Mississippi Today

It is time for Mississippi to celebrate Marjorie Baroni

Published

3 months ago

August 16, 2024

mississippitoday.org – Terry Meng and Peter Dreier – 2024-08-16 05:00:00

It is time for Mississippi to celebrate Marjorie Baroni

Marjorie Baroni – one of Mississippi’s most courageous and committed civil rights activists – was born 100 years ago, on Aug. 16, 1924. Historians have taken note of her key role in the struggle for social justice in Natchez, but she is not well-known in her hometown. It is time to rectify that omission by celebrating her life and legacy.

During the last decade, Natchez has begun confronting its history of racism and acknowledging the individuals engaged in the civil rights struggle. Two years ago, it dedicated a monument to the more than 150 Black marchers sent to the MIssissippi State Penitentiary at Parchman in 1965 for protesting for civil rights. In 2015 the Natchez Board of Aldermen passed a resolution apologizing to those Black residents “who suffered these injustices.”

The Natchez Museum of African American History and Culture, established in 1991, and the Natchez Civil Rights Trail Committee now have partnered on a new publication that tells the story of the civil rights movement in their city. The free map of civil rights sites includes photographs and an annotated list of 53 sites along with a QR code that takes readers to the online version of the map. The map may be downloaded at: https://visitnatchez.org/wp-content/uploads/Map-of-Civil-Rights-Sites-Corrected-PDF-Mallory.pdf

Cover of the “Map of Civil Rights Sites in Natchez, Mississippi.”

This year Mississippi and the nation are marking the 60th anniversary of a key turning point in the civil rights movement, Freedom Summer, of which Baroni played a significant part.

‘You had to follow your conscience’

Marge (as she was known) hardly fits the stereotype of a white activist in the Black-led freedom movement. She was not a do-gooder or a white savior. She was a fearless activist who put herself at great risk, alongside Black Natchezians, to challenge the Jim Crow system.

She was born Majorie Rushing to poor Mississippi sharecroppers and raised in the Baptist church. As a child, she liked to read (including books like Victor Hugo’s “Les Miserables” and Charles Dickens’ “A Tale of Two Cities”) and described herself as a “dreamer” and a “romantic.”

But the harsh realities of poverty and a dysfunctional family (an alcoholic father and a stern mother) intruded on her hopes. Like her parents and five siblings, she endured the hard toil of working the land, including picking cotton. The family moved often, to different tenant shacks and farms in Natchez and Adams County. One of them was the China Grove Plantation, where the Rushings were the only white family. As a young girl, Marge recognized the racial and class differences that kept people apart, sowing the seeds for her later activism and her empathy for the victims of injustice.

After dropping out of Natchez High School during her senior year at age 17, she married 19-year-old Louis Baroni, the son of local sharecroppers from an Italian family. After moving to Connecticut and then New Orleans, where Louis found work in shipyards during World War II, they returned to Natchez and raised six children.

Marge’s intense reading and search for fulfillment led her to convert to Catholicism in 1947 and join St. Mary’s Cathedral. During the 1950s, she led a weekly book club at the church. Cathedral school invited her to speak to high school girls about her conversion.

During this period, she discovered the writings of Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Worker movement, a prolific journalist and a well-known peace activist who inspired thousands of like-minded Catholics to establish homes where they lived with and served poor and homeless people. Describing Day’s influence, Baroni came to believe “you had to follow your conscience, no matter how difficult it was.” The two women soon developed an active correspondence that lasted until Day’s death in 1980. Day, who was 27 years older, occasionally visited Marge in Natchez. Marge, in turn, kept Day abreast of the Southern civil rights struggle.

A major turning point in Marge’s life occurred in 1957, while she was attending a local piano concert. Like all such public events in Natchez at the time, the concert was segregated. As she later wrote:

“The fact that (concerts and plays) were segregated became too much for me. What was I doing there? How could I justify my belief in the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man if I had no qualms about enjoying privilege because of the color of my skin?”

Within a few years, she quit her job as the first female editor of the Natchez Democrat, where she wrote a column on cultural and theater events, because she was no longer willing to attend segregated affairs.

“The thing is, it was perfectly acceptable for white people to sit down and talk about how black people were mistreated, so long as one didn’t do anything about it, so long as one didn’t attempt to change it,” she later recounted. “You could deplore it. You could be upset about it. You could say it was wrong. You could point to the Bible. You could read the Bible and study your religion, but you couldn’t practice it.”

Stepping up her activism

By the early 1960s, she was deeply immersed in the civil rights movement, just as the Ku Klux Klan, which had a large presence in Natchez, began terrorizing activists fighting for racial justice. In 1963, Marge volunteered with Natchez’s Freedom Campaign, which challenged the segregated Democratic Party. This effort led to Freedom Summer in 1964, as college students and others from around the country came to Mississippi to help the struggle for voting rights and desegregation.

Marge stepped up her activism. She brought supplies to Natchez’s Freedom Schools, a cornerstone of the movement’s efforts to mobilize Black citizens. She opened her house to Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee activists to meet and lodge – a risky undertaking.

“After a year of Klan-related beatings, arsons and murders on both sides of the Mississippi River in 1964,” wrote Stanley Nelson, former editor of the Concordia Sentinel and author of several books on unsolved murders of civil rights activists, Marge “begged Monsignor Thomas Fullam, pastor of St. Mary’s Cathedral in Natchez, to ‘preach about it.’” She was devastated when he refused to do so. But she credited Father Fullam with integrating Cathedral School in 1965, a year before local public schools were desegregated.

Marge reached out to Catholic clergy and lay leaders across Mississippi and other Southern states to encourage them to address issues of racial injustice and segregation within the church. She built relationships with the Black parishioners of Natchez’s Holy Family Catholic Church and its white Josephite priests, Father William Morrissey and Father William Danahy, who offered the local NAACP space to meet at the church and who joined its clandestine meetings where they discussed strategies and tactics.

Marge was one of the few white members of Natchez’s NAACP chapter and became friends with its president, George Metcalf. Through those ties, she worked to integrate Natchez’s whites-only library and the dining room at the Eola Hotel and to help register Black voters at Holy Family..

In December 1964, she participated in a sit-in in downtown Natchez as a test of the new federal Civil Rights Act, which prohibited segregation in public accommodations. She joined the six-month-long mass boycott of Natchez’s downtown stores to protest the August 1965 bombing of Metcalf’s car by segregationists (he was seriously injured) and the city’s intransigence in addressing segregation.

She attended hearings of the Civil Rights Commission. At a meeting of the liberal Mississippi Council on Human Relations held at Tougaloo College, she met Mickey Schwerner, a Freedom Summer volunteer from New York, a month before he and two others were killed by Klansmen near Philadelphia, Mississippi.

From 1967 to 1969, Marge worked with the Catholic church and civic leaders to bring funds from the federal anti-poverty program to her hometown by creating the Adams Jefferson County Improvement Corporation. As its assistant director, Marge was on the front lines of these efforts. The agency sponsored the first local Head Start program, adult literacy programs and job training programs for high school students – white and Black. Today these programs seem like common sense, but at the time, they were controversial.

In 1969, and for the next 10 years, she went to work in Fayette, 24 miles from Natchez, as an aide to Charles Evers, a civil rights leader who had been elected the first mayor of a biracial Mississippi town.

Ostracism and death threats

All these and other efforts took a personal toll on Marge and her family. They endured death threats from the KKK, including at least one bomb attempt at their home. On several occasions, shots were fired at their house, once when Louis and their son Philip were sitting on their front porch. Louis worked at the Armstrong Tire factory, a stronghold of KKK members. His fellow white workers refused to talk or socialize with him and he feared for his life. Marge was shunned by most white parishioners at St. Mary’s church, including one-time friends.

Dorothy Day encouraged Marge to persist. In one of her letters, Day praised her “energies and desires to serve the Lord” and her “love of people and interracial justice,” observing, “You have been a voice in the wilderness and a shining light to the blind!”

Although Marge was always a voracious reader, it wasn’t until she was in her 50s that she took the time to complete her formal education. In 1982 she graduated from the University of Southern Mississippi. Over the next four years, she worked as a part-time teacher in Hattiesburg while pursuing her master’s degree from USM. This gave her the opportunity to write about her journey of faith and her involvement in the civil rights movement. For years she documented her experiences in journals, essays, letters, short stories, and autobiographical writings.

Marge was diagnosed with cancer in 1981 and died in 1986. She never finished her graduate degree. Her papers, now part of the archives at the University of Mississippi, provide a chronicle of her life, thoughts and activism and the civil rights movement. Eva Walton (now Kendrick), a graduate student at Ole Miss, mined these documents, as well as interviews, to write her own master’s thesis about Marge, which she completed in 2012.

Other scholars have written about Marge and the Natchez civil rights movement. Yet she remains unheralded in her own hometown and native state, which in recent years have been confronting their own legacy of racism and celebrating those who challenged Jim Crow. This is a good time to honor Marge Baroni for her courage, integrity, and contributions to making Natchez a more humane city and Mississippi a more inclusive state. We all stand on her shoulders.

Terry Meng, a Natchez native and a graduate of its Cathedral School, is a nurse practitioner in Pasadena, California. Peter Dreier is a professor of politics at Occidental College in Los Angeles and co-author of several books, including “The 100 Greatest Americans of the 20th Century: A Social Justice Hall of Fame”.

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

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Mississippi Today

Senate panel weighs how much — or whether — to cut state taxes

Published

8 hours ago

November 4, 2024

Staff Editor

mississippitoday.org – Taylor Vance – 2024-11-04 15:42:00

A group of state senators on Monday grappled with how much to slash state taxes or if they should cut them at all, portending a major policy debate at the Capitol for next year’s legislative session.

The Senate Fiscal Policy Study Group solicited testimony from the state government‘s leading experts on budget, economic and tax policies to prepare for an almost certain intense debate in January over how much they should trim state taxes while balancing the need to fund government services.

Senate Finance Chairman Josh Harkins, a Republican from Flowood whose committee has jurisdiction over tax policy, told Mississippi Today that he wanted senators to have basic facts in front of them before they help decide next year if Mississippi should cut taxes.

“We’re getting a tax cut the next two years whether we do anything or not,” Harkins said. “I just want to make sure we have all the facts in front of people to understand we have a clear picture of how much revenue we’re bringing in.”

Mississippi is already phasing in a major tax cut. After a raucous debate in 2022, lawmakers agreed to phase in an income tax cut. In two years it will leave Mississippi with a flat 4% tax on income over $10,000, one of the lowest rates in the nation.

However, the top two legislative leaders, Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann who oversees the Senate and House Speaker Jason White, have both recently said they want legislators to consider new tax cut policies.

Hosemann, the Republican leader of the Senate, has publicly said he would like to see the state’s grocery tax, the highest of its kind in the nation, reduced, though he hasn’t specified how much of a reduction or how long it would take for the cut to be implemented.

White, a Republican from West, said last week that he would like to see the state’s 4% income tax phased out and have the state’s 7% grocery tax cut in half over time.

“We are hoping to construct a tax system that, yes, prioritizes certain needs in our state, but it also protects and rewards taxpayers,” White said last week.

But it’s difficult to collect accurate data on the state’s grocery tax, and state lawmakers must grapple with a laundry list of spending needs and obligations based on testimony from state agency leaders on Monday.

Mississippi currently has a 7% sales tax, which is applied to groceries. The state collects the tax but remits 18.5% back to cities. For many municipalities, the sales tax is a significant source of revenue.

If state lawmakers want to reduce the grocery tax without impacting cities, they could pass a new law to change the diversion amounts or appropriate enough money to make the municipalities whole.

State Revenue Commissioner Chris Graham said the Mississippi Department of Revenue, the agency in charge of collecting state taxes, does not have a mechanism in place for accurately capturing how much money cities collect in grocery taxes. This is because the tax on groceries is the same as non-grocery items.

However, Graham estimates that the state collects roughly $540 million in taxes from grocery items.

The other problem lawmakers would have in implementing significant tax cuts is a growing list of spending needs in Mississippi, a state with abject poverty, water and sewer and other infrastructure woes and some of the worst health metrics in the nation.

Representatives from the Legislative Budget Office, the group that advises lawmakers on tax and spending policy, told senators that lawmakers will also be faced with rising costs in the public employee retirement system, the Medicaid budget, public education, state employee health insurance, and state infrastructure projects.

State agencies, including the employee retirement system, also requested $751 million more for the coming budget year.

“That’s the billion dollar question, I guess,” Senate Appropriations Chairman Briggs Hopson, a Republican from Vicksburg, said. “How we’re able to fund basic government services?”

Harkins and Hopson said the committee would likely meet again before the Legislature convenes for its 2025 session on January 7.

A House committee on tax cuts has also been holding hearings, and White in September held a summit on tax policy.

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

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Mississippi Today

Already dire lack of affordable housing for low-income Mississippians on verge of worsening

Published

12 hours ago

November 4, 2024

Staff Editor

mississippitoday.org – Simeon Gates – 2024-11-04 11:00:00

In Mississippi, where there’s already a dearth of 50,000 or more affordable homes for extremely low-income residents, that number could grow in the next five years.

Housing units available under the federal Low Income Tax Credit program could lose their affordability by 2030 –a number estimated nationwide to be 350,000 with 2,917 in Mississippi, alone; 496 in the state already have.

The federal program responsible for most of the nation’s affordable housing is expiring.

The Low Income Housing Tax Credit, introduced as part of the Tax Reform Act of 1986, provides for developers to buy, build and restore low-income housing units. Under the deal, the housing only needs to stay low-rent for 30 years. Construction began in the early 1990s.

Some LIHTC housing will remain affordable due to other subsidies, nonprofits, state law and individual landlords.

“I think the low-income housing tax credit has done everything that it can to address the need for affordable housing around the state,” said Scott Spivey, executive director of the Mississippi Housing Corporation, a state office that administers the program and works with the state government and those in the affordable housing industry to create and support affordable housing

Spivey supports the proposed Affordable Housing Credit and Improvement Act, a federal bill that would expand upon the low-income housing tax credit in several ways, including giving developers more credit for certain projects for low-income households and changing tenant eligibility rules.

The bill was introduced in the House and the Senate last session, and is co-sponsored by Mississippi Sens. Cindy Hyde-Smith and Roger Wicker and in the House by Reps. Mike Ezell, and Michael Guest. As of this spring, both bills are in committee.

While housing has become a major issue for Americans, getting legislation passed has been challenging. “Everybody knows that housing is an issue, but it gets caught up with everything else…and it kind of gets lost in the shuffle,” said Spivey.

This issue is especially important in Mississippi, where demand for housing is high across all incomes.

“All the market studies that we see that come with the applications tell us that there’s a huge need for affordable housing across the state at all the income bands” said Spivey.

According to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, almost a third of Mississippi renters are extremely low income; 65% of them are severely cost burdened, meaning they spent more than half their income on rent. The majority of these households are seniors, disabled people, single caregivers of young children, people enrolled in school, or other.

Director of Housing Law at the Mississippi Center for Justice, Ashley Richardson said housing problems worsened after Mississippi stopped participating in the federal rental assistance program in 2022.

MCJ’s work on housing includes a statewide eviction hotline, investigating instances of housing discrimination, and more.

Richardson praised the LIHTC program, but echoed Spivey’s concerns. “Even with the affordable housing we do have in Mississippi, we are still at a lack,” she said.

The National Housing Preservation Database estimates Mississippi is short 52,421 affordable and available rental homes for low-income people. The National Low Income Housing Coalition puts the figure at 49,478.

Richardson wants the state to deal with issues like providing more tenant protections and rental assistance. There’s also a need to improve homes that are rundown or in poor condition, and many housing nonprofits are running out of funding.

Spivey said people should talk to their property managers and learn about their rights. MHC’s website has resources for homebuyers and renters.

As the housing crisis goes on, there are options for people struggling to find and keep affordable housing and an effort to take action at the federal and state levels.

Some aspiring low-income homeowners may qualify for Habitat for Humanity, a program that builds homes for families in need. Families who qualify work on the homes alongside volunteers, pay an affordable mortgage and receive financial literacy education.

New applicants must meet the qualifications, including a good debt-income ratio, 125 hours of sweat equity and taking classes on financial literacy, home repairs, and being a good neighbor.

Merrill McKewen, executive director for Habitat for Humanity Mississippi Capital Area, emphasized the importance of housing to individuals and communities.

“There are untold studies that have been done that, you’ve gotta have a safe, decent, affordable place to live. The children are better students, the parents are better employees…it grounds you to a community that you can contribute to and be a part of. It is the American dream, to own a home, which is what we’re all about,” she said.

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

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Mississippi Today

Mississippi Election 2024: What will be on Tuesday’s ballot?

Published

13 hours ago

November 4, 2024

Staff Editor

mississippitoday.org – Bobby Harrison – 2024-11-04 10:00:00

Mississippians will go to the polls on Tuesday, Nov. 5, to elect federal and state judicial posts and some local offices, such as for election commissioners and school board members.

Polls will be open from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. on Tuesday. To find your polling place, use the secretary of state’s locator, or call your local county circuit clerk.

The following is a list of the candidates for federal and judicial posts with brief bios:

President

Kamala Harris, current vice president and Democratic nominee for president. Her running mate is Tim Walz.
Donald Trump, former president and current Republican nominee. His running mate is J.D. Vance.
Robert Kennedy Jr. remains on the ballot in Mississippi even though he has endorsed Trump. His running mate is Nicole Shanahan.
Jill Stein is the Green Party candidate. Her running mate is Rudolph Ware.
Five other candidates will be on the Mississippi ballot for president. For a complete list of presidential candidates, see the sample ballot.

U.S. Senate

Ty Pinkins is the Democratic nominee. He is a Rolling Fork native and attorney, representing, among other clients, those alleging unfair working conditions. He served 21 years in the U.S. Army, including combat stints, other overseas deployment and posts in the White House,
Roger Wicker is the Republican incumbent senator. He resides in Tupelo and has served in the U.S. Senate since late 2007 after first being appointed to fill a vacancy by then-Gov. Haley Barbour. He was elected to the post in 2008. He previously served in the U.S. House and as a state senator. He is an attorney and served in the United States Air Force.

House District 1

Dianne Black is the Democratic nominee. She is a small business owner in Olive Branch in DeSoto County.
Trent Kelly is the Republican incumbent. He was elected to the post in a special election in 2015. He previously served as a district attorney and before then as a prosecuting attorney for the city of Tupelo. He is a major general in the Mississippi Army National Guard.

House District 2

Bennie Thompson is the Democratic incumbent. He was first elected to the post in 1993. Before then, he served as a Hinds County supervisor and as alderman and then as mayor of Bolton.
Ronald Eller is the Republican nominee. He grew up in West Virginia and moved to central Mississippi after retiring from the military. He is a physician assistant and business owner.

House District 3

Michael Guest is the Republican incumbent and is unopposed.

House District 4

Mike Ezell is the Republican incumbent first being elected in 2022. He previously served as Jackson County sheriff.
Craig Raybon is the Democratic nominee. Raybon is from Gulfport and began a nonprofit “focused on helping out the community as a whole.”

Central District Supreme Court

Jenifer Branning currently serves as a member of the state Senate from Neshoba County.
Byron Carter is a Hinds County attorney and previously served as a law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Armis Hawkins.
James Kitchens is the incumbent. He has served on the state’s highest court since 2008.
Ceola James previously served on the Court of Appeals.
Abby Gale Robinson is a Jackson attorney. She previously was a commercial builder.

Southern District Supreme Court

Dawn Beam is the incumbent, having been first appointed in 2016 by then-Gov. Phil Bryant and later winning election to the post. She is a former chancellor for the Hattiesburg area.
David Sullivan is an attorney in Harrison County and has been a municipal judge in D’Iberville since 2019. His father, Michael, previously served on the state Supreme Court.

Northern District Supreme Court seats

Robert Chamberlin of DeSoto County is unopposed.
James Maxwell of Lafayette County is unopposed.

Court of Appeals 5^th District seat

Ian Baker is an assistant district attorney in Harrison County.
Jennifer Schloegel is a Chancery Court judge for Harrison, Hancock and Stone counties.
Amy St. Pe is a Municipal Court judge in Gautier.