Mississippi Today
Special interest groups endorse, donate to Mississippi judicial candidates
Special interest groups have donated at least $117,000 to candidates running in contested elections for the Mississippi Supreme Court and the Mississippi Court of Appeals so far this year, and that figure is almost certain to increase before the November election.
Judicial elections in Mississippi are typically low-interest races where law firms, individual lawyers and trade associations make up the lion’s share of political contributions. Endorsements from special interest groups often give candidates an edge in the race and their donations often give candidates a needed boost in campaigning.
The candidate who has racked up the most money from trade associations and other interest groups, according to campaign finance documents Mississippi Today reviewed, is Republican state Sen. Jennifer Branning of Philadelphia who is challenging incumbent Justice Jim Kitchens for his central district Supreme Court seat.ย
Branning has received at least $84,500 from interest groups, including $5,000 from the Mississippi Realtors PAC, $5,000 from the Mississippi Bankers Association and $5,000 from the Mississippi Road Builders PAC.
The candidate who has received the second-highest number of donations from special interest groups is incumbent Supreme Court Justice Dawn Beam of the southern district who is facing a challenge from Coast-based lawyer David Sullivan.ย
Beam has received at least $27,500 from special interest groups including $5,000 from the Mississippi Physicians PAC and $5,000 from the Mississippi Medical PAC.
With the election still four months away, these types of donations are widely expected to increase.
Brandon Jones, the director of campaigns for the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Action Fund, an organization that promotes racial justice, said on Mississippi Today‘s July 15 edition of โThe Other Sideโ political podcast, that the organization is endorsing Kitchens’ bid for reelection, though he did not say whether that endorsement would come with a donation.
โKitchens was elected in 2009 and has been, what I believe, one of the fairest, honest, down-the-middle and just kind of within the mainstream of what we would hope out of a jurist,โ Jones said.
It’s fairly common in the Magnolia State for political organizations and interests groups to get involved in judicial races, since Mississippi opts to elect its state judges. But candidates for the state’s most powerful judicial roles are limited in how they can campaign and fundraise.
The Code of Judicial Conduct adopted by the Mississippi Supreme Court prohibits judicial candidates from commenting on how they would rule on a potential case that could come before them.
And the code technically bans candidates from directly raising money, but they commonly get around this prohibition by forming a campaign committee to raise and spend money.
Since candidates for the most powerful judicial offices in the state can’t comment on how they’ll rule on cases, why do special interest groups donate to these candidates at all?
The Mississippi Physicians PAC, an arm of the medical malpractice insurance organization Medical Assurance of Mississippi, has donated $15,000 to three judicial candidates this year. The organization did not return a request for comment on why it had invested so much money in judicial races this year.
The Mississippi Medical PAC, operated by the powerful Mississippi State Medical Association, has collectively donated $10,000 to judicial candidates so far this cycle.
Dr. Jim Rish, past president of the organization and current chairman of the PAC, told Mississippi Today that the organization looks to the judicial candidates’ prior rulings and personal judicial philosophy to determine donations.
Rish said the organization’s primary concern is protecting the hard-fought battles it helped achieve on โtort reformโ in 2004 or changes to state law that reduced the amount of damages plaintiffs can receive from malpractice litigation.
Mississippi by the early 2000s had become known as a lawsuit haven, where sympathetic juries and judges handed out huge awards to plaintiffs who filed malpractice suits against physicians and hospitals.
Medical leaders at the time argued they were on the verge of shuttering clinics because the cost of malpractice insurance had skyrocketed.
As a result, medical, insurance, business and political forces joined to push for lawsuit reform. The coalition proved successful when Gov. Haley Barbour and the state Legislature in 2004 passed legislation to cap noneconomic and punitive damages for such suits.
โWe don’t intend to become complicit in allowing the environment to revert back to that,โ Rish said. โWe’re fully engaged, and that’s why we take a keen interest in these races.โ
The Mississippi Association of Realtors and the Mississippi Poultry Association have also each donated $10,000 so far in the ongoing judicial campaigns. None of the organizations returned a request for comment.
Judicial offices are nonpartisan, so candidates do not participate in a party primary. All candidates will appear on the Nov. 5, 2024, general election ballot. If a candidate does not receive a majority of the votes cast, the two candidates who received the most votes will advance to a runoff election on Nov. 26.
Judges on Mississippi’s two highest courts do not run at large. Instead, voters from their respective districts elect them.
The nine members of the Supreme Court are elected from three districts: northern, central and southern. The 10 members of the Court of Appeals are each elected from five districts across the state.
The judges are elected in staggered terms, so all 19 seats of the two courts are not up for election each cycle.
For the Supreme Court, the chief justice is chosen by
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
A Mississippi town moves a Confederate monument that became a shrouded eyesore
GRENADA (AP) โ A Mississippi town has taken down a Confederate monument that stood on the courthouse square since 1910 โ a figure that was tightly wrapped in tarps the past four years, symbolizing the community’s enduring division over how to commemorate the past.
Grenada’s first Black mayor in two decades seems determined to follow through on the city’s plans to relocate the monument to other public land. A concrete slab has already been poured behind a fire station about 3.5 miles (5.6 kilometers) from the square.
But a new fight might be developing. A Republican lawmaker from another part of Mississippi wrote to Grenada officials saying she believes the city is violating a state law that restricts the relocation of war memorials or monuments.
The Grenada City Council voted to move the monument in 2020, weeks after police killed George Floyd in Minneapolis. The vote seemed timely: Mississippi legislators had just retired the last state flag in the U.S. that prominently featured the Confederate battle emblem.
The tarps went up soon after the vote, shrouding the Confederate soldier and the pedestal he stood on. But even as people complained about the eyesore, the move was delayed by tight budgets, state bureaucracy or political foot-dragging. Explanations vary, depending on who’s asked.
A new mayor and city council took office in May, prepared to take action. On Sept. 11, with little advance notice, police blocked traffic and a work crew disassembled and removed the 20-foot (6.1-meter) stone structure.
“I’m glad to see it move to a different location,” said Robin Whitfield, an artist with a studio just off Grenada’s historic square. “This represents that something has changed.”
Still, Whitfield, who is white, said she wishes Grenada leaders had invited the community to engage in dialogue about the symbol, to bridge the gap between those who think moving it is erasing history and those who see it as a daily reminder of white supremacy. She was among the few people watching as a crane lifted parts of the monument onto a flatbed truck.
“No one ever talked about it, other than yelling on Facebook,” Whitfield said.
Mayor Charles Latham said the monument has been “quite a divisive figure” in the town of 12,300, where about 57% of residents are Black and 40% are white.
“I understand people had family and stuff to fight and die in that war, and they should be proud of their family,” Latham said. “But you’ve got to understand that there were those who were oppressed by this, by the Confederate flag on there. There’s been a lot of hate and violence perpetrated against people of color, under the color of that flag.”
The city received permission from the Mississippi Department of Archives and History to move the Confederate monument, as required. But Rep. Stacey Hobgood-Wilkes of Picayune said the fire station site is inappropriate.
“We are prepared to pursue such avenues that may be necessary to ensure that the statue is relocated to a more suitable and appropriate location,” she wrote, suggesting a Confederate cemetery closer to the courthouse square as an alternative. She said the Ladies Cemetery Association is willing to deed a parcel to the city to make it happen.
The Confederate monument in Grenada is one of hundreds in the South, most of which were dedicated during the early 20th century when groups such as the United Daughters of the Confederacy sought to shape the historical narrative by valorizing the Lost Cause mythology of the Civil War.
The monuments, many of them outside courthouses, came under fresh scrutiny after an avowed white supremacist who had posed with Confederate flags in photos posted online killed nine Black people inside the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015.
Grenada’s monument includes images of Confederate president Jefferson Davis and a Confederate battle flag. It was engraved with praise for “the noble men who marched neath the flag of the Stars and Bars” and “the noble women of the South,” who “gave their loved ones to our country to conquer or to die for truth and right.”
A half-century after it was dedicated, the monument’s symbolism figured in a voting rights march. When the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders held a mass rally in downtown Grenada in June 1966, Robert Green of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference scrambled up the pedestal and planted a U.S. flag above the image of Davis.
The cemetery is a spot Latham himself had previously advocated as a new site for the monument, but he said it’s too late to change now, after the city already budgeted $60,000 for the move.
“So, who’s going to pay the city back for the $30,000 we’ve already expended to relocate this?” he said. “You should’ve showed up a year and a half ago, two years ago, before the city gets to this point.”
A few other Confederate monuments in Mississippi have been relocated. In July 2020, a Confederate soldier statue was moved from a prominent spot at the University of Mississippi to a Civil War cemetery in a secluded part of the Oxford campus. In May 2021, a Confederate monument featuring three soldiers was moved from outside the Lowndes County Courthouse in Columbus to another cemetery with Confederate soldiers.
Lori Chavis, a Grenada City Council member, said that since the monument was covered by tarps, “it’s caused nothing but more divide in our city.”
She said she supports relocating the monument but worries about a lawsuit. She acknowledged that people probably didn’t know until recently exactly where it would reappear.
“It’s tucked back in the woods, and it’s not visible from even pulling behind the fire station,” Chavis said. “And I think that’s what got some of the citizens upset.”
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Crooked Letter Sports Podcast
Podcast: New Orleans sports columnist and author Jeff Duncan joins the podcast to talk about his new Steve Gleason book and the new-look New Orleans Saints.
Jeff Duncan went from the Mississippi Book Festival in Jackson on Saturday to Jerry World in Dallas on Sunday where he watched and wrote about the Saints’ total dismantling of the Dallas Cowboys. We talk about both events and also about what happened in high school and college football last weekend and what’s coming up this weekend.
Stream all episodes here.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
On this day in 1899
Sept. 18, 1899
Scott Joplin, known as โthe King of Ragtime,โ copyrighted the โMaple Leaf Rag,โ which became the first song to sell more than 1 million copies of sheet music. The popularity launched a sensation surrounding ragtime, which has been called America’s โfirst classical music.โย
Born near Texarkana, Texas, Joplin grew up in a musical family. He worked on the railroad with other family members until he was able to earn money as a musician, traveling across the South. He wound up playing at the World’s Fair in Chicago in 1893, where he met fellow musician Otis Saunders, who encouraged him to write down the songs he had been making up to entertain audiences. In all, Joplin wrote dozens of ragtime songs.
After some success, he moved to New York City, hoping he could make a living while stretching the boundaries of music. He wrote a ragtime ballet and two operas, but success in these new forms eluded him. He was buried in a pauper’s grave in New York City in 1917.
More than six decades later, his music was rediscovered, initially by Joshua Rifkin, who recorded Joplin’s songs on a record, and then Gunther Schuller of the New England Conservatory, who performed four of the ragtime songs in concert: โMy faculty, many of whom had never even heard of Joplin, were saying things like, โMy gosh, he writes melodies like Schubert!’โ
Joplin’s music won over even more admirers through the 1973 movie, โThe Sting,โ which won an Oscar for the music. His song, โThe Entertainer,โ reached No. 3 on Billboard and was ranked No. 10 among โSongs of the Centuryโ list by the Recording Industry Association of America. His opera โTreemonishaโ was produced to wide acclaim, and he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1976 for his special contribution to American music.ย
โThe ragtime craze, the faddish thing, will obviously die down, but Joplin will have his position secure in American music history,โ Rifkin said. โHe is a treasurable composer.โ
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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