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.

A group of Mississippians who were stripped of their voting rights is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to strike a provision of the state Constitution that allows denial of suffrage to people convicted of some felonies. 

The Mississippi residents, through attorneys with the Southern Poverty Law Center and private law firm Simpson Thacher and Bartlett, filed an appeal Friday with the nation’s highest court. They argue that the provision of the state Constitution that strips voting rights for life violates the U.S. Constitution’s Eighth Amendment protection against cruel and unusual punishment. 

Jonathan Youngwood, global co-chair of Simpson Thacher’s litigation department, told Mississippi Today in a statement that after filing the petition with the Court, he remains confident in the case, and the firm’s clients remain committed to ensuring their right to vote is restored. 

“The right to vote is an important cornerstone of democracy and denying broad groups of citizens, such as those who have completed their sentences for criminal convictions, deserve the full right of participating in our representative government,” Youngwood said. 

Under the Mississippi Constitution, people convicted of a list of 10 felonies lose their voting rights for life. Opinions from the Mississippi Attorney General’s Office have since expanded the list of disenfranchising felonies to 24. 

The practice of stripping voting rights away from people for life is a holdover from the Jim Crow-era. The framers of the 1890 Constitution believed Black people were most likely to commit those crimes. 

About 55,000 names are on the Secretary of State’s voter disenfranchisement list as of March 19. The list, provided to Mississippi Today and the Marshall Project-Jackson through a public records request, goes back to 1992 for felony convictions in state court. 

The only way for someone to have their suffrage restored is to convince lawmakers to restore it, but the process is arduous. It necessitates a two-thirds majority vote in both legislative chambers, the highest vote threshold in the state Capitol.

Governors can restore suffrage through issuing pardons, but no governor has issued one since the waning days of Gov. Haley Barbour’s administration in 2012. 

In August, a three-judge panel of the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, in a 2-1 decision, agreed with the plaintiffs and found that the lifetime voting ban violates the U.S. Constitution. But the full court, known for its conservative rulings, overturned the decision of the three-judge panel.

Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch’s office is defending the state in the appeal, and it has not yet responded to the plaintiff’s petition with the U.S. Supreme Court. It’s unclear when the Court will issue a ruling on the petition.  

While the litigation is pending, state lawmakers have attempted to reform the state’s felony suffrage process. 

The GOP-controlled house last year passed a bipartisan proposal to automatically restore suffrage to people convicted of nonviolent disenfranchising felonies after they’ve completed the terms of their sentence. 

The legislation, however, died in the 52-member Senate because Senate Constitution Chairwoman Angela Burks Hill, R-Picayune, declined to bring the bill up for a vote before a deadline. House leadership is expected to address the issue again during its 2025 session. 

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.