Mississippi Today
Mississippi Today launches collaboration with JPMorganChase

The American Journalism Project today announced it is teaming up with JPMorganChase to support local news organizations throughout the country. In addition to providing funding for the American Journalism Project’s national efforts to rebuild local news, JPMorganChase is sponsoring eight nonprofit newsrooms nationwide, sharing ongoing financial health content, organizing local events, and providing expertise tailored to their unique challenges to help meet their business and operational goals. This work with JPMorganChase marks the first time the American Journalism Project is collaborating with a financial services firm.
“As the largest bank in the country, this commitment from JPMorganChase sends a powerful signal that corporations can play an integral role in rebuilding local news,” said Sarabeth Berman, CEO of the American Journalism Project. “The investment and scale will infuse resources in a thrilling new generation of news outlets that are working to ensure local news is available to all, strengthening and informing communities.”
“The evidence is clear that a thriving local news ecosystem is key to more civic engagement and a healthy democracy. JPMorganChase believes supporting sustainable models for local news is essential to meeting information needs, strengthening communities and fostering inclusive economic growth,” said Andrew Gray, Managing Director of Regional Communications for JPMorganChase. “The American Journalism Project is playing a key role in supporting the sector by growing local news from the ground up so outlets can independently thrive. We’re proud to be a part of this effort, and engage locally to identify the best opportunities where we can make an impact.”
JPMorganChase will work directly with eight local nonprofit news organizations in the American Journalism Project’s portfolio, including:
- THE CITY (New York City), a nonpartisan news outlet that serves the people of New York through independent journalism that holds the powerful to account, deepens democratic participation, and makes sense of complex issues.
- Block Club Chicago, a newsroom dedicated to delivering reliable, relevant, and nonpartisan coverage of Chicago’s diverse neighborhoods.
- Mississippi Today, which as part of the Deep South Today nonprofit news network is providing free nonpartisan news to inform communities statewide and ensure accountability from public officials.
- Cityside (San Francisco Bay Area), a nonpartisan digital news organization building community through local journalism with three local news sites, Berkeleyside, The Oaklandside and Richmondside.
- Montana Free Press, a nonpartisan, public-powered news organization dedicated to reaching and serving the information needs of all Montanans by producing in-depth news, information, and analysis.
- Signal Ohio, a statewide news organizations with newsrooms in Cleveland and Akron, committed to producing high-quality accountability journalism while working directly with residents to produce and distribute community reporting that is free to access for all
- Fort Worth Report, producing independent, factual news coverage that aims to find solutions for community issues and strengthen a diverse and rapidly growing city and home county.
- Spotlight Delaware, a community-powered, collaborative newsroom covering the impact of public policy, increasing access to information and civic engagement in historically underserved communities, and strengthening existing newsrooms throughout the state.
“Deep South Today is grateful for this opportunity to partner with JPMorganChase to further build the capacity of Mississippi Today to deliver essential local news to the communities it serves,” said Warwick Sabin, President and CEO of Deep South Today. “We look forward to working closely with them over the long term to achieve a healthier democracy and civil society through journalism that informs, engages, and inspires more Mississippians.”
AJP is the leading venture philanthropy working to address the market failure in local news. It is establishing and advancing a new generation of nonprofit local news organizations across the country. Founded in 2019, AJP is built on the evidence that robust journalism is an essential component of a healthy democracy. To date, AJP has raised $175M from local and national funders to address the local news crisis and has backed 44 news operations across 33 states.
JPMorganChase is a leading financial services firm and one of the oldest financial institutions in the U.S. It serves millions of customers, clients, and communities in 100+ global markets. This collaboration with AJP is part of the bank’s overarching efforts to support local journalism.
About the American Journalism Project
The American Journalism Project is a venture philanthropy dedicated to local news. We believe in civic journalism as a public good and are reimagining its future by building a model to finance and sustain the local news our democracy requires. We make grants to local nonprofit news organizations to build their revenue and business operations, partner with communities to launch new organizations, and meteor leaders as they grow and sustain their newsrooms. To learn more about the American Journalism Project, visit our website.
About JPMorganChase
JPMorgan Chase & Co. (NYSE: JPM) is a leading financial services firm based in the United States of America (“U.S.”), with operations worldwide. JPMorgan Chase had $4.1 trillion in assets and $337 billion in stockholders’ equity as of March 31, 2024. The Firm is a leader in investment banking, financial services for consumers and small businesses, commercial banking, financial transaction processing and asset management. Under the J.P. Morgan and Chase brands, the Firm serves millions of customers in the U.S., and many of the world’s most prominent corporate, institutional and government clients globally. Information about JPMorgan Chase & Co. is available at www.jpmorganchase.com.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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Mississippi Today
On this day in 1960
On this day in 1960
March 16, 1960

Inspired by the Greensboro sit-in a month earlier, Black students staged sit-ins at whites-only lunch counters in eight downtown stores in Savannah, Georgia.
Students Carolyn Quilloin Coleman, Joan Tyson Hall and Ernest Robinson stepped into Levy’s Department Store, shopping before entering the segregated Azalea Room. The server ordered them to leave, but they attempted to order anyway. Police hauled them to jail, where they sang, “We Shall Overcome.”
Robinson recalled looking at his hand where he scrawled the words of a Psalm: “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.”
“That verse uplifted us,” Coleman told the Savannah Morning News. “We were very familiar with what had happened to Emmett Till, a 14-year-old student who was killed in Mississippi for allegedly whistling at a White girl across the street. While we thought that we were safe in Savannah, we knew that anything could happen.”
In response, Black leaders W.W. Law, Hosea Williams and Eugene Gadsden organized a boycott of city businesses and led voter registration drives that brought changes to city government. Seven months later, Savannah repealed its ordinance requiring segregated lunch counters. The boycott continued until all facilities were desegregated in October 1963.
Months later, Martin Luther King Jr. arrived to hail the passing of Jim Crow ways. The Levy’s Department Store building now houses the Savannah College of Art and Design’s Jen Library, and a historic marker now honors the students’ fight for freedom.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
The quiet part out loud: Mississippi political leaders tolerate tax burden on poor
The quiet part out loud: Mississippi political leaders tolerate tax burden on poor
Former Gov. Haley Barbour finally said the quiet part out loud.
During a recent speech to the Mississippi State University Stennis Institute of Government and Capitol Press Corps, the former two-term governor and master communicator said taxing groceries was a good thing because everybody has to eat.
Barbour reasoned that it is important for all people to have skin in the game — to pay taxes — because “otherwise, they will vote to pave the streets with gold if they don’t have to pay anything.”
Various conservative politicians and other policymakers espouse the Barbour philosophy that a tax on food is fair and necessary. To ensure that poor people pay taxes, too, they advocate for a grocery tax that absorbs a much greater percentage of the income of low income families.
The quiet part out loud is a reference to the fact that as governor from 2004 until 2012, Barbour blocked legislative efforts to eliminate the grocery tax and offset that lost revenue, at least in part by increasing the tax on cigarettes. Barbour vetoed two bills in 2006: one to eliminate the highest in the nation 7% tax on food and the other to cut in half the levy on groceries.
Veto messages are where governors articulate their reasoning for opposing legislation. In neither veto of the grocery tax cut bills did the governor talk about “fairness.”
Instead, he talked about the fact that the combination of cutting or eliminating the grocery tax and increasing the cigarette tax was not revenue neutral. The legislation, Barbour argued at the time, would produce less revenue for the state.
He maintained that it sent the wrong message to cut taxes at a time when he was going to Congress to try to secure federal funds to help with the recovery from the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina. And in fairness to the governor, Hurricane Katrina was the seminal event of Barbour’s tenure as governor and one of the seminal events in the state’s history, and his ability to obtain those funds was paramount for the success of the Gulf Coast and south Mississippi.
So it is fair to say Katrina was heavy on Barbour’s mind in 2006 when the Legislature sent him the bills to cut the grocery tax.
It is clear, though, that Mississippi’s political leadership still has similar views as Barbour on the grocery tax. Since Barbour has left office, there have been two major reductions in the income tax: one in 2016 when Phil Bryant was governor and another in 2022 when Tate Reeves was governor.
There has been no cut in the grocery tax during that time.
This year the Senate proposes another major cut in the income tax and a reduction in the grocery tax from 7 cents to 5 cents on every dollar purchase of groceries.
There are efforts by the House leadership and Reeves to completely eliminate the income tax. In addition, the House tax cut plan essentially would trim the grocery tax to 5.5%. The House plan in most instances also would raise the sales tax on most other retail items from 7% to 8.5%.
And there are retail items other than groceries that most all people need. After all, most everyone, including poor people who might not pay an income tax, must buy clothes, household utensils and numerous other retail items that under the House plan would cost more because of the increase in the sales tax.
In short, there are many opportunities other than the grocery tax to collect taxes from poor people.
But just to recap:
• Only 12 states tax food like Mississippi does.
• Mississippi not only has the highest state-imposed tax on food, but also has one of the country’s highest sales taxes on other retail items.
• Mississippi has one of the lowest income taxes in the country and it is getting even lower thanks to the 2022 tax cut that is still being phased in.
The aforementioned tax structure results in Mississippi’s low-wage earners paying a greater percentage of their income in state and local taxes than do the state’s more affluent residents, a 2024 study found.
The report by the Institute of Taxation and Economic Policy found that Mississippi has the nation’s 19th-most regressive tax system where low-income residents are forced to pay a larger percentage of their income in taxes than the state’s wealthier citizens.
The study shows the income tax is the only component of the Mississippi tax system that requires the wealthy to pay more than the poor.
And even though Mississippi has the nation’s highest percentage of poor people, the quiet part that needs to be told louder is that our leaders are working to make the tax structure even more regressive.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
At least 3 dead in Mississippi after likely tornadoes sweep through the state
At least 3 dead in Mississippi after likely tornadoes sweep through the state
Violent tornadoes ripped through parts of the U.S. this weekend, killing at least three people in Mississippi and damaging several communities across the Magnolia State.
Two separate likely tornadoes hit Walthall County on Saturday afternoon, killing three people near Darbun along Bethlehem Loop Road, according to the county’s Emergency Management Director Royce McKee.
Walthall County Sheriff Kyle Breland told WLBT there are also injuries, collapsed homes, and trees blocking roadways in the county.
The National Weather Service in Jackson on Saturday afternoon had issued a tornado emergency for two separate tornadoes that moved through Walthall County. That rare official designation of a “large and dangerous tornado” continued into Marion, Lawrence and Jefferson Davis counties. Numerous other tornado warnings were issued before storms cleared out of the state by Saturday late afternoon.
Before sunrise early Saturday morning, a likely tornado ripped through the Elliott community in Grenada County, destroying several homes and damaging other buildings. No fatalities were reported in that storm.
“All of a sudden, it got like a freight train,” Robert Holman told FOX Weather of the Elliott storm. “Then all of a sudden, we just heard stuff just falling all on the house.”
The storms knocked out power to about 25,000 people across the state.
Though Mississippi was in the Saturday bullseye for the tornado outbreak, the same storm system affected much of the U.S. over the weekend.
The number of fatalities increased after the Kansas Highway Patrol reported eight people died in a highway pileup caused by a dust storm in Sherman County Friday. At least 50 vehicles were involved.
Missouri recorded more fatalities than any other state as it withstood scattered twisters overnight that killed at least 12 people, authorities said. The deaths included a man who was killed after a tornado ripped apart his home.
“It was unrecognizable as a home. Just a debris field,” said Coroner Jim Akers of Butler County, describing the scene that confronted rescuers. “The floor was upside down. We were walking on walls.”
Dakota Henderson said he and others rescuing people trapped in their homes Friday night found five dead bodies scattered in the debris outside what remained of his aunt’s house in hard-hit Wayne County, Missouri.
“It was a very rough deal last night,” he said Saturday, surrounded by uprooted trees and splintered homes. “It’s really disturbing for what happened to the people, the casualties last night.”
Henderson said they rescued his aunt from a bedroom that was the only room left standing in her house, taking her out through a window. They also carried out a man who had a broken arm and leg.
Officials in Arkansas said three people died in Independence County and 29 others were injured across eight counties as storms passed through the state.
“We have teams out surveying the damage from last night’s tornadoes and have first responders on the ground to assist,” Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders said on X.
She and Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp declared states of emergency. Kemp said he was making the declaration in anticipation of severe weather moving in later Saturday.
On Friday, meanwhile, authorities said three people were killed in car crashes during a dust storm in Amarillo in the Texas Panhandle.
Tornadoes hit amid storm outbreak
The Storm Prediction Center said fast-moving storms could spawn twisters and hail as large as baseballs on Saturday, but the greatest threat would come from winds near or exceeding hurricane force, with gusts of 100 miles per hour possible.
Significant tornadoes continued to hit Saturday. The regions at highest risk stretch from eastern Louisiana and Mississippi through Alabama, western Georgia and the Florida panhandle, the center said.
Bailey Dillon, 24, and her fiance, Caleb Barnes, watched a massive tornado from their front porch in Tylertown, Mississippi, about half a mile (0.8 km) away as it struck an area near Paradise Ranch RV Park.
They drove over afterward to see if anyone needed help and recorded a video depicting snapped trees, leveled buildings and overturned vehicles.
“The amount of damage was catastrophic,” Dillon said. “It was a large amount of cabins, RVs, campers that were just flipped over — everything was destroyed.”
Paradise Ranch reported on Facebook that all its staff and guests were safe and accounted for, but Dillon said the damage extended beyond the ranch itself.
“Homes and everything were destroyed all around it,” she said. “Schools and buildings are just completely gone.”
Some of the imagery from the extreme weather has gone viral.
Tad Peters and his dad, Richard Peters, had pulled over to fuel up their pickup truck in Rolla, Missouri, Friday night when they heard tornado sirens and saw other motorists flee the interstate to park.
“Whoa, is this coming? Oh, it’s here. It’s here,” Tad Peters can be heard saying on a video. “Look at all that debris. Ohhh. My God, we are in a torn …”
His father then rolled up the truck window. The two were headed to Indiana for a weightlifting competition but decided to turn around and head back home to Norman, Oklahoma, about six hours away, where they encountered wildfires.
Wildfires elsewhere in the Southern Plains threatened to spread rapidly amid warm, dry weather and strong winds in Texas, Kansas, Missouri and New Mexico.
A blaze in Roberts County, Texas, northeast of Amarillo, quickly blew up from less than a square mile (about 2 square kilometers) to an estimated 32.8 square miles (85 square kilometers), the Texas A&M University Forest Service said on X. Crews stopped its advance by Friday evening.
About 60 miles (90 kilometers) to the south, another fire grew to about 3.9 square miles (10 square kilometers) before its advance was halted in the afternoon.
High winds also knocked out power to more than 200,000 homes and businesses in Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana and Michigan, according the website poweroutage.us.
Extreme weather encompasses a zone of 100 million people
The deaths came as a massive storm system moving across the country unleashed winds that triggered deadly dust storms and fanned more than 100 wildfires.
Extreme weather conditions were forecast to affect an area home to more than 100 million people. Winds gusting up to 80 mph (130 kph) were predicted from the Canadian border to Texas, threatening blizzard conditions in colder northern areas and wildfire risk in warmer, drier places to the south.
The National Weather Service issued blizzard warnings for parts of far western Minnesota and far eastern South Dakota starting early Saturday. Snow accumulations of 3 to 6 inches (7.6 to 15.2 centimeters) were expected, with up to a foot (30 centimeters) possible.
Winds gusting to 60 mph (97 kph) were expected to cause whiteout conditions.
Evacuations were ordered in some Oklahoma communities as more than 130 fires were reported across the state. Nearly 300 homes were damaged or destroyed. Gov. Kevin Stitt said at a Saturday news conference that some 266 square miles (689 square kilometers) had burned in his state.
The State Patrol said winds were so strong that they toppled several tractor-trailers.
Experts said it’s not unusual to see such weather extremes in March.
Mississippi Today editors contributed to this Associated Press report. Bruce Shipkowski reported from Toms River, New Jersey. Julie Walker reported from New York. Rebecca Reynolds contributed from Louisville, Kentucky. Jeff Roberson in Wayne County, Missouri, Eugene Johnson in Seattle and Janie Har in San Francisco contributed.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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