Nov. 18, 1946

Future U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall was nearly lynched in Columbia, Tennessee, just 30 miles from where the Ku Klux Klan was born. 

He and his fellow NAACP lawyers had come here to defend Black men accused of racial violence. In a trial, Marshall and other NAACP lawyers won acquittals for nearly two dozen Black men. 

After the verdicts were read, Marshall and his colleagues promptly left town. After crossing a river, they came upon a car in the middle of the road. Then they heard a siren. Three police cars emptied, and eight men surrounded the lawyers. An officer told Marshall he was being arrested for drunken driving, even though he hadn’t been drinking. Officers forced Marshall into the back seat of a car and told the other men to leave. 

“Marshall knew that nothing good ever happened when police cars drove black men down unpaved roads,” author Gilbert King wrote in “Devil in the Grove.” “He knew that the bodies of blacks — the victims of lynchings and random murders — had been discovered along these riverbanks for decades. And it was at the bottom of Duck River that, during the trial, the NAACP lawyers had been told their bodies would end up.” 

When the car stopped next to the river, Marshall could see a crowd of white men gathered under a tree. Then he spotted headlights behind them. It was a fellow NAACP lawyer, Zephaniah Alexander Looby, who had trailed them to make sure nothing happened. Reporter Harry Raymond concluded that a lynching had been planned, and “Thurgood Marshall was the intended victim.” Marshall never forgot the harrowing night and redoubled his efforts to bring justice in cases where Black defendants were falsely accused.

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

Years ago, some state elected leaders lamented that Mississippi has far too much bureaucracy for such a poor, small state, and vowed — for starters — to eliminate or consolidate state government’s roughly 200 agencies, boards and commissions.

More than a decade later, the number of state agencies, boards and commissions has been whittled down to … roughly 200.

There was one monumental victory in the war on bureaucracy in Mississippi: After years of bitter political debate, the Legislature this year combined the separate cosmetology and barber licensure boards into one. Saa-lute!

That’s not much ROI for Mississippi’s war on big government. But as a comedian once said, hope springs in turtles.

State Auditor Shad White, eyeing the open governor seat for 2027, has paid a Boston consultant $2 million in taxpayer dollars to determine how to cut spending of taxpayer dollars.

The resultant report is a spectacular, novel blueprint for lawmakers on how to starve the beast, run the state more like a bid-ness — and it’s chock full of hitherto unheard of ideas to put the Magnolia State’s government on a diet.

Actually, no. It’s not.

It’s mostly a rehash, amalgam of long-discussed, never enacted ideas to cut government spending. Someone could have cobbled it together after spending a day or two on Google, going through Mississippi press clippings and perusing old legislative watchdog reports and recommendations and bills.

It’s mostly a greatest hits compilation of Mississippi government spending cutting ideas. And it has many Mississippi politicos surmising it’s mostly a taxpayer-funded gubernatorial campaign stunt by White. It produced a 59-page report destined to sit atop a pile of dusty Joint Legislative Committee on Performance Evaluation and Expenditure Review reports and others espousing many of the same findings and recommendations.

White says his report shows how state government could cut $335 million in spending without breaking a sweat. That’s debatable. But it does clearly show how $2 million could have been saved.

There’s been some banter around the Capitol of folks saying they would have created a similar report for a mere $1 million, or $100,000, or for a nice lunch and a couple of beers. Others noted the 59-page report cost taxpayers $33,898 per page.

None of this is to say the report’s findings are bad ideas for belt-tightening. Many would make sense. That’s why they’ve been proposed before, some over and again. They’ve just proved nearly impossible to enact in the realpolitik of the Legislature and government. Some of the cost savings have been enacted, but then government backslid, un-enacted or ignored them.

Perhaps now is the time to dust off some of these ideas. If, as legislative leaders and Gov. Tate Reeves avow, they are going to continue slashing taxes, it might be a good idea to cut some spending as well.

White’s consultant report includes recommendations such as reducing government officials’ travel spending. This was a hot topic for several years, after a 2013 investigation by the Clarion-Ledger showed that even during lean budget years, government officials still spent tens of millions of dollars on travel, domestic and abroad, and had a massive fleet of government vehicles with dubious need for them. The Legislature clamped down on travel and agencies enacted fleet rules and promoted mileage reimbursement for personal vehicles. But according to White’s report, travel spending has been growing and again needs a major haircut.

The report found that, compared to other states, Mississippi government is spending too much on office space and insurance for state buildings and leased property, and on advertising and public relations for state agencies. Again, these are issues that have been pointed out multiple times over the last couple of decades, by lawmakers, media and PEER reports.

Ditto for the state spending millions on incentives for motion pictures to be shot here. There was a knock-down, drag-out battle over that years ago, with then-Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves and others pointing out the state was receiving little to nothing in return for doling out taxpayer funded incentives.

White’s report recommends the state consolidate and reform its purchasing and look for better deals when it buys goods and services. That should sound familiar. Two lawmakers in particular, Sen. John Polk and Rep. Jerry Turner, led a serious crusade on purchasing reform for several years, and managed to push through some meaningful changes. But many of those have been undone or are now ignored.

White pointed out potential savings from state agencies consolidating back-office functions, such as accounting and purchasing. Nothing new under the sun here. Others, notably former Sen. Buck Clarke, championed this years ago, to little avail.

White says there is a dog’s breakfast of savings to be had with state IT purchasing — for computer software and hardware and such. Some major restructuring of the admin side of state government years ago was supposed to address this issue.

White said Mississippi could sell the state’s airplane, make officials use commercial or charter flights, and save more than $1 million a year. The state airplane, travel on it by governors and related issues have been scrutinized and debated off and on for decades. Then-Gov. Phil Bryant made a big issue out of selling one of the state’s planes (a jet) when it had two and vowed to take commercial flights.

White notes state agencies’ misuse of emergency contracts — declaring an emergency so bidding requirements can be waived — costs the state millions. This was pointed out as a major issue in the Mississippi prisons bribery and kickback scandal that sent former Corrections Commissioner Chris Epps to prison and tainted around $1 billion of state contracts. There were vows then, about a decade ago, to reform this. But White says that emergency contracts now constitute more than 30% of all active state-funded contracts by value.

One would assume that Boston Consulting Group provided White with more than what’s in the 59 pages he released to the public as his “Project Momentum” report. But if it did, it’s a secret. Mississippi Today requested all the backing documents the consultant submitted to White’s agency to complete the project.

White denied the public records request, claiming exemption of any such documents as the work product of an audit. But if the work was an actual audit, it was an unusual one. In his contract with the company, White gave it the directive to find at least $250 million in wasteful spending among the 13 agencies it examined. Typically, hired auditors are not told upfront specifically what they should find.

Perhaps not to be outdone, Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann, who himself has eyes on the 2027 governor’s race, wants to reorganize state government. He’s calling for lawmakers to create a committee to … wait for it … figure out how to consolidate or eliminate many of the more than 200 agencies, boards and commissions.

Hosemann years ago, when he was secretary of state, called for such consolidation and famously opined of the state’s sprawling bureacracy, “You wouldn’t run a lemonade stand like this, much less state government.”

Hosemann was joined in this call to cut bureaucracy and spending by then-Gov. Phil Bryant. But those efforts fizzled, with Bryant and Hosemann back then lamenting there was little will among lawmakers to whittle down state government. Hosemann more recently said there were bigger fish to fry, including tax cuts, but now he wants to focus on government efficiency and cutting the number of agencies, boards and commissions.

Once again, everything old is new again.

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

Nov. 17, 1871

Edward Crosby stood before the congressional hearing and swore to tell the truth. By raising his right hand, Crosby put himself and his family at risk. He could be killed for daring to tell about the terrorism he and other Black Mississippians had faced. 

Days earlier, he had attempted to vote in Aberdeen, Mississippi, asking for a Republican ballot. The clerk at the polling place said none was available. He waited. Dozens more Black men came to vote, and they were all told the same thing. Then he tried another polling place. Same result. 

That day, white men, backed by a cannon, drove about 700 Black voters from the polls in Aberdeen. After nightfall, Crosby stepped out to retrieve water for his child when he saw 30 or so Klansmen galloping up on horses. He hid in a smokehouse, and when Klansmen confronted his wife, she replied that he was away. They left, and from that moment on, “I didn’t sleep more than an hour,” Crosby recalled. “If there had been a stick cracked very light, I would have sprung up in the bed.” 

In response, Mississippi, which was under federal rule at the time, pursued an anti-Klan campaign. In less than a year, grand juries returned 678 indictments with less than a third of them leading to convictions. 

That number, however, was misleading, because in almost all the cases, Klansmen pleaded no contest in exchange for small fines or suspended sentences. Whatever protection that federal troops offered had vanished by the time they left the state a few years later.

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