The New York Times, which praised the Barksdales on its editorial page, wrote at the time that the contribution was “thought by authorities to be by far the largest in the field of literacy.”

The $100 million gift not only provided tangible benefits to Mississippi’s schools and children, but it provided a critical symbolic boost to public education in the state.

In a letter to the editor published in The New York Times a couple days after the gift was announced, retired sociology professor Beth Hess of Mountain Lake, N.J, praised the Barksdales but added a telling addendum to her note.

“It is disturbing that the state of Mississippi will be rewarded for its continuing failure to tax its citizens fairly and to allocate enough money to educate students, especially in predominantly Black districts,” Hess wrote. “This should have been a public rather than private responsibility.”

Indeed, this exact point was on the minds of many Mississippians — certainly including the Barksdales — at the time. And given the then-fresh history of segregation of the state’s public schools, how could it not be?

The historic financial commitment made by the Barksdales came less than a quarter of a century from the vote in 1978 to finally remove from the state constitution the provision creating a “separate but equal” system to prevent the integration of the schools.

And it came much less than a quarter of a century from the vote in 1987 to finally remove from the constitution the provision that allowed the Legislature to disband the public schools rather than integrate them. That segregationist provision had been added to the Mississippi Constitution in 1960, with voters in only three of the state’s 82 counties rejecting it: Itawamba and Tishomingo counties in northeast Mississippi and Jackson County on the Gulf Coast.

To say in the year 2000 that there were still Mississippians not enamored with a fully integrated Mississippi public school system would be an understatement.

The history of public education in Mississippi, like the history of the state itself, is marred by racial strife and hate-inspired division that continues even today in some ways.

But on that January day in 2000, Jim Barksdale, a Mississippi native and one of the nation’s leading business executives, showed them and the nation another way forward, proclaiming his commitment “to keeping the main thing the main thing.” And it was clear that he believed the “main thing” was support of an integrated Mississippi public education system.

Barksdale’s brother, Claiborne, who ran the Barksdale Reading Institute that was created with the contribution, said that Jim and Sally Barksdale viewed their action as a $100 million investment in Mississippi and its children, not as a gift. If positive results were not being achieved, the Barksdales were prepared to halt the program and invest their money in other beneficial ways.

The program worked, however, and looking back over these past 25 years since the gift, the results are clear. The historic investment produced historic gains that are now dubbed “The Mississippi Miracle.”

“The state ranks second in its reading scores for children in poverty and seventh for children from households of color,” Claiborne Barksdale wrote this week for Mississippi Today Ideas. “… Tens of thousands of Mississippi children are reading, and reading proficiently, thanks to Jim and Sally’s persistent desire to help them achieve a brighter future. I’d say that’s a pretty damn good return on their investment.”

It could still be argued, as the retired sociology professor did on the New York Times editorial pages in 2000, that Mississippi leaders are not doing enough for public education. But important strides have been made. The state still funds a reading initiative based on the Barksdale model.

While state politicians line up to claim credit for Mississippi’s improved reading scores and “The Mississippi Miracle,” it’s worth remembering that it all started with the Barksdales’ investment 25 years ago.

Editor’s note: Jim and Donna Barksdale are Mississippi Today donors and founding board members. Donors do not in any way influence our newsroom’s editorial decisions. For more on that policy or to view a list of our donors, click here.

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