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Q&A with Rep. Zakiya Summers on Right to Contraception Act

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Note: This Q&A first published in Mississippi Today’s InformHer newsletter. Subscribe to our free women and girls newsletter to read stories like this monthly.

Rep. Zakiya Summers, D-Jackson, is a second-term lawmaker who has been outspoken on the need for Medicaid expansion and on a number of women’s health issues. Summers authored House Bill 1154 this session to ensure access to contraception.

After the fall of Roe v. Wade in June of last year, the federal constitutional right to contraception became a topic of national discussion. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas called on the Supreme Court to review Griswold v. Connecticut, the landmark decision in which the court ruled that married couples have the right to access contraception.

Soon after, 195 Republican members of the U.S. Congress, including every Mississippi Republican in the House, voted against the “Right to Contraception Act,” which would have codified the right to contraception under federal law. Since then, some state legislatures have introduced bills to restrict access to contraceptives or allowed health providers to refuse to provide or cover contraception.

The Dobbs ruling made access to contraception more critical in Mississippi, which has among the country’s highest rates of unplanned pregnancy and maternal mortality and the highest rate of infant mortality.

Gov. Tate Reeves has been unclear about his stance on contraception, refusing to rule out contraceptive bans or define what he considers contraception versus “abortion-inducing” pills and devices.

Mississippi Today spoke with Summers hours before the House passed a Medicaid expansion bill and the day before a presumptive eligibility bill, co-authored by Summers, was sent to the governor for approval.

Editor’s note: This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.

Mississippi Today: Can you tell us a little bit about yourself? What have you been focused on in past sessions and what’s on your agenda this session?

Zakiya Summers: I am Zakiya Summers. I serve as state representative for House District 68, which covers Hinds and Rankin counties. I’m in my second term, so this is my fifth session. The first term was a bit of a learning curve even though I had been a part of the policy advocacy table for a number of years, it’s different when you’re in the belly of the beast. I really prioritized five issue areas: education, election reform, increasing access to health care, infrastructure and economic development. We were pretty successful during the first term – we got a few things passed through our work with colleagues across the aisle.

My proudest moment has been to be in a position where I was able to cast my vote to take down the Confederate flag and put up a new flag. It was very personal for me because the flag was a very traumatizing symbol, even for my husband. I was honored and privileged to be able to do that after many, many years, decades, of a lot of different people who were working on that issue for a long time.

Another bill that I’m really proud of is a law that now implements computer science curriculum in K-12 education. I thought that was extremely important because I understand that in order for us to do some of the things that Gov. Reeves talked about in his State of the State around really helping to build wealth and prosperity in the state of Mississippi, we have to prepare young people for the jobs of the future. And I know that jobs of the future will be heavily technology-based. I mean, we saw that in the huge economic development deal that we did at the beginning of the session with Amazon web services.

This year, I’m pushing the Right to Contraception Act. I’m also pushing a bill called the Crown Act which would prohibit hair discrimination in schools and I think it’s gaining some momentum.

MT: Can you tell us a little bit about the story behind the Right to Contraception Act?

ZS: The Right to Contraception Act is really an effort to be proactive and to raise the bar, elevate the message around preventative health. We’ve received so many dismal reports from health experts, from our medical health officer, from out chief health officer about the really negative, unfortunate health outcomes and health disparities we have in the state of Mississippi. Mississippi is 50th on the list in the entire country with those health disparities. And we know that when families have access to the things they need they can make the best decisions for their lives and for their families and for their future. And so we see the Right to Contraception Act as an opportunity for Mississippians to have unfettered access to contraception if they would like to have that and it will help them to make the best decisions for them.

MT: It might seem far-fetched to some people that Mississippians could lose access to contraception. But we’ve seen with recent events – IVF in Alabama, for instance – that liberties we take for granted aren’t always guaranteed. Why is it important in the Legislature to predict what may happen down the road and get ahead of it with policies and laws that preserve the liberties we take for granted?

ZS: It’s so important, especially when you see what’s happening across the landscape. We never would have thought that Roe v. Wade would be rolled back but elections have consequences. And when you don’t vote or you don’t vote for your best interests, you end up getting people in positions that can make these appointments to these courts and they end up rolling back precedents that we’ve had for decades. And it becomes more than just partisan politics – it becomes a matter of life and death.

We’ve seen with the overturning of Roe v. Wade that individuals no longer have the ability to make their own decisions about their health and their bodies. And then we also saw as a result of that decision an opinion by Supreme Court Justice Thomas that even hinted at removing the right to contraception. And then, when our governor was questioned about it, he was not clear about how he would move or what he would support or oppose around the issue.

You mentioned the IVF decision that came out of Alabama just last week. And now we’re talking about if an embryo is a person. So we’re beginning to see these – I really think they’re unintended consequences. Because I really don’t think that when the fight was around getting rid of Roe v. Wade that they even had the thought that these kinds of things would begin to roll out. And so what we want to do in Mississippi is we want to be pro-life all the way. And I actually see the Right to Contraception Act as a pro-life measure, because if we want to make sure that our boys and girls, men, women, families, are set up in the very best situation that they can possibly be in, where they can remain in a state that’s their home, but provides the conditions by which they’re not just surviving but thriving, then we should support the Right to Contraception Act because that is an important piece to this equation for them to be able to make those healthy decision for themselves.

MT: You helped author House Bill 539 on presumptive eligibility for pregnant women. It passed the House a few weeks ago now – quite early on in the session. Are you feeling hopeful that it will have more success this year than last year?

ZS: I am feeling incredibly optimistic this session. We have a speaker now, Speaker Jason White, that has encouraged and urged all of us to work on a bipartisan level. We are seeing our colleagues across the aisle actually bring us into conversations on legislation that we have been introducing for a number of years that are finally getting some light and attention. I think the energy has changed in the House and I really appreciate the Speaker, as well as the chairmen and chairwomen we have on committees right now, wanting to work with the Democrats. Because, I mean, let’s face it, we are in a super minority – we get that, we understand that. But we believe that Mississippians want us to work together, because the best ideas and the best solutions to the problems many of us face come from when we can get together and hash it out.

We know that we may not get everything we want. But let’s try to build some consensus and at least commit to working together as we move forward. And then Speaker White has also been very adamant about working with leadership in the Senate, as well. So that we can build a positive force on both ends of the Capitol and hopefully get some stuff to the governor’s desk that will be historic for the state of Mississippi.

MT: There are a couple of bills on chemical endangerment this year, which would allow for prosecution of pregnant women who take drugs during pregnancy. The author of one of the bills says it would not prosecute women for taking the abortion pill – that abortion pills are protected because they are prescriptions. But the author of the other chemical endangerment bill said that could be open for debate. What do you make of the obscurity in this legislation and do you think that obscurity is dangerous?

ZS: I think with any bill where you’re getting one perspective that’s different from the other, it’s something that we need to watch. Because it could put our autonomy at risk. And we need to know how is this going to impact the folks that live in our communities on whether or not they can access the things they need.

And, you know, we don’t represent the demographics of our state here in the Legislature. Our population, we have more women than we do men, but the percentage here, in the House as well as the Senate, is very, very low. I think we have a total of 17 women who serve as legislators. Now that doesn’t necessarily mean that because you’re a woman and you serve as a legislator that you’re going to do what’s best for women. But what I will say is that a man that has never had a uterus and has never carried a child and doesn’t understand the risks and also the fear that surrounds the ability and process of getting pregnant and having a child, it’s a real thing. When you look at the rates of our maternal mortality and infant mortality in the state, it’s something that our young women have in the back of their minds. And they want to be able to survive this pregnancy and also have a healthy child as an outcome. And then in addition to that be able to raise a child in a healthy environment. And so what we shouldn’t be doing, especially coming from a man, a man should not be telling women what to do with their bodies. I mean, that’s just the bottom line. And we should be able to get together, work with women, and work with experts that can give us the knowledge and the facts around what is good and what’s available for women and their families. Instead of doing everything we can to be punitive against women, we should be trying to help them be successful in the state.

MT: Are there any other bills you’re keeping an eye on? How are you feeling about Medicaid expansion this year?

ZS: I am so overwhelmed with Medicaid expansion. It passed out of committee yesterday and it’s going to come up in the House today. This is the first time in 10 years that we’ve even seen Medicaid expansion be put on the table. It’s a huge deal for the state of Mississippi for all the reasons I’ve talked about today with the health disparities and the negative health outcomes we have in the state. So I’m very excited about that. I am hopeful that our colleagues in the Senate will stand strong and also support this legislation and if, and I say if, a veto were to happen, that we also stand united and override that veto. Because the working families in our communities and our districts across the state are depending on this. They’re depending on us to do the right thing, to give them a chance to work, be healthy, take care of themselves, take care of their families, and achieve that dream of prosperity that Gov. Reeves talked about this week.

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

Mississippi Today

Meet Willye B. White: A Mississippian we should all celebrate

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mississippitoday.org – @rick_cleveland – 2025-04-04 11:09:00

In an interview years and years ago, the late Willye B. White told me in her warm, soothing Delta voice, “A dream without a plan is just a wish. As a young girl, I had a plan.”

She most definitely did have a plan. And she executed said plan, as we shall see.

And I know what many readers are thinking: “Who the heck was Willye B. White?” That, or: “Willye B. White, where have I heard that name before?”

Rick Cleveland

Well, you might have driven an eight-mile, flat-as-a-pancake stretch of U.S. 49E, between Sidon and Greenwood, and seen the marker that says: “Willye B. White Memorial Highway.” Or you might have visited the Olympic Room at the Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame and seen where White was a five-time participant and two-time medalist in the Summer Olympics as a jumper and a sprinter.

If you don’t know who Willye B. White was, you should. Every Mississippian should. So pour yourself a cup of coffee or a glass of iced tea, follow along and prepare to be inspired.

Willye B. White was born on the last day of 1939 in Money, near Greenwood, and was raised by grandparents. As a child, she picked cotton to help feed her family. When she wasn’t picking cotton, she was running, really fast, and jumping, really high and really long distances.

She began competing in high school track and field meets at the age of 10. At age 11, she scored enough points in a high school meet to win the competition all by herself. At age 16, in 1956, she competed in the Summer Olympics at Melbourne, Australia.

Her plan then was simple. The Olympics, on the other side of the world, would take place in November. “I didn’t know much about the Olympics, but I knew that if I made the team and I went to the Olympics, I wouldn’t have to pick cotton that year. I was all for that.”

Just imagine. You are 16 years old, a high school sophomore, a poor Black girl. You are from Money, Mississippi, and you walk into the stadium at the Melbourne Cricket Grounds to compete before a crowd of more than 100,000 strangers nearly 10,000 miles from your home.

She competed in the long jump. She won the silver medal to become the first-ever American to win a medal in that event. And then she came home to segregated Mississippi, to little or no fanfare. This was the year after Emmett Till, a year younger than White, was brutally murdered just a short distance from where she lived.

“I used to sit in those cotton fields and watch the trains go by,” she once told an interviewer. “I knew they were going to some place different, some place into the hills and out of those cotton fields.”

Her grandfather had fought in France in World War I. “He told me about all the places he saw,” White said. “I always wanted to travel and see the places he talked about.”

Travel, she did. In the late 1950s there were two colleges that offered scholarships to young, Black female track and field athletes. One was Tuskegee in Alabama, the other was Tennessee State in Nashville. White chose Tennessee State, she said, “because it was the farthest away from those cotton fields.”

She was getting started on a track and field career that would take her, by her own count, to 150 different countries across the globe. She was the best female long jumper in the U.S. for two decades. She competed in Olympics in Melbourne, Rome, Tokyo, Mexico City and Munich. She would compete on more than 30 U.S. teams in international events. In 1999, Sports Illustrated named her one of the top 100 female athletes of the 20th century.

Chicago became White’s home for most of adulthood. This was long before Olympic athletes were rich, making millions in endorsements and appearance fees. She needed a job, so she became a nurse. Later on, she became an public health administrator as well as a coach. She created the Willye B. White Foundation to help needy children with health and after school care. 

In 1982, at age 42, she returned to Mississippi to be inducted into the Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame and was welcomed back to a reception at the Governor’s Mansion by Gov. William Winter, who introduced her during induction ceremonies. Twenty-six years after she won the silver medal at Melbourne, she called being hosted and celebrated by the governor of her home state “the zenith of her career.”

Willye B. White died of pancreatic cancer in a Chicago hospital in 2007. While working on an obituary/column about her, I talked to the late, great Ralph Boston, the three-time Olympic long jump medalist from Laurel. They were Tennessee State and U.S. Olympic teammates. They shared a healthy respect from one another, and Boston clearly enjoyed talking about White.

At one point, Ralph asked me, “Did you know Willye B. had an even more famous high school classmate.”

No, I said, I did not.

“Ever heard of Morgan Freeman?” Ralph said, laughing.

Of course.

“I was with Morgan one time and I asked him if he ever ran track,” Ralph said, already chuckling about what would come next.

“Morgan said he did not run track in high school because he knew if he ran, he’d have to run against Willye B. White, and Morgan said he didn’t want to lose to a girl.”

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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Early voting proposal killed on last day of Mississippi legislative session

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mississippitoday.org – @MSTODAYnews – 2025-04-03 13:02:00

Mississippi will remain one of only three states without no-excuse early voting or no-excuse absentee voting. 

Senate leaders, on the last day of their regular 2025 session, decided not to send a bill to Gov. Tate Reeves that would have expanded pre-Election Day voting options. The governor has been vocally opposed to early voting in Mississippi, and would likely have vetoed the measure.

The House and Senate this week overwhelmingly voted for legislation that established a watered-down version of early voting. The proposal would have required voters to go to a circuit clerk’s office and verify their identity with a photo ID. 

The proposal also listed broad excuses that would have allowed many voters an opportunity to cast early ballots. 

The measure passed the House unanimously and the Senate approved it 42-7. However, Sen. Jeff Tate, a Republican from Meridian who strongly opposes early voting, held the bill on a procedural motion. 

Senate Elections Chairman Jeremy England chose not to dispose of Tate’s motion on Thursday morning, the last day the Senate was in session. This killed the bill and prevented it from going to the governor. 

England, a Republican from Vancleave, told reporters he decided to kill the legislation because he believed some of its language needed tweaking. 

The other reality is that Republican Gov. Tate Reeves strongly opposes early voting proposals and even attacked England on social media for advancing the proposal out of the Senate chamber. 

England said he received word “through some sources” that Reeves would veto the measure.

“I’m not done working on it, though,” England said. 

Although Mississippi does not have no-excuse early voting or no-excuse absentee voting, it does have absentee voting. 

To vote by absentee, a voter must meet one of around a dozen legal excuses, such as temporarily living outside of their county or being over 65. Mississippi law doesn’t allow people to vote by absentee purely out of convenience or choice. 

Several conservative states, such as Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas and Florida, have an in-person early voting system. The Republican National Committee in 2023 urged Republican voters to cast an early ballot in states that have early voting procedures. 

Yet some Republican leaders in Mississippi have ardently opposed early voting legislation over concerns that it undermines election security. 

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

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Mississippi Today

Mississippi Legislature approves DEI ban after heated debate

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mississippitoday.org – @MSTODAYnews – 2025-04-02 16:34:00

Mississippi lawmakers have reached an agreement to ban diversity, equity and inclusion programs and a list of “divisive concepts” from public schools across the state education system, following the lead of numerous other Republican-controlled states and President Donald Trump’s administration.  

House and Senate lawmakers approved a compromise bill in votes on Tuesday and Wednesday. It will likely head to Republican Gov. Tate Reeves for his signature after it clears a procedural motion.

The agreement between the Republican-dominated chambers followed hours of heated debate in which Democrats, almost all of whom are Black, excoriated the legislation as a setback in the long struggle to make Mississippi a fairer place for minorities. They also said the bill could bog universities down with costly legal fights and erode academic freedom.

Democratic Rep. Bryant Clark, who seldom addresses the entire House chamber from the podium during debates, rose to speak out against the bill on Tuesday. He is the son of the late Robert Clark, the first Black Mississippian elected to the state Legislature since the 1800s and the first Black Mississippian to serve as speaker pro tempore and preside over the House chamber since Reconstruction.

“We are better than this, and all of you know that we don’t need this with Mississippi history,” Clark said. “We should be the ones that say, ‘listen, we may be from Mississippi, we may have a dark past, but you know what, we’re going to be the first to stand up this time and say there is nothing wrong with DEI.'”

Legislative Republicans argued that the measure — which will apply to all public schools from the K-12 level through universities — will elevate merit in education and remove a list of so-called “divisive concepts” from academic settings. More broadly, conservative critics of DEI say the programs divide people into categories of victims and oppressors and infuse left-wing ideology into campus life.

“We are a diverse state. Nowhere in here are we trying to wipe that out,” said Republican Sen. Tyler McCaughn, one of the bill’s authors. “We’re just trying to change the focus back to that of excellence.”

The House and Senate initially passed proposals that differed in who they would impact, what activities they would regulate and how they aim to reshape the inner workings of the state’s education system. Some House leaders wanted the bill to be “semi-vague” in its language and wanted to create a process for withholding state funds based on complaints that almost anyone could lodge. The Senate wanted to pair a DEI ban with a task force to study inefficiencies in the higher education system, a provision the upper chamber later agreed to scrap.

The concepts that will be rooted out from curricula include the idea that gender identity can be a “subjective sense of self, disconnected from biological reality.” The move reflects another effort to align with the Trump administration, which has declared via executive order that there are only two sexes.

The House and Senate disagreed on how to enforce the measure but ultimately settled on an agreement that would empower students, parents of minor students, faculty members and contractors to sue schools for violating the law.

People could only sue after they go through an internal campus review process and a 25-day period when schools could fix the alleged violation. Republican Rep. Joey Hood, one of the House negotiators, said that was a compromise between the chambers. The House wanted to make it possible for almost anyone to file lawsuits over the DEI ban, while Senate negotiators initially bristled at the idea of fast-tracking internal campus disputes to the legal system.   

The House ultimately held firm in its position to create a private cause of action, or the right to sue, but it agreed to give schools the ability to conduct an investigative process and potentially resolve the alleged violation before letting people sue in chancery courts.

“You have to go through the administrative process,” said Republican Sen. Nicole Boyd, one of the bill’s lead authors. “Because the whole idea is that, if there is a violation, the school needs to cure the violation. That’s what the purpose is. It’s not to create litigation, it’s to cure violations.” 

If people disagree with the findings from that process, they could also ask the attorney general’s office to sue on their behalf.

Under the new law, Mississippi could withhold state funds from schools that don’t comply. Schools would be required to compile reports on all complaints filed in response to the new law.

Trump promised in his 2024 campaign to eliminate DEI in the federal government. One of the first executive orders he signed did that. Some Mississippi lawmakers introduced bills in the 2024 session to restrict DEI, but the proposals never made it out of committee. With the national headwinds at their backs and several other laws in Republican-led states to use as models, Mississippi lawmakers made plans to introduce anti-DEI legislation.

The policy debate also unfolded amid the early stages of a potential Republican primary matchup in the 2027 governor’s race between State Auditor Shad White and Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann. White, who has been one of the state’s loudest advocates for banning DEI, had branded Hosemann in the months before the 2025 session “DEI Delbert,” claiming the Senate leader has stood in the way of DEI restrictions passing the Legislature. 

During the first Senate floor debate over the chamber’s DEI legislation during this year’s legislative session, Hosemann seemed to be conscious of these political attacks. He walked over to staff members and asked how many people were watching the debate live on YouTube. 

As the DEI debate cleared one of its final hurdles Wednesday afternoon, the House and Senate remained at loggerheads over the state budget amid Republican infighting. It appeared likely the Legislature would end its session Wednesday or Thursday without passing a $7 billion budget to fund state agencies, potentially threatening a government shutdown.

“It is my understanding that we don’t have a budget and will likely leave here without a budget. But this piece of legislation …which I don’t think remedies any of Mississippi’s issues, this has become one of the top priorities that we had to get done,” said Democratic Sen. Rod Hickman. “I just want to say, if we put that much work into everything else we did, Mississippi might be a much better place.”

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

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