Nov. 21, 1934

Ella Fitzgerald, the “Queen of Jazz,” made her debut at the Apollo Theater in Harlem. She had planned to go on stage and dance for Amateur Night, but when the Edwards Sisters danced before her, she decided to sing instead. That break led to others, and she became a sensation after a song she co-wrote, “A-Tisket, A-Tasket,” became a major hit in 1938. 

She battled racism, ordered by Pan-Am to leave their flight to Australia. Despite missing two concerts there, she went on to set a new box office record in Australia. She helped to break racial barriers, refusing to perform before segregated audiences. The NAACP awarded her the Equal Justice Award and the American Black Achievement Award. 

Fitzgerald became the first Black woman to win a Grammy. In her music, she innovated with scat singing, sang be-bop, jazz and even gospel hymns. She performed with her own orchestra, the Benny Goodman Orchestra, Duke Ellington and Count Basie, and her Song Book series became a huge critical and commercial success. 

She performed in Hollywood films, and her most memorable take on television came when her voice shattered a glass. When the tape was played back, her voice broke another glass, and the ad asked, “Is it live, or is it Memorex?” 

By the time she died in 1996, she had won 13 Grammy Awards, the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, the George and Ira Gershwin Award for Lifetime Musical Achievement, the National Medal of Arts and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. 

Mattel has now designed a doll after her, part of the Barbie Inspiring Women Series, which “pays tribute to incredible heroines of their time — courageous women who took risks, changed rules and paved the way for generations to dream bigger than ever before.”

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

JXN Water said Wednesday it’s confirmed no lead in about 43% of the city’s service lines, and that it will continue to investigate the remaining lines as it complies with recently updated guidelines from the Environmental Protection Agency.

A representative for Jacobs, a contractor that manages the city’s drinking water plants for JXN Water, told Mississippi Today their goal is to fully determine whether there’s lead in any of the city’s nearly 75,000 service lines by 2027.

Yvonne Mazza-Lappi, water compliance manager for Jacobs, said JXN Water has so far identified nearly 14,000 galvanized iron service lines, or about 18% of the total amount. For each of those lines, she explained, JXN Water will have to find out if they were ever downstream of a lead service line, as lead particles can attach to the surface of those pipes according to the EPA. If so, JXN Water will have to replace the galvanized line.

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There are another roughly 29,000 service lines, she added, where the material is unknown.

“With this inventory, the EPA requires certain validation,” Mazza-Lappi said. “So we can’t just assume that someone’s service line is non-lead. We have to prove that. We use historical records. If we don’t have enough of those, we do build inspections.”

The EPA in October finalized a revision to its Lead and Copper rule, requiring public water systems around the country to find and replace lead service lines over the next decade.

JXN Water released a mapping tool where residents can look up their address and see the latest information for their service line, both on the customer side and the utility side. JXN Water spokesperson Aisha Carson said the utility will mail notices this week to residents that fall in the “unknown” or “galvanized” categories.

Mazza-Lappi said that so far, JXN Water has found just four lead service lines in the city, and that it replaced those lines earlier this year. She said they also offered those residents filters and will do follow-up sampling in January to make sure their water meets federal standards.

While there are still tens of thousands of lines to examine to make sure there’s no lead present, Mazza-Lappi said that their predictive modeling suggests there’s no widespread presence.

In the notices JXN Water is mailing to customers with galvanized lines or lines with unknown materials, the utility lists a number of ways to reduce the risk of lead contamination, such as letting the tap run before drinking, using a filter, or cleaning faucet screens and aerators.

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

A federal appeals court has ruled, again, that members of Jackson’s airport authority can’t sue over a state takeover of the city’s airport.

The court overruled a lower federal court decision, and ordered it to dismiss members of the airport authority in a lawsuit to block a state takeover of the Jackson-Medgar Wiley Evers International Airport.

“For the fourth time, Mississippi state legislators appeal a district court order compelling discovery in an eight-year-old dispute over control of the Jackson-Medgar Evers International Airport,” Judge Edith Jones wrote in the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals opinion issued Tuesday. “For numerous reasons that have percolated throughout this litigation, we conclude that the current plaintiffs, members of the Jackson Municipal Airport Authority, lack … standing to sue. Groundhog Day has come to an end. Accordingly, we vacate the order of the district court and remand with instructions to dismiss.”

Jackson’s mayor and city council remain as plaintiffs, and the authority members could appeal Tuesday’s order, but the federal appeals court has appeared to make clear it doesn’t believe the challenge should be in federal court.

“This suit is nothing more than a political dispute between state and local governments over control of an airport and the land around it,” the court wrote Tuesday. “One side has dragged that fight into federal court by tricking it out in equal protection colors. That won’t fly.”

The state Legislature in 2016 passed a measure that would abolish the Jackson Municipal Airport Authority and replace it with a regional authority with members from the cirt of Jackson and Madison and Rankin counties. Currently, the Jackson mayor and council appoint JMAA’s members.

Under the new regional authority, the governor would appoint five members including one each from lists supplied by the Jackson City Council, Madison supervisors and Rankin supervisors. The lieutenant governor would appoint one and the mayor of Jackson one. The adjutant general of the Mississippi National Guard and director of the Mississippi Development Authority would also serve on the nine-member authority.

City leaders and Jackson’s lawmakers have opposed the move, and the city and authority in its litigation claimed the move was racially motivated by a group of white lawmakers and violated Jackson citizens’ voting rights. They point out state leaders are treating Jackson differently — an argument city leaders have also made on the state’s takeover of policing and courts in the downtown Jackson area and efforts by lawmakers to take over the city’s troubled water system, which is now under federal control.

U.S. District Judge Carlton Reeves has ruled in favor of the city and JMAA several times in the airport litigation, but then has been reversed by the Fifth Circuit.

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