Mississippi Today
The death of rural hospitals could leave Mississippians ‘sick, sick, sick’
The death of rural hospitals could leave Mississippians ‘sick, sick, sick’
GREENWOOD – Only a few dozen cars sit in Greenwood Leflore Hospital’s parking lot.
The hospital’s windows, streaked with purple paint, read, “Stay strong!” Another one says, “We love our patients!” Behind the glass, magazines sit untouched on side tables —the lobby is vacant.
Greenwood Leflore is the community’s only hospital, and it’s months away from closing.
The COVID-19 pandemic drained the hospital, which was already financially vulnerable, dry. Costs went up, while profit did not. Doctors and nurses, burned out from the pandemic, left in droves. Now, the hospital is shutting down floor after floor, cutting costs to maintain operations.
Mississippians know this story.
Dozens of hospitals across the state, many the only in their communities, are struggling to stay open.
A report from the Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform puts a third of Mississippi’s rural hospitals at risk of closure, and half of those at risk of closure within the next few years. There are only three other states with worse prognoses.
But it’s especially devastating in Mississippi, where life expectancy and health outcomes are consistently the worst in the country.
Hospital administrators are holding their breath, waiting on help from the state, but they could be getting less money this year than they need. And there’s little to no chance that state leaders will expand Medicaid this year as 40 other states have done. Expanding Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act would bring more than $1 billion in federal funding to Mississippi in a year.
Ryan Kelly, executive director of the Mississippi Rural Health Association, said the situation is dire, and there’s not a straightforward answer.
“I wish, for the sake of simplicity, I had one single thing I could point to and say this is the problem,” he said. “We have been saying this for a long time that this will get serious and it is now serious.
“We are in far more of a serious time now than we ever have been before.”
For the hospital CEOs, doctors and residents of rural Mississippi, this isn’t just a statistic. It’s a life-and-death reality.
‘Hospitals can close. Watch and see.’
Dr. John Lucas’s office is at the end of a quiet hallway, past empty rooms with empty beds.
Though he’s spent his entire professional life at Greenwood Leflore, Lucas, a longtime Greenwood resident and now chief of staff, remembers starting his career as a surgeon in a much different hospital than the one he sees today.
His late father, Dr. John Lucas Jr., practiced at Greenwood Leflore from 1963 until his retirement in 2011. Back in the hospital’s heyday, Lucas said his father’s patients overflowed into the hallways. At that time, the hospital was licensed for 250 beds, he said.
When Lucas joined his father at the hospital in 1988, he didn’t experience that level of activity, but it was a far cry from the desolate hospital he serves today.
“It wasn’t uncommon to have as close to 200 beds full when I first came here,” he said. “It’s really sad to walk these empty halls and to see that we only have one part of one floor occupied with patients.”
In the past decade, Lucas has watched the hospital close unit after unit, tapering services in an effort to stay open.
First it was the neurosurgery department. Then, it was the urology department and inpatient dialysis. Now, the hospital doesn’t have full coverage of its emergency room for orthopedics or general surgery. Most recently, it shuttered its labor and delivery department and intensive care units.
At a health affairs committee meeting in February, Nelson Weichold, chief financial officer at the University of Mississippi Medical Center, said the worst part about the looming hospital closures is the slow cessation of services.
“It’s not just when the hospital closes,” he said. “It’s the years building up to that when they’re taking financial measures to do everything they can to try and keep the doors open.”
But it’s not financially viable to keep all of those service lines open anymore, according to Greenwood Leflore’s interim CEO Gary Marchand.
About 75% of the hospital’s patients are uninsured or on Medicaid or Medicare, which underpay the hospital for its services, Marchand said.
So most of the time, that means the hospital is losing money caring for its patients. And for the quarter of patients who have commercial insurance, the hospital often has to fight with the company to get the claim paid, he said.
“Our challenge is we have to map the inadequacy of those payments to our cost structure,” Marchand said. “For years, systemically, they (Medicare, Medicaid and commercial insurance) have paid below real cost.”
Before 2020, the hospital was losing between $7 to $9 million a year, Marchand said. To satisfy the city and county, which partially own the hospital, Greenwood Leflore leaders came up with a plan to generate $7 million a year to break even.
Then COVID hit, and everything changed.
The hospital went into the pandemic with $20 million in cash reserves. With each wave of the virus, despite government relief, their reserves were depleted. By the end of 2021, half of the cash was gone.
It’s a fallacy that hospitals made money during the pandemic, Marchand said. Because Medicaid and Medicare paid for patients by their diagnosis, not the length of their hospital stay, patients who were in the ICU for weeks ended up costing the hospital.
Greenwood Leflore hasn’t been able to make the money back — it’s not clear why, but fewer people are seeking care, and payments have remained stagnant.
For several months, the University of Mississippi Medical Center was entertaining a plan to lease the hospital, saving it from closure. However, in November, the deal abruptly fell through without explanation from UMMC.
Marchand said the hospital has six months to figure out a plan or it’ll be forced to close.
“The struggle is to get the community and the legislators and others to understand a hospital is a business,” he said. “I think a lot of people think, ‘Oh, you need hospitals. They’re never going to go away.’
“Hospitals can close. Watch and see.”
A quick scroll on the hospital’s Facebook page shows that Greenwood residents know that closure is a real possibility.
Lucas said he hears the same refrain over and over again when he’s out in the community: “How’s the hospital doing?”
“Whenever I go to a social outing, it’s the first thing I get asked,” Lucas said. “Everybody’s concerned.”
Pie Fincher and her family are products of Greenwood Leflore Hospital.
Fincher, who is 89 years old, has only gone to another hospital for treatment one time in her life. Both of Fincher’s children were born at Greenwood Leflore, and the hospital has saved her life several times, she said, including once when she had a major brain bleed.
“It’s just been a lifeline for our family,” Fincher said.
But the neurology department doesn’t exist anymore. Neither does labor and delivery. Those doctors that delivered her kids and saved her life are long gone.
“I vividly remember how proud we were of that hospital to be built (in its current location in 1952),” Fincher said. “It was just state of the art everything. As time has gone on, we’ve been so fortunate to have so many wonderful doctors.
“That’s what’s so heartbreaking about it, is we have all these wonderful doctors that are willing to work in Greenwood — this little small, nondescript, tiny town — and we let them go.”
DeWitt Kimble was born in Greenwood 72 years ago. In the past few years, because of problems with his prostate, he’s increasingly relied on the hospital for emergency care.
Kimble first heard the hospital might shutter about a decade ago. Now that its closure is imminent, he’s worried.
“If you really close this hospital down, we’re going to have to go to Jackson,” he said. “We’re going to have to go to Grenada. We’re going to have to go to Cleveland, and a lot of people don’t have transportation, like me.”
The motor gave out on Kimble’s Suburban about a month ago, and he’s not been able to afford its repair.
If the hospital closes, residents such as Kimble will be forced to travel a half hour or more for care. In the Delta, where much of the population struggles with reliable transportation, the lack of a nearby hospital could be fatal.
Between a quarter and a third of Lucas’ surgeries are canceled, largely because of transportation issues, he said.
Kimble had a surgery scheduled on Monday to remove his catheter. His primary care physician at a private practice said he’d arrange for Kimble’s transportation, but Kimble said he’s called the office repeatedly, and no one has answered.
No one from his doctor’s office could be reached for comment by press time.
Kimble never made it to his procedure.
“I’m just sitting here, so frustrated,” he told Mississippi Today on Monday afternoon.
That means Kimble will still have to rely on his doctor in Greenwood and the hospital for continuing care.
“If the hospital closes, there will be a lot of walking dead,” he said. “Folks will be sick, sick, sick.”
Marchand’s Plan A is getting Greenwood Leflore designated as a critical access hospital. That means the hospital would have to give up almost all of its 200 beds, but it would get more money for services that it provides. Critical access hospitals are typically reimbursed by Medicare at a rate of 101%, theoretically allowing a 1% profit.
State Health Officer Dr. Dan Edney said closing service lines and applying for different hospital designations are solutions he’s seen increasingly across the state, but especially in the Delta. Though they might keep hospitals open, it’s still a loss for the community, he said.
“You take what was a vibrant hospital in the Delta, pre-pandemic, and now it’s a shell of its former self, post-pandemic,” Edney said. “Their only road to survivability is to downgrade.”
But to qualify for the designation, Greenwood Leflore would have to be 35 miles from the nearest hospital.
They’re just short —South Sunflower County Hospital in Indianola is 28 miles away.
Marchand is hoping for a waiver from the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare regarding the distance requirement. His argument is that because of transportation challenges for the hospital’s population, the hospital should be an exception.
If that doesn’t work, the hospital will go up for sale again.
The survival of Delta’s largest health care system will be ‘touch and go’ after this year
If you ask Iris Stacker, interim CEO of Delta Health System in Greenville, how long the hospital system has before it’s forced to close, perplexingly, she smiles.
“I intend to be here forever,” Stacker says.
But Chief Nursing Officer Amy Walker raises an eyebrow.
“We’ll be here through the end of the year,” Walker deadpans. “It’s really touch and go after that.”
The duo head up the largest health care system in the Mississippi Delta. And together, they’re trying to keep it from closing.
Walker’s cynicism is often balanced out by Stacker’s cheeriness, but they do agree on one thing: The hospital is losing money.
“Even Positive Polly over there can’t deny that,” Walker said.
Despite being licensed for over 300 beds, the hospital’s census hovers around 80 patients. And most of the patients are uninsured or on Medicaid or Medicare.
Last year, Delta Health spent about $26 million on uncompensated care. That amounts to about 15% of its total operating expenses.
“We don’t turn people away,” Stacker said. “Instead of trying to go to a doctor and pay for that visit, they wait until 5 p.m. and come to our emergency room.”
But the decline in hospital patients isn’t because care isn’t needed in the Delta, which has some of the worst health disparities in Mississippi.
“It’s not because the patients aren’t here,” Walker said. “It’s because we don’t have the nurses to take care of them.”
Walker said the hospital has long struggled to recruit nurses to Mississippi, much less the Delta.
“We’ve always had that problem,” Walker said. “And if you look at our salaries, we usually have to pay more than Memphis and Jackson to get nurses here. We were already used to doing that.”
The problem worsened during the pandemic, as nurses were offered more money to travel or work elsewhere. Others got so burned out that they went ahead and retired. Statewide, nurse vacancies and turnover rates are at a 10-year high.
Since the pandemic, the hospital’s nurse workforce has nearly halved.
The exodus’ effects have rippled throughout the hospital: emergency wait time has quadrupled, the largest medical surgery unit is closed, and half of the hospital’s ICU beds are not in use.
“You would think that now three years out, things would have normalized, but they haven’t, and I don’t think we’re ever going to get back to normal,” Walker said. “We’ve lost so much of our volume at this point. I can’t really predict if it will come back.”
During the pandemic, supply and labor costs shot up. While prices aren’t as high as they were then, they haven’t returned to pre-pandemic levels.
The way Walker explains it, if the price of eggs goes up, a grocery store can make up for the inflation by passing the cost down to the consumer. But that can’t happen in a hospital setting.
Delta Health has to keep serving its patients, no matter if it’s losing money or not.
“We’re pretty much living on grant money right now,” Stacker said.
Stacker knows that Medicaid expansion is unlikely to pass this legislative session, though it’s what she thinks would help the most.
Without systemic changes, Stacker admits that the hospital’s fate is uncertain.
And if the Delta loses the hospital system, it’s going to affect the entire region.
“We save people’s lives every day here,” Walker said. “Once hospitals start closing, those patients aren’t just going to go away.”
Staying afloat, for now
Winston Medical Center’s CEO Paul Black is a numbers guy.
Black’s hesitant to say it, but he admits that his background has helped keep the hospital afloat.
Before taking the helm of the hospital, Black did consulting work for hospitals around the state and made use of his accounting degree as an auditor for the Medicare program.
“This reimbursement stuff is what I grew up doing,” he said. “So when I got started, I had already been on that side of the fence.”
Something his financial background did not prepare him for, though, was a disaster in his first week of work in April 2014.
Six days into his tenure, Louisville was hit by a devastating EF-4 tornado.
“I don’t remember a whole lot about what took place the first six months,” Black said. “I won’t say that I walked around in a fog, but there was just so much going on. And there’s no manual for it.”
During that time, funding was coming from various sources — disaster relief, cash reserves, community loans —which is why, years later, Black said the hospital’s finances don’t look as dire as many other hospitals in the state.
Winston lost money caring for patients during the pandemic, and Black said expenses have gone up while payments have not increased. The nursing home’s population has also been depleted because so many elderly Winston County residents died during the pandemic.
However, Black fought back with changes of his own.
The hospital raised nurse salaries, which convinced many to stay. Additionally, he’s made sure the hospital offers a diverse array of services —from a nursing home to mental health needs — to protect them from financial collapse.
“That keeps a lot of people coming here,” he said. “We’ve been very efficient with what we’re doing.”
But he warned that Winston Medical Center, while not in the red, isn’t in the green either.
Black’s predecessor, Lee McCall, now heads up Neshoba County General Hospital in Philadelphia, less than an hour from Louisville.
Neshoba County was similarly impacted by COVID —McCall said hospitalizations are down by about half, in part because many of the hospital’s chronically ill and elderly patients who regularly sought care or were in the nursing home died during the pandemic.
When McCall took the CEO job in 2014, the hospital averaged 1,500 annual admissions. Last year, they had 750.
Because of the drop in census, the hospital closed one of its acute floor wings in October to cut costs.
Additionally, more people are visiting the emergency room, where they know the hospital will provide care, whether or not they’re insured.
“Our ER visits have definitely gone up,” said Dr. Jon Boyles, the hospital’s emergency department director. “We’re seeing it seems more and more people who basically use the ER as a clinic.”
The hospital also lost staff during the pandemic — staff they can’t afford to hire back. McCall said he’s trying to do everything he can to prevent layoffs.
“To be honest, there’s just not anywhere to really lay off unless we just shut down a service line completely, which we’re trying to avoid at all costs,” he said.
McCall has kept a close eye on the Capitol the past few months. Like Stacker in Greenville, McCall knows Medicaid expansion isn’t going to happen this session, but he’ll keep advocating for it.
He doesn’t deny that hospitals need the grant money making its way through the Legislature, but said hospitals need a sustainable solution — not a temporary one.
“That’s one-time money,” McCall said. “That doesn’t fix the ongoing problem. So we’re going to be right back where we are now next year.”
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
CRYSTAL SPRINGS – Roger Horton has worked decades as a commercial painter, a skill he’s kept up with even with the challenge of having what his wife has called “one good eye.”
It hasn’t stopped him from being able to complete detailed paint jobs and create straight lines without the help of tape. But last year following a head injury, he and others said people have been pointing out a change in his work. Horton says the sight in his right eye is clouded, like he is looking underwater.
Affected vision, short term memory and periods of irritability – potential symptoms of concussion – followed after he was arrested last September. During an encounter with several police officers, Horton alleges more than one slammed his head into a cruiser and placed handcuffs on so tight that he started to bleed.
“(The officer) was kind of rough with me and all, and he takes my head and I said, ‘What’d I do?’” he recalled recently.
Horton ended up being convicted of two misdemeanor charges and has paid off the fines, but a year later he still has questions about the arrest and treatment by the police.
To date, he has not seen a doctor to evaluate his eye and check for vision or cognitive issues. Horton and his wife Rhonda don’t have a car, and transportation to doctor’s appointments in the Jackson area remains a challenge.
The Hortons have lived in Crystal Springs all their lives, and they have lived in the home the past five years that belonged to Rhonda’s mother.
More than a quarter of all people in Crystal Springs live below the poverty line, and that includes the couple. Rhonda Horton said it’s hard to make a living because there aren’t a lot of jobs, but they support themselves as painters.
That’s how they met Yvonne Florczak-Seeman, who lived in Illinois and purchased her first historical property in Crystal Springs in 2019. She splits her time between the two states.
“We painted that porch bar and the rest is history,” Rhonda Horton said, adding that they went on to complete detailed work on mantles, kitchen cabinets and a cigar room at Florczak-Seeman’s North Jackson Street residence.
Over the years, the couple built a relationship with Florczak-Seeman, who is seeking to open a women’s empowerment center called the Butterfly Garden, in the building next to city hall.
Florczak-Seeman has supported the couple numerous times, including helping them pay a late water bill and offering them work. She called them talented painters and hired them again to paint the interior of the future center, located at East Railroad Avenue.
In pieces, Rhonda Horton told Florczak-Seeman about her husband’s arrest and later the injuries she said he sustained from it. Florczak-Seeman had questions about the encounter and other potential injustices at play, so she offered to help.
“I just want them to pay for what they’ve done not just to him, but everybody,” Rhonda Horton said. “That’s what I want, justice.”
The Arrest
On Sept. 24, 2023, Horton was walking home from a friend’s house when officers approached him. One grabbed his arms to handcuff him, and he remembers them cutting his wrist and causing it to bleed.
Then, he said, a second officer slammed his head into the top of the police car, followed by another officer who slammed his head again. During the encounter, a bag of marijuana that Horton said he found fell out of his pocket onto the ground.
An officer put Horton in the back of the cruiser and took him to the station where Horton asked to speak to the police chief and call his wife. He said the police took his phone and clothes.
Afterward, he was taken to the Copiah County Detention Center in Gallman.
Police Chief Tony Hemphill disputed Horton’s allegation of mistreatment, saying he did not sustain any injuries that required hospitalization. He said Horton’s wrist was cut while he resisted arrest.
“He was not brutalized and targeted,” Hemphill said. “If he had just complied, he wouldn’t have had to come up there (to jail) that night.”
Two police reports from the night of the September 2023 arrest detail how officers had responded to a possible assault and were given the description of a white man. While in the area, they encountered Horton — the only person who fit that description.
Hemphill said a mother called police after her daughter told her she was assaulted. He said officers approached Horton on the street and tried to talk with him to rule him out as a suspect.
That’s when Horton began “fighting, pulling away, and kicking against (the officer’s) patrol vehicle, trying to run,” according to a police report from the night and Hemphill. Horton denies doing any of that.
The next day police took Horton from the county jail to the Crystal Springs police station. There, police informed him a teenage girl reported being assaulted. After learning about the assault allegation, Horton remembered feeling shocked and saying it couldn’t be true because he was not on the street where the alleged incident took place.
Hemphill confirmed the police investigated the assault allegation and found it not credible, meaning Horton wouldn’t face any related charges. He said he communicated this to Horton and his wife early on and since then, which the couple disputes.
As Horton was being arrested and detained, his wife grew worried because she had just spoken with him on the phone and expected him to arrive home shortly. Rhonda Horton and her adult son started calling Roger’s phone, each not getting an answer.
Then during one of the calls by her son, someone who did not identify himself answered Roger’s phone and said, ‘Your daddy’s dead’ and then hung up, Rhonda Horton said.
She was starting to assume the worst had happened. Rhonda Horton wouldn’t have confirmation her husband was alive until he called from the county jail in the early morning.
The next morning as she talked with the police chief, Rhonda Horton asked the chief about who answered the phone and told her son that Roger was dead. The chief told her the person who answered must have been from the county.
Hemphill later told Mississippi Today that he did not know about the call and that type of behavior by his staff “is not going to be tolerated.” Similarly, Copiah County Sheriff Byron Swilley said he had not heard about it and could not say whether a member of his department made the comment to Rhonda and Roger Horton’s son.
A Sept. 25, 2023, citation signed by Hemphill, shared with Mississippi Today, summoned Roger Horton to municipal court for the misdemeanor charges of possession of marijuana and resisting arrest and directed him not to have contact with the alleged victim in the assault case. No contact orders are typically for cases such as domestic violence and sexual assault and they are set by a judge.
LaKiedra Kangar, who works in municipal court services, said the no contact order was put in place because of the assault allegation. She confirmed Horton was not charged with the offense following the police department’s investigation of the allegation.
Weeks passed. Roger Horton went to court for the misdemeanor charges, to which he pleaded guilty. Felony assault charges were not part of the hearing. Municipal Court Judge Matthew Kitchens ordered Roger to pay over $900 in fines for the misdemeanors.
Horton was able to pay for some of the fine through at least 10 hours worth of court-ordered community service, which he said involved painting buildings for the city.
Months later after learning about Horton’s arrest and how he said the police treated him, Florczak-Seeman said she wanted to know more. Horton didn’t have access to his arrest documents, so she accompanied him and his wife to the police department to ask for them.
The first visit, Horton asked but did not receive the arrest report. Florczak-Seeman asked if he had a fine for any of the charges, which police said Horton did even after completing some community service hours. Florczak-Seeman paid for the remaining balance and had him work for her for two days to pay that off.
This year, they went to the police department a second time so Horton could ask for his arrest paperwork. An officer told him he didn’t need it and that the rape allegation had been investigated and found not to be credible, Horton told Mississippi Today.
Florczak-Seeman asked why Horton couldn’t receive the report. She said Hemphill asked if she was Horton’s attorney, and Florczak-Seeman clarified she was his representative.
The chief left for a few minutes and returned with two pieces of paper and handed them to Horton. Hemphill told Mississippi Today he did not recall whether he was the one who handed the report to Horton.
Florczak-Seeman took the document from Horton and began to read it as they stood in the lobby. She said she was horrified to see the name of the alleged, underage victim and her address in the report.
Hemphill said the victim’s personal information should have been restricted and not doing so was an oversight.
After reading the report, Florczak-Seeman went down the street to the mayor’s office at city hall to explain what happened, and how she believed the mayor had grounds to fire the police chief because he provided that document to Roger with the alleged victim’s information.
Mayor Sally Garland confirmed she had a conversation with Florczak-Seeman about the police chief’s employment.
She said she reviews all complaints about city officials, and Garland said she goes to the department head to get a better understanding of the situation. If she determines there are potential grounds for termination, a hearing would be scheduled with the Board of Aldermen, and the group would vote on that decision.
Garland did not find grounds for termination, and Hemphill remains police chief.
A Strange Visit
The Hortons and Florczak-Seeman hadn’t given much thought about the 2023 arrest, until weeks ago when a teenaged girl suddenly showed up in Florczak-Seeman’s yard.
At the end of September at the North Jackson Street home, Florczak-Seeman heard screaming and found the teenage girl who came onto her property. She asked what was wrong, and the teenager said she was chased by a dog, which Florczak-Seeman and Rhonda Horton did not see.
The teenager asked for a soda, and Rhonda Horton went inside to get one. Florczak-Seeman asked where the teenager lived, and she gave an answer that Florczak-Seeman said conflicted with what two girls who were standing nearby on the public sidewalk said she told them.
Then Florczak-Seeman asked the teenager’s name and recognized it as the name of the alleged victim on Horton’s arrest record. Immediately, Florczak-Seeman said she turned to Horton and told him to stay back, and she told the teenager to get off her property, which she did.
At the moment, they were not able to verify whether the teenager was the alleged victim from the report. Neither the Hortons nor Florczak-Seeman had seen her before, and they only knew her name from the arrest report.
“That didn’t make sense at all,” Rhonda Horton told Mississippi Today.
Florczak-Seeman called 911 to report the situation and ask for police to come, which they did not. Hemphill told Mississippi Today a dispatcher informed him about the call with Florczak-Seeman, including details with the teenage girl and how she wanted to report the girl for trespassing.
Florczak-Seeman is one of the people who have noticed a difference in Horton’s vision. It’s clear when comparing the detailed and clean paint job Roger completed at her Jackson Street property in 2019 and the center where he painted last year.
During an interview at the center in October, Florczak-Seeman pointed to the ceiling and noted spots that Horton did not paint. She remembers telling him about them and realized that he couldn’t see them.
“The spots on my ceiling are still not painted, and they’re not painted as a reminder of the injustices that happened in this situation and why I got involved,” Florczak-Seeman said.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Some Mississippi voters head to the polls Tuesday to decide who should represent them on the state’s highest courts.
Polls will be open from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. on Tuesday. Absentee voting has begun, and in-person absentee voting at county circuit clerk’s offices ends at noon on Saturday.
In the Jackson Metro area and parts of central Mississippi, incumbent Supreme Court Justice Jim Kitchens will compete against Republican state Sen. Jenifer Branning of Neshoba County. In areas on the Gulf Coast, Jennifer Schloegel and Amy St. Pé will face each other for an open seat on the Court of Appeals.
Candidates for judicial offices in Mississippi are technically nonpartisan, but political parties and trade associations often contribute money to candidates and cut ads for them, which has increasingly made them almost as partisan as other campaigns.
In the Central District Supreme Court race, GOP forces are working to oust Kitchens, one of the dwindling number of centrist jurists on the high Court. Conservative leaders also realize Kitchens is next in line to lead the court as chief justice should current Chief Justice Mike Randolph step down.
Kitchens is one of two centrist members of the high court and is widely viewed as the preferred candidate of Democrats, though the Democratic Party has not endorsed his candidacy.
Kitchens, first elected to the court in 2008, is a former district attorney and private-practice lawyer. On the campaign trail, he has pointed to his experience as an attorney and judge, particularly his years prosecuting criminals and his rulings on criminal cases.
In an interview on Mississippi Today’s ‘The Other Side’ podcast, Kitchens said his opponent, who primarily practices real estate law, would be at a “significant disadvantage” because the state Supreme Court often reviews criminal cases and major civil lawsuits that are sent to them on appeal.
“I’m sure she has an academic knowledge about the circuit courts that she perhaps learned in law school or perhaps has been to some seminars, but she does not have the hands-on trial experience that I have,” Kitchens said. “And that’s so important to the work that I do.”
Branning, a private-practice attorney, was first elected to the Legislature in 2015. She has led the Senate Elections and Transportation committees. During her time at the Capitol, she has been one of the more conservative members of the Senate leadership, voting against changing the state flag to remove the Confederate battle emblem, voting against expanding Medicaid to the working poor and supporting mandatory and increased minimum sentences for crime.
While campaigning for the judicial seat, she has pledged to ensure that “conservative values” are always represented in the judiciary, but she has stopped short of endorsing policy positions — which Mississippi judicial candidates are prohibited from doing.
Branning declined an invitation to appear on Mississippi Today’s podcast.
“Mississippians need and deserve Supreme Court justices that are constitutionally conservative in nature,” Branning said in a recent interview with radio station SuperTalk Mississippi. “And by that, I mean justices that simply follow the law. They do not add or take away.”
The two candidates have collectively raised around $187,00 and spent $182,00 during the final stretch of the campaign, according to campaign finance reports filed with the Secretary of State’s office.
Since she initially qualified in January, Branning has raised the most amount of money at $879,871, with $250,000 of that money coming from a loan she gave her campaign. She spent around $730,000 of that money. Several third party groups have supported her campaign.
Kitchens has raised around $514,00 since he qualified for reelection. He’s spent roughly $436,000 of that money, and some of his top contributors have been trial attorneys.
For the open Court of Appeals seat, Schloegel and St Pe, two influential names on the Gulf Coast, are working to turn out their voters in a close election.
Schloegel is a Chancery Court judge in Harrison, Hancock and Stone counties. St. Pé is an attorney in private practice, a municipal court judge in Gautier, and a city attorney for Moss Point.
Schloegel has raised roughly $214,000 since she qualified, and has spent almost that same amount of money this election cycle. St. Pé has raised around $480,000 this year and spent approximately $438,067 during that timeframe.
Whoever wins the race, it ensures that a woman will fill the open seat. After the election, half of the judges on the 10-member appellate court will be women, the most number of women who have served on the court at one time.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Nov. 22, 1961
Five Black students, made up of NAACP Youth Council members and two SNCC volunteers from Albany State College, were arrested after entering the white waiting room of the Trailways station in Albany, Georgia.
The council members bonded out of jail, but the SNCC volunteers, Bertha Gober and Blanton Hall declined bail and “chose to remain in jail over the holidays to dramatize their demand for justice,” according to SNCC Digital Gateway. The president of Albany State College expelled them.
Gober became one of SNCC’s Freedom Singers and wrote the song, “We’ll Never Turn Back,” after the 1961 killing of Herbert Lee in Mississippi. The tune became SNCC’s anthem.
After her release from jail, Gober joined other students, and police arrested her and other demonstrators. Back in the same jail, she sang to the police chief and mayor to open the cells, “I hear God’s children praying in jail, ‘Freedom, freedom, freedom.’”
Albany State suspended another student, Bernice Reagon, after she joined SNCC. She poured herself into the civil rights movement and later formed the Grammy-nominated a cappella group Sweet Honey in the Rock to educate and empower the audience and community.
“When I opened my mouth and began to sing, there was a force and power within myself I had never heard before,” a power she said she did not know she had.
Other members of the Freedom Singers included Cordell Reagon, Bernice Johnson, Dorothy Vallis, Rutha Harris, Bernard Lafayette and Charles Neblett. On the third anniversary of the sit-in movement in 1963, they performed at Carnegie Hall.
“This is a singing movement,” SNCC leader James Forman told a reporter. “The songs help. Without them, it would be ugly.”
Today, the Albany Civil Rights Institute houses exhibits on these protesters, Martin Luther King Jr. and others who joined the Albany Movement.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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