Mississippi Today
Mississippi arts groups scramble as Thalia Mara Hall work continue
Ripple effects continue to grow as Thalia Mara Hall’s temporary shutdown stretches into late September, Jackson arts groups adjust to keep season schedules on track and promoters eye lost opportunities and calendar dates that are slipping past.
Jackson’s premier performing arts venue was closed in early August after a weekend air–
conditioning failure and discovery of mold, sending stakeholders scrambling to secure
alternative venues or deal with cancellations. A recent state fire marshal report citing 22 fire
code violations at the building, and noting the health issues of indoor mold and human waste on its outside balcony heaped on more concern for onlookers who can only watch and wait for remediation work to begin.
The Jackson fire marshal will assist crews to address fire code issues once it is safe to return to he building, Jackson Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba said at a briefing last week. “We don’t want anyone in Thalia Mara Hall until the remediation goes forward.”
A contractor was on standby to address the balcony issue, he added, and city officials had already been looking into ways, such as appropriate fencing on the outside stairwell, to limit the area’s access by people who are unhoused and try to camp there.
“Thalia Mara Hall is going to be just fine,” Lumumba said, stressing that the 1968 structure is an aging building. “So, there’s not just a set of repairs that need to be made and then we’re in pristine condition. Once we make these repairs, I’m sure we will identify other repairs that need to be made, as an aging building necessitates,” he said.
At latest update, the city awaited proposals from new vendors and a revision from another for mold remediation. Once it starts, that work is expected to take between four and eight weeks, followed by a final inspection, clearance and certificate of occupancy. Added to the list of items to be addressed at the theater: rigging system, fire curtain and response to the fire marshal’s report.
In the meantime, loss of access deals a blow to parties that rely on the municipal building as the metro area’s best and, in some cases, only venue able to host certain productions and handle the capacity needed to make them work. Even when local nonprofit arts groups find alternative locations, changes come at a cost.
“Our ticket sales are definitely slower, and our new subscription sales are down from last year,” Mississippi Symphony Orchestra President and Executive Director Jenny Mann said. “We’re already spending about $20,000 extra that was unbudgeted, for all the moving we’re having to do.”
A frequent Thalia Mara Hall user typically logging 34 days there annually for concerts and
rehearsals, MSO embarks on its 80th anniversary season away from its home stage, and with a lot of celebratory activities postponed. MSO’s flagship Bravo series opening concert Oct. 12 is now set for Madison Central High School Auditorium in Madison and the season’s first Pops concert Oct. 26 moves to Jackson Academy Performing Arts Center.
“Those schools are really bending over backwards to accommodate us,” Mann said.
Anniversary celebrations remain on go for the Jackson Symphony League, marking 70 years, and the Mississippi Youth Symphony Orchestra, hitting the 75-year milestone. “So, we have some things in place, but it’s just not quite the grand celebration we had hoped,.” Mann said.
Thalia Mara Hall is crucial because funding is factored around that space, Ballet Mississippi
Executive Artistic Director David Keary said. “When the number of performances is lower and the number of people in the audiences is lower, your budget takes a pretty significant hit,” he said, estimating that hit around $35,000.
“The Nutcracker,” Ballet Mississippi’s biggest production of the year, is now scheduled for
Jackson Preparatory School’s Fortenberry Theatre with public performances afternoon and
evening Saturday, Dec. 7, and Sunday matinee Dec. 8.
“Ticket sales are impacted, school performances for children — we can’t do that,” Keary said. “We’re looking at about half the seat-selling capacity.”
Also out is a Friday night show, a festive evening aimed at young adults that was catching on, because of anticipated parking conflicts with another event at the school. “That hurts,” Keary said. “It really takes a hit on the momentum.”
He is still mulling how to adjust the production, particularly big scene changes in the first act, for the smaller site. “I do wish the city would expedite this,” he said of fixes to Thalia Mara Hall.
Jackson-based Ballet Magnificat! also confirmed its Christmas production for Jackson Prep, with Dec. 21 and 22 performances of “Light Has Come: The Angel’s Story” there. As a touring company, it is already more nimble with a facility change, but the different stage size may limit backdrops and the show’s multiple changes, Executive Director Keith Thibodeaux said. He hopes three performances instead of their usual two can catch the same number of audience members. “It’s a nice venue, and it’s a good place to watch a performance,” Thibodeaux said.
He is heartened by the arts community’s unified pressure for transparency and progress. “We need to get Thalia Mara Hall in order, and it’s not in order,” he said. “It’s sad that Jackson doesn’t have a nice theater like it did, and we would like to be there.”
Jackson promoter Arden Barnett had to cancel two September shows by Kevin Hart (which had already been postponed once), October’s Kansas concert and “Wheel of Fortune: Live” that was slated for November. He moved the concert by Joe Bonamassa (August) and comedian Ali Siddiq (Oct. 19) to a half-house format at the Mississippi Coliseum.
“From a pain level of 1 to 10, it’s an easy 10,” Barnett said, expressing his frustration and little faith the city can meet the timeline under discussion. “No one’s going to buy a ticket until that building is deemed 100 percent safe, and then it might be a bit of a struggle until we get a couple of shows in there. The next six months are pretty rough, even if they get it cleaned up,” he said, with the inability to confidently book shows given the necessary lead time to announce it and sell tickets. “It’s a huge snowball effect.”
Innovation Arts and Entertainment CEO Adam Epstein keeps a close eye on theater
developments with their Broadway in Jackson fall events and series on the calendar in
November and December: “Tina — The Tina Turner Musical” Nov. 19; “Cirque Dreams
Holidaze” Dec. 12; “Chicago: The Musical” Dec. 16; and “Mannheim Steamroller Christmas”
Dec. 27.
“If the city doesn’t start the remediation work in the next seven days, the entire
Broadway in Jackson series is in dire jeopardy of being canceled” through the end of this year, Epstein said.
Season tickets went on sale in August, and are down by more than half. “It’s
crickets.”
The Mississippi Book Festival did manage a switch that preserved some of its in-person student outreach and even scored an all-time high of 37,000 students with broadcast into classrooms around the state of children’s and YA author events before the Sept. 14 festival. Area schoolkids are traditionally bused to Thalia Mara Hall for the pre-fest activities.
“We had to pivot, at least three weeks out from the event,” festival director Ellen Rodgers said, adding a day to the schedule and the destination of Belhaven University for the Arts instead. Calling Thalia Mara Hall “a marquee venue we’ve come to rely on. It is such a treasure, so that was sad. We just made do. Hopefully, we’ll be able to get back there.”
The fest’s Thursday plans with Angie Thomas went virtual when weather threats prevented
school travel, but Friday’s author Kate DiCamillo event proceeded with 750 students in-person.
Changes meant fewer books went directly into kids’ hands. In-person students get a copy of
their own of the featured author’s new book; virtually participating schools receive copies for the school library.
USA International Ballet Competition Executive Director Mona Nicholas remains optimistic that the City of Jackson will get Thalia Mara Hall back up and running as soon as possible. “They’ve not let us down in the past and I don’t believe they’ll let us down this time,” she said, pointing out there was already a plan in place to replace the air-conditioning, now moved up to sooner rather than later because of the latest malfunction.
Mississippi Opera Artistic Director Jay Dean said he has been told the theater should be usable by the time its April 26 production of “The Magic Flute” needs the space.
“We are not actively trying to secure an alternate space because in truth, there is no alternate space anywhere in the Jackson metro to do this,” Dean said. “We’re kind of in the same boat as the Broadway people — if it doesn’t happen at Thalia Mara Hall, it doesn’t happen.”
Dean took exception to characterizations of the theater as an old building. “It’s not an old
building. When you look at performing arts centers around the world, it’s a very young building that has been neglected. Carnegie Hall opened in 1891, that’s an old building. The Paris Opera House opened in 1875, it’s still functioning. … These are still viable performing arts centers because they’ve been taken care of and the maintenance of those facilities has been prioritized.
“The problems at Thalia Mara Hall did not develop because the A/C was off one weekend,”
Dean said. “That’s the snowflake on the tip of the iceberg.”
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
Podcast: This Mississippi elected official wants his office off the statewide ballot
Mississippi Today’s Adam Ganucheau and Bobby Harrison discuss Insurance Commissioner Mike Chaney’s recent proposal to change his office’s traditionally elected position to an appointed one. Chaney is not the first Mississippi elected official to suggest such a bold step, and the politics of the state could make this debate a fiery one in 2025.
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.
Sept. 23, 1955
An all-white, all-male jury in the Mississippi Delta acquitted J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant of murdering Emmett Till after deliberating 67 minutes. One juror told a reporter that they wouldn’t have taken so long if they hadn’t stopped to drink a Coke.
Milam and Bryant stood before photographers, lit up cigars and kissed their wives in celebration of the not guilty verdict. Months later, the half-brothers admitted to Look magazine that they had indeed killed Till.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Editor’s note: Wright Thompson’s “The Barn” is the story of the place where Emmett Till was tortured to death in the summer of 1955, and a thousand-year history of the dirt surrounding that barn, an attempt to map the forces that drove a mob of white men to kill a Black child. It follows the curdling of the Mississippi Delta as the global cotton markets rise and then, starting in 1920, collapse. This is one story among many.
On Friday, December 14, 1923, a sharecropper outside Drew named Joe Pullum went to visit his plantation manager, Tom Sanders, to settle his annual accounts. Pullum carried a .38-caliber revolver. He’d learned to shoot fighting with the famous U.S. Army Buffalo Soldiers in the hills of Cuba during the Spanish-American War. When he returned home to farm, he lived with his family in a small tenant house east of town. The crop had been harvested and now came the tense settlement day. The only input a farmer controlled was the price of labor, a fundamental that remains true today, and for some men the temptation to cheat people with no legal recourse remained too great. Settlement day was an annual test of honesty and honor and most men failed. Pullum already suspected his boss would try to cheat him.
It had been another terrible year, the third in a row. Rain fell for nearly the entire cotton season and many farmers picked the worst crop they’d picked in decades, ten acres to make one bale in some places instead of three bales an acre. These plagues of sun and sky felt biblical. Banks wanted money or land from farmers. A third fewer bales got picked statewide and many farmers just abandoned the crop in the fields rather than pick at a loss. The jarring sign of untouched cotton in winter haunted the memories of farmers for a generation. It was the smallest crop in fifty years. That was a problem for management.
Pullum wanted his money.
Sanders said Pullum owed him fifty dollars.
They began to shout at each other. Nobody knows who drew his weapon first. Sanders and his manager, John Manning, stood on a back porch. Pullum stood on the ground below them and shot both men before fleeing east towards the Brooks plantation headquarters—the same land that in five decades would become Fannie Lou Hamer’s Freedom Farm.
Sanders was dead. John Manning was wounded. Pullum ran to his house and loaded his shotgun with the only ammunition he had: lightweight bird shot. The posse went to Pullum’s house. Pullum aimed at their heads because of the low-caliber bird shot. He shot R. L. Methvin in the face and killed him. He wounded another man, then slid into the Wild Bill Bayou and started trying to move his way north. His mother sharecropped on the next road to the north and, under threat, he tried to make it to her. A witness saw him cross Brooks Road to the west side of the bayou. The posse couldn’t follow him through the thick swamps, still uncleared, and lost his trail at an abandoned tenant house. For two hours they searched, until someone found boot tracks leading down into a drainage ditch that fed back into the Wild Bill Bayou. They spread out along both sides of the swamp. Joe Pullum hid in the thick undergrowth, careful like those ancient deer about where he put his feet, and he listened as they approached. His military training kicked in.
The posse got closer and closer. Pullum waited.
Finally they were within pistol range. Just a few yards away. He shot Kenneth Blackwood in the face, Luther Hughes in the head, and Bob Stringfellow in the side and the arm. He shot Archie Manning, a local cotton gin employee and ancestor of the famous quarterback, in the face and the throat. The posse emptied eight or ten boxes of ammunition into the swamp but hit nothing. Pullum slipped silently away from his pursuers, moving through the bayou toward his mom’s house on what is now Swope Road.
The posse called for help. The sheriff from my hometown of Clarksdale, along with a half dozen prominent citizens, arrived with two Browning machine guns. Other men went into Drew and loaded ten fifty-five-gallon drums of gasoline onto a truck, which they drove as far as it could go into the muck. A wagon pulled by a team of four mules took it the rest of the way into the swamp. At 11:30 p.m., more than fourteen hours after the first shot was fired, the mob rolled the first barrel of gasoline into the swamp. They lit it on fire and ran down shooting wildly.
J. L. Doggett, from Clarksdale, saw something move in the darkness.
“There he is!” he shouted.
Pullum shot him immediately.
Doggett was a prominent lumberman. I knew his daughter when she was an old woman. She played bridge at the Clarksdale Country Club, in one of the rooms just off the snack bar, where kids would go to get chicken tenders and lemonade to charge to their parents’ accounts.
“All my friends are dead and gone,” she’d say.
Back at the Wild Bill Bayou the mob rolled a second barrel of gasoline into the water. The machine guns fired belts of withering fire into the darkness. Pullum remained hidden and picked off his attackers whenever he got a clear shot. He had only a shotgun and a small pistol, so he had to get close to kill. The posse rolled a third barrel of gasoline into the swamp and lit it on fire. This time the fire made Pullum move and the machine guns opened up and cut him down. Pullum had killed at least four people and wounded at least nine, although local oral accounts put that number higher.
The posse threw his dying body on a horse and they took him to a waiting car, which drove him to town. They left him to die on the cotton platform on Main Street. His shotgun got displayed in downtown Drew. Some older Black citizens tell how their parents and grandparents told them that parts of Pullum’s body—multiple people mention his ear or ears—got displayed for decades after that in local shop windows as a warning.
After the lynching Drew and other nearby towns enforced a strict curfew for Blacks. More lines got drawn on the Delta, unmarked on any map but understood by everyone as law. Boundaries governed more and more moments and spaces, and crossing one of those boundaries would be Emmett Till’s fatal crime. When a local dance hall closed and the crowd didn’t clear fast enough, the local sheriff shot and killed seven or eight people, including two of the musicians.
The Franklin family left Sunflower County because of the killing. Their nine-year-old son, who would name his daughter Aretha, heard his parents talking about it. In nearby Webb, twenty-three miles from the barn and less from the spot where Pullum died, Mamie’s father packed up his family and moved to Chicago.
Pullum’s family disappeared. His great-grandson Thomas Pullum, who lives in Oakland, California, spends his free time trying to find out what happened to them, especially to Joe’s two sons, who were never heard from again. Thomas came to Mississippi for the first time in 1967 and sat with his grandmother in the shadow of the Wild Bill Bayou. In a quiet moment he asked her to tell him about Joe. He saw a cloud of “pain and misery” pass over her face as tears welled in her eyes. But then something strange happened. Something in her eyes changed, a defiant sparkle emerging, and she smiled and settled back into the pillows on her bed and started to tell the kids the story.
“I had heard of Mr. Joseph Pullum, your great-grandfather, all my life,” she began and told them the tale of a Black man who had the courage to say no, to stand up for himself, and when it became clear he would not survive, a man who decided to send as many of the enemy to hell as he could before they got him. Those stories are all that’s left, along with some newspaper clippings and a smudged death certificate, signed by the same local doctor who would later buy the barn where Emmett Till was tortured to death.
The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi by Wright Thompson will be released on Sept. 24, 2024.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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