Mississippi Today
Work begins on Tippah highway project 20 years after being made priority
Tippah County, population about 20,500 in northeast Mississippi, was the state‘s center of political power for one day this past week.
State Rep. Jody Steverson, a Republican who represents Tippah County, posted on social media, โI would like to personally invite every Tippah County citizen to this historic event… Never in our county’s history have the governor, lieutenant governor, and House speaker of Mississippi ever assembled in Tippah County simultaneously.”
Gov. Tate Reeves, Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann, House Speaker Jason White, as well as former Speaker Philip Gunn, were on hand for the ground-breaking of a project to four-lane about a 10-mile section of U.S. Highway 15 from the Tippah and Union counties line to about a mile north of Ripley, the county seat and largest city in Tippah County.
The ground-breaking was a big deal in Tippah County. The project has been on the drawing board since 2002 when the Legislature passed a bill called Vison 21 that established a method to four-lane highways in Mississippi based on needs and available money.
The section of U.S. 15 was on the initial Vison 21 map as an โimmediate need.โ More than two decades later, the state’s political leadership traveled to near the Tennessee state line to celebrate the ground-breaking.
Progress, finally.
Highway 15 has been in need of four-laning for decades, especially the section between New Albany in Union County and Ripley. Traffic on the two-lane road moves at a snail’s pace thanks in part to the big trucks at a furniture factory in the area and other businesses.
The ground-breaking more than two decades after U.S 15 was made a priority highlights the lack of funding the Department of Transportation has had for new highway construction projects. For more than a decade, the Department of Transportation has lacked enough money to maintain existing roads, much less construct new highways.
Thanks in large part to national economic conditions and federal funds, including the 2021 federal infrastructure bill, Mississippi currently has more money for roads and bridges. Mississippi has surplus funds that are being used, in part, on road and bridge needs. Work will begin soon on a few other highway projects.
But the surplus state money is not likely to last. The three Transportation commissioners and their executive director, Brad White, are still talking about the need for a source of new, sustained money to fund the state’s transportation needs on an ongoing basis. Central District Transportation Commissioner Willie Simmons focused on the need of a new source of revenue recently during the political stumping at the Neshoba County Fair.
Many also would argue that the lack of funding has been exacerbated at times by the Legislature passing bills to place projects above those cited as priorities by the process spelled out in Vision 21.
Gov. Reeves, who was no doubt the star in Tippah County at the ground-breaking, was blamed by some for bypassing the Vison 21 projects as lieutenant governor.
In 2014, the House voted to kill the Department of Transportation budget because of what House leaders described as the Senate leadership’s insistence on placing โpet projectsโ in the bill.
Those projects included the six laning of Lakeland Drive in suburban Jackson near where then-Lt. Gov. Reeves, who presided over the Senate, lived.
The issue of Lakeland Drive was a major one during Reeves’ successful 2019 gubernatorial bid as it came to light that part of the Lakeland Project included building a $2 million frontage road to make it easier for people in the gated neighborhood where Reeves lived to gain access to Lakeland Drive.
The access road was scrapped by the Transportation Commission after it made news. The addition of the extra lanes on Lakeland Drive was completed.
Reeves took credit for the six-laning of Lakeland, but said he had no input on the frontage road. But emails at the time indicated that members of his staff were in discussions with MDOT officials about the project.
Then-MDOT Executive Director Melinda McGrath said in correspondence with Reeves that the Legislature in budgeting money for projects such as Lakeland Drive was ignoring the Vison 21 priorities.
Work is finally beginning on Highway 15 in Tippah County and the governor said he is happy about it.
On social media he posted, โStopped in Tippah County to break ground on a nearly $200 million Highway 15 expansion project. This massive investment will help further solidify Mississippi as a transportation hub for the country. Together, we’re making our infrastructure bigger and better than ever before.โ
Slowly, that might be finally happening.
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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