March 1, 1956

The University of Alabama expelled Autherine Lucy, the first Black student ever admitted. Thousands of students rioted.

Lucy charged in court that university officials had been complicit in allowing the disorder, as a means of avoiding compliance with the court order. The trustees expelled her for making such “outrageous, false and baseless accusations.” 

In 1980, the university overturned her expulsion, and a dozen years later, she earned a master’s degree in elementary education at the university, which endowed a scholarship in her name. The institution also hung a portrait with this inscription: “Her initiative and courage won the right for students of all races to attend the university.” 

When the university honored her with a monument in 2019, she looked at the huge gathering and said, “The last time I saw a crowd like this, I didn’t know what they were waiting for.” 

She told the students, “If you don’t know your history, you will forget your past.” She recalled the hate she was showered with when she enrolled and the scripture that gave her strength: “The Lord is with me; I will not fear: What can man do to me?”

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

The Littles will have a big time Saturday in Biggersville

by Rick Cleveland, Mississippi Today
February 28, 2025

To borrow from the Southeastern Conference: Basketball just means more in extreme northeast Mississippi, more commonly known as Hill Country. Never was that more evident than Friday morning at Mississippi Coliseum. In a battle of tiny town titans, the Biggersville girls came from behind to defeat Thrasher 54-47 for the Class 1A state championship in a fiercely contested, well-coached and well-played game.

When the final horn sounded, the basketball court became a sea of emotion, tears flowing seemingly everywhere: tears of joy, tears of despair. As much as the outcome meant – one way or the other to so many folks – it just had to mean more to one family. They would be the Littles of Biggersville.

Cliff Little is the Biggersville head coach. Jana Little, his wife, is an assistant coach. Lainey Jackson Little, their daughter, is a junior guard on the team. Eighteen years ago Cliff and Jana were a young married couple teaching at East Webster in Maben. Cliff was an assistant basketball coach, Jana the team’s scorekeeper. The team qualified for the State Tournament in Jackson, but Jana, six months pregnant, was diagnosed with toxemia (pregnancy-induced hypertension) and stayed home.

On March 1, 2007, Jana gave birth to a daughter, who weighed one pound, 15 ounces. “She would have fit in the palm of my hand,” Cliff Little says. 

They named her Lainey Jackson, the middle name from the name of the place they had planned to be the night Lainey Jack, as they call her, was born. The initial prognosis was grim: She might make it, she might not. Lainey Jack spent the first six weeks of her life in the hospital, mostly in an incubator. The tiny girl showed then what the folks in Biggersville have come to know – that she was a fighter.

Let’s move ahead 17 years to this time last year. The Biggersville girls with Lainey Jack as their second leading scorer and playmaker made it to the State championship semifinals against Lumberton, only to lose by a single point on two late free throws.

Cliff Little also coaches the Biggersville boys, who went on to win the 2024 state championship. So he wasn’t back in Biggersville the day after his girls were eliminated. He wasn’t in the Biggersville gym when his girls took the floor for their first practice in preparation for what occurred Friday morning at Mississippi Coliseum.. The family have rarely missed a day together since.

They certainly didn’t miss on the eighth day of May last year when, during a players-only practice, Lainey Jack went down with a horrible injury to her right knee. A torn ACL that required surgery and months and months of strenuous rehab.

How strenuous? When his daughter first began her rehab at home, Cliff would make sure a garbage can was nearby for when she would need to vomit, which was all too often. But she was determined and kept at it, day after day. We may assume that when you come into this world weighing 31 ounces, such grit comes naturally.

Said Cliff Little, “I told her back during all that rehab that when we won the state championship I was going to have the date – May 8th – inscribed on her ring.”

Lainey Jack was released to play again in December, just seven months after surgery. She is still working to recover the quickness and cutting ability she possessed prior to the injury, but it’s coming.

She was in the starting lineup Friday, a heavy brace on that right knee.. One minute into the game, she swished a 22-foot three-pointer to give Biggersville its first lead. That would be her only basket, but she scrapped and battled throughout. And, afterward, she was in the middle of the celebration, holding the cherished Gold Ball trophy.

“I worked really hard to come back, and that’s what makes this so special,” she said, before deflecting praise to her teammates, 15-year-old Sadiya Hill in particular. Hill scored 24 points to lead the Lions, while Jaylee Stafford scored 19 and pulled down 11 rebounds despite playing much of the fourth quarter with four fouls.

Stafford and Little are juniors. The gifted Hill is just a sophomore and her talented older sister, K’yana Hill is another junior. So there’s a good chance Biggersville will be back again next year. No telling how many championships the 46-year-old Cliff Little will win before he’s done. This makes seven state championships – five boys, two girls – in all for Little.

“They are all special,” Little said when asked where this latest championship ranks. “They’re all special, but this one, considering the circumstances… this one’s extra special.”

Put it this way: There will be an 18th birthday party, combined with a state championship celebration, in Biggersville Saturday.  

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

Sheldon Bray of Blue Springs said he took his wife and two sons to the “March to Save America” rally in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6, 2021, because he wanted to show his boys the importance of making their voices heard. 

“I don’t like people that complain about what’s going on, but you don’t participate and let your representative know,” Bray told Mississippi Today. Instead of “sending somebody up there to read your mind,” Bray said, people should “get involved.”

He said that in months before Jan. 6, he had worriedly watched the imposition of mask mandates and the rapid expansion of absentee voting since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

“Politicians on both sides of the aisle had told us for years that our elections are being messed with and our elections aren’t secure,” he said. “And then we get to 2020, and all of a sudden, this election was perfect.” But he “just kept getting the feeling like an investigation was off the table.”

Four years after the breach of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, Bray and others among the 13 Mississippians charged in connection with the events of that day – even those who pleaded guilty – defend their actions, which they maintain were misconstrued by the media and misunderstood by a broad swath of the public. As some Mississippians served sentences over the past three years, a community emerged around them, hailing them as patriots and political prisoners. That community now considers the pardons a sign of victory.

In all, Trump granted sweeping clemency to all of the nearly 1,600 people charged in the attack on the Capitol.

State Rep. Daryl Porter, Jr., D-Summit, called the pardons “a slap in the face to law enforcement.” 

“I think it is a slap in the face to the Constitution. I think it’s a slap in the face to this country,” Porter said. “It sends a really poor message, that if something cannot go your way, you can thus break the law and then be let go, and not face any consequences for what you’ve done.”

A Hero’s Welcome in Oxford

Bray and five other Jan. 6 defendants spoke to about 50 people in a Lafayette County chancery courtroom in Oxford on Feb. 21. 

Bray told the group there had been many times when he had to tell the stories of incarcerated Jan. 6 participants on their behalf, “but through the grace of God, I don’t have to do that tonight.”

The meeting was hosted by the Union County Republican Women’s Club, the Mississippi Conservative Coalition and My Brother’s Keeper-Oxford, a group founded in 2022 to organize letters and donations for Mississippians charged in connection with the Capitol breach. The Oxford-based group is unrelated to a nonprofit of the same name that works to reduce health disparities, as well as an Obama Foundation program that supports boys and young men of color.

Lori Richmond Cyree, the founder of My Brother’s Keeper-Oxford and lead organizer of the event, described the community that formed around Jan. 6 defendants as “the heart and soul of this country.”

Cyree said she hoped the event would foster understanding by allowing people to hear from Jan. 6 defendants in person. “I just believe that if you get people together and they can have honest conversations, wonderful things can happen,” Cyree said. 

Several speakers described their actions on Jan. 6 as part of a sea change that had shifted the country off a path they said was corrupt and authoritarian.

Mike Brock of Walls told the audience he never intended to partake in an insurrection – just to pressure Pence to delay lawmakers’ certification of the electoral vote count. Brock said he told federal agents that he felt he had no choice but to travel to Washington in January 2021.

“It’s disgraceful to all the people that have shed their blood for this country to not do nothing, not stand up and even raise a hand, to say, ‘Hey, I’m against this,’” Brock remembered telling the agents.

Brock, who was charged with obstructing and attacking law enforcement, violence on Capitol grounds and disorderly conduct, said he was pushed into a police line by “a whole football team” of running protesters after making his way from the rally to the Capitol. He was awaiting the announcement of his trial date when Trump pardoned him.

Thomas Webster of Oxford suggested that “deep state actors” used the public’s fear of the COVID-19 virus to make way for fraudulent election practices.

“Do you believe COVID was an accident?” Thomas Webster asked the attendees, some of whom responded, “No!”

“The timing of that was just unbelievable. And I believe it was intentional, designed to create that atmosphere to make everybody so afraid.”

Webster, a retired New York City police officer and Marine Corps veteran, was convicted of charges including assaulting a police officer with a dangerous weapon, a flagpole bearing the Marine Corps flag. He said that law enforcement officers outside the Capitol failed to use proper de-escalation methods and that he acted in self-defense after an officer provoked him. He was serving a 10-year prison sentence at the time of his pardon.

At the end of the event, the pardoned speakers gave Cyree and Marie Thomas, who also works with My Brother’s Keeper-Oxford, plaques engraved with Mississippi Jan. 6 defendants’ signatures. “For Love of the Forgotten,” the plaques read.

Nancy Frohn, of the Union County Republican Women’s Club, cast Trump’s second term as a new beginning for the country.

“I think God let Joe Biden go into office to let us see how bad things could really get,” said Nancy Frohn of that group.

“We have to thank God every day that he has given our country a second chance.” 

‘Every background you can think of’

The Jan. 6 defendants interviewed by Mississippi Today had a wide range of reasons why they were supporters of Trump and part of the broader “Trump community,” as Bray put it. 

Thomas Harlen Smith of Mathiston said he never voted in a presidential election until 2020, and he didn’t like Trump until he ran for president. “I thought, he’s a rich guy, you know? I’m just a poor Mississippi guy.” 

But Trump “stuck to what he said,” said Smith, and put the country’s economy first.  

Smith said Trump’s policies before the COVID pandemic benefited small businesses like his excavation and construction company. “We owe it all to Trump, whether people like that or not,” he said.

“Even during COVID,” said Smith, “I still did fine.” 

Smith was convicted of 11 charges in 2023, including assaulting a police officer with a dangerous weapon and obstructing an official proceeding. Smith said he accidentally grabbed a police officer as he tried to pull protesters out of a clash with law enforcement on the West Terrace of the Capitol. He was serving a nine-month prison sentence when Trump issued the pardons.

James McGrew of Biloxi, who served in Iraq and suffered injuries and substance dependency as a result, said he began supporting Trump because of his positions on veterans affairs and in particular, the Veteran’s Choice program, which allowed veterans to choose their healthcare providers. 

“All the VA did for me up until about 2016 was give me pills,” he said. It wasn’t until “the middle of 2016, 2017, that the VA started changing.” 

The Trump administration expanded eligibility for the program in 2017, though it was first passed in 2014 during the Obama administration.

“I supported Donald Trump just for that reason alone – that he supported me.”

McGrew pleaded guilty in 2022 to “assaulting, resisting or impeding” law enforcement officers and was sentenced to 78 months in prison.  

Some of the Jan. 6 defendants made it clear they did not consider themselves uncritical supporters of Trump. Brock said that he’s a Trump supporter at the end of the day. But “I got a lot of stuff that I could say against Trump,” he said, “that I wish he’d have done different, or would do different.” 

Brock said that although Trump is “the man of the hour,” he thinks the president doesn’t “admit any of his mistakes” and pushed COVID restrictions and vaccines too hard during his first term. 

As general principles, he believes in small government and worries about the role of money in politics.

“We don’t need the federal government to do nothing for us,” Brock said. “What we need, worse than anything, is somebody to get the federal government out of our business.”

And Brock said something needs to be done about corrupt politicians.

“They call bribing lobbying,” he said. “To me, that’s become the same thing.”

Bray said he had a distrust of billionaires, and Trump being a part of that club made him wonder whether one could really believe that he was for the people. 

He also took issue with people seeing Trump as a savior. “There’s a lot of Trump voters that are like, ‘This will fix everything. We just gotta elect Trump, and everything’s fixed.’” 

Bray was convicted in 2024 of obstructing law enforcement, and of disorderly and disruptive conduct in a restricted building. He said he used a police riot shield to part crowds in the Capitol rotunda as he and his son were trying to leave, but he denied interfering with law enforcement. He recalled complying with officers’ instructions and offering his first aid kit to an officer who appeared injured. Before the Justice Department dropped his case last month, his sentencing was scheduled for February.

Bray spoke about the importance of engaging with politics, learning about representatives, tracking how they vote, and speaking up. “You can’t just flip on the TV for one hour each day and watch whatever your favorite brand of news is, and just take that and say, ‘Okay, I’m informed’,” Bray said. 

“All the nationwide media, the legacy media companies, they portrayed us as terrorists, extremists, conspiracy theorists,” McGrew said. To a lot of people, he said, “we were monsters.” But he wants people to know that the people who participated in Jan. 6 aren’t a monolith. “We’ve had every background you can think of as part of this movement.”

Cyree believes that the way to make progress is for individuals to talk to each other directly. 

“We’ve got this groupthink that needs to stop,” Cyree said. “Groupthink sometimes goes to group hate and group misunderstanding. If you can get one person to talk to another person, they can find out they have a lot more in common that unites them, than separates them.” 

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