A former Jackson State University administrator’s sex discrimination lawsuit against Mississippi’s public university governing board will proceed, a federal judge ruled in a lengthy order this week. 

Though a majority of Debra Mays-Jackson’s claims against the Institutions of Higher Learning Board of Trustees were dismissed, the Southern District of Mississippi allowed two to survive — one against the IHL and the other against the individual trustees. 

For now, the lawsuit’s playing field is winnowed to the claim that IHL discriminated against Mays-Jackson, a former vice president at Jackson State, when trustees did not interview her after she applied to the university’s top post in 2023. 

The recent order puts Mays-Jackson and her attorney, Lisa Ross, a JSU alumnus, one step closer to taking depositions and conducting discovery about the IHL’s presidential search process and decisionmaking. 

Ross filed the lawsuit in November 2023, the same day the board hired from within, elevating Marcus Thompson from IHL deputy commissioner to the president of Mississippi’s largest historically Black university, even though Thompson was not one of the 79 applicants to the position. 

“Without this sex discrimination lawsuit, the defendants would continue to falsely claim the males they have selected as President of JSU were clearly better qualified than the females who were rejected on account of their sex,” Ross said in a statement. 

An IHL spokesperson said the board’s policy is not to comment on pending litigation. 

The court dismissed one of Mays-Jackson’s claims over the board’s 2020 hiring of Thomas Hudson, largely because Mays-Jackson never applied for the job. 

But Mays-Jackson argued she was not afforded the opportunity to apply because the board activated a policy that permitted trustees to suspend a presidential search and hire anyone known to the board, regardless of whether that person applied for the role. 

Recently, the board had used that policy to hire President Tracy Cook at Alcorn State University, President Joe Paul at the University of Southern Mississippi and Chancellor Glenn Boyce at the University of Mississippi. 

In her suit, Mays-Jackson alleged the IHL has never used this policy to elevate a woman to lead one of Mississippi’s eight public universities. IHL did not confirm or deny that allegation in response to a question from Mississippi Today. 

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

Jan. 10, 1966 

Vernon Dahmer Sr. defended his family from a KKK attack at their home near Hattiesburg, Mississippi. 

The farmer, businessman, entrepreneur and NAACP leader had dedicated his life to voting rights. Upset by his work on voting rights in the African-American community, Klansmen firebombed the family’s home while they were sleeping and began firing their guns into the home. Dahmer grabbed his shotgun and fired back at Klansmen, enabling his family to escape safely out a back window. Flames from the blaze seared his lungs, and he died a day later. 

On his deathbed, a reporter pressed him on why he kept pushing for voting rights for Black Americans. Dahmer explained, “If you don’t vote, you don’t count.” 

The case led to a few convictions, but the Klansmen didn’t stay behind bars long because governors pardoned them, commuted their sentences or released them early. Most of the killers walked free, including Imperial Wizard Sam Bowers, who ordered the attack. 

Bowers was finally convicted in 1998 and sentenced to life in prison, where he died in 2006. 

In 2020, county officials erected a statue in honor of Vernon Dahmer outside the same courthouse where Black residents once protested for the right to vote. Sculptor Ben Watts and artist Vixon Sullivan worked together on the statue.

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

They called him The Space Ghost. Jearld Baylis — Jearld, not Jerald or Gerald — was the best defensive football player I ever saw at Southern Miss, and I’ve seen them all since the early 1960s.

Baylis, who died recently at the age of 62, played nose tackle with the emphasis on “tackle.” He made about a jillion tackles, many behind the scrimmage line, in his four years (1980-83) as a starter at USM after three years as a starter and star at Jackson Callaway.

When Southern Miss ended Bear Bryant’s 59-game home winning streak at Alabama in 1982, Baylis led the defensive charge with 18 tackles. The remarkable Reggie Collier, the quarterback, got most of the headlines during those golden years of USM football, but Baylis was every bit as important to the Golden Eagles’ success.

The truth is, despite the lavish praise of opposing coaches such as Bryant at Alabama, Bobby Bowden at Florida State, Pat Dye at Auburn and Emory Bellard at Mississippi State, Baylis never got the credit he deserved.

There are so many stories. Here’s one from the late, great Kent Hull, the Mississippi State center who became one of the best NFL players at his position and helped the Buffalo Bills to four Super Bowls:

It was at one of those Super Bowls — the 1992 game in Minneapolis — when Hull and I talked about his three head-to-head battles with Baylis when they were both in college. Hull, you should know, was always brutally honest, which endeared him to sports writers and sportscasters everywhere.

Hull said Baylis was the best he ever went against. “Block him?” Hull said rhetorically at one point. “Hell, most times I couldn’t touch him. He was just so quick. You had to double-team him, and sometimes that didn’t work either.”

John Bond was the quarterback of those fantastic Mississippi State teams who won so many games but could never beat Southern Miss. He remembers Jearld Baylis the way most of us remember our worst nightmares.

“He was a stud,” Bond said upon learning of Baylis’s death. “He was their best dude on that side of the ball, a relentless badass.”

In many ways Baylis was a football unicorn. Most nose tackles are monsters, whose job it is to occupy the center and guards and keep them from blocking the linebackers. Not Baylis. He was undersized, 6-feet tall and 230 pounds tops, and he didn’t just clear the way for linebackers. He did it himself.

“Jearld was just so fast, so quick, so strong,” said Steve Carmody, USM’s center back then and a Jackson lawyer now. Carmody, son of then-USM head coach Jim Carmody, went against Baylis most days in practice and says he never faced a better player on game day.

“Jearld could run with the halfbacks and wide receivers. I don’t know what his 40-time was but he was really, really fast. His first step was as quick as anybody at any position,” Steve Carmody said.

No, Carmody said, he has no idea where Baylis got his nickname, The Space Ghost, but he said, “It could have been because trying to block him was like trying to block a ghost. Poof! He was gone, already past you.”

Reggie Collier, who now works as a banker in Hattiesburg, was a year ahead of Baylis at USM. 

“Jearld was the first of those really big name players that everybody wanted that came to Southern,” Collier said. “He wasn’t a project or a diamond in the rough like I was. He was the man. He was the best high school player in the state when we signed him. Everybody knew who he was when he got here, the No. 1 recruit in Mississippi.”

Collier remembers an early season practice when he was a sophomore and Baylis had just arrived on campus. “We’re scrimmaging, and I am running the option going to my right just turning up the field,” Collier said. “Then, somebody latches onto me from behind, and I am thinking who the hell is that. People didn’t usually get me from behind. Of course, it was Jearld. From day one, he was special.

“I tell people this all the time. We won a whole lot of games back then, beat a lot of really great teams that nobody but us thought we could beat. I always get a lot of credit for that, but Gearld deserves as much credit as anyone. He was as important as anyone. He was the anchor of that defense and, man, we played great defense.”

Because of his size, NFL teams passed on Baylis. He played first in the USFL, then went to Canada and became one of the great defensive players in the history of the Canadian Football League. He was All-Canadian Football League four times, the defensive player of the year on a championship team once.

For whatever reason, Baylis rarely returned to Mississippi, living in Canada, in Baltimore, in Washington state and Oregon in his later years. Details of his death are sketchy, but he had suffered from bouts with pneumonia preceding his death.

Said Don Horn, his teammate at both Callaway and Southern Miss, “Unfortunately, I had lost touch with Jearld, but I’ll never forget him. I promise you this, those of us who played with him — or against him — will never forget Jearld Baylis.”

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