Mississippi Today
Yazoo City: Home to two Super Bowl stars and so much football history
Yazoo City: Home to two Super Bowl stars and so much football history
YAZOO CITY – Today we take a football-themed tour of Yazoo City, birthplace and hometown of defensive tackle Fletcher Cox and running back Kenneth Gainwell, who will play for the Philadelphia Eagles in Sunday’s Super Bowl.
That’s right: This little town of about 10,000 residents on the southeastern edge of the Mississippi Delta produced two of the 96 players who will dress out for a game that will be watched by about 100 million viewers around the world.
Cox played at Yazoo City High, while Gainwell, a distant cousin, played at Yazoo County High, about eight miles south of town.
This seems an absolutely perfect time for this tour. Our guide is Yazoo City High School athletic director Tony Woolfolk, who played for the Yazoo High Indians, the Alcorn State Bravesand later was Cox’s high school coach. We are to meet at the high school. But first, I drive into town on Jerry Clower Boulevard, named for the famous, countrified comedian, who before becoming famous, played tackle for Mississippi State. Clower once told me, “You remember when ol’ Showboat Boykin scored seven touchdowns in one Egg Bowl for Ole Miss? Well, he stepped right on my big belly when he scored the last one.”
I take a left off Clower Boulevard onto Willie Morris Parkway, named for the great Mississippi author, once a Yazoo City halfback. Willie Morris described his hometown as “half Delta, half hills, all crazy.” Crazy about football, that’s for sure. Willie once wrote a short story about high school football titled “The Fumble” and a book titled “The Courting of Marcus Dupree.” If you haven’t read the story or the book, you should. Willie often described himself as “Yazoo City’s other Willie” in deference to fellow Yazoo native Willie Brown, the Pro Football Hall of Famer and Oakland Raiders Super Bowl hero who died in 2019. Willie Morris would quickly tell you, “Willie Brown was only the greatest cornerback in football history.”
READ MORE: RIP Willie Brown, who never forgot Mushroom Street or Yazoo City
One more left turn gets us to the high school, where Woolfolk, a starting safety for the Alcorn Braves in the 1984 Alcorn-Mississippi Valley “Game of the Century,” is unloading soft drinks and snacks for that night’s basketball game. He knows a thing or two about Yazoo City football history.
First, Tony shows me the Yazoo High trophy case with literally hundreds of sports trophies and plaques, including one saluting 1968 Big Eight Conference Player of the Year Larry Kramer, once one of the most promising running backs in Mississippi history before injuries slowed him at Ole Miss. There’s another plaque that documents the retirement of Fletcher Cox’s red and white Indians jersey number 54. Asked about the first time he ever set eyes on Cox, Tony answers, “It was the summer after his eighth grade year. There were a bunch of kids out on the field playing ball and one of them was at least a head taller and a whole lot faster than the rest of them. I pointed and said, ‘Who is that kid?’ Somebody said, ‘That’s Bug-eye Cox.’”
Bug-eye?
“Yeah, that’s what everybody called him back then. His granny named him that because his eyes kind of bulged,” Tony says. “It stuck. Over time, I shortened it to Bug. I still call him Bug, but I knew the first time I saw him, we had us one — a potential superstar. Even then, he was bigger than everybody else and he could really, really run. You know Bug ran the 4 x 100 relay in track for us.”
I did not know that, but the idea of a 6-foot, 4-inch, 240-pound sprinter is kind of frightening. (Cox, a six-time Pro Bowler, now weighs 310.)
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From the trophy case we move on to the football field at what is now called Fletcher Cox Stadium. We go through the locker room with nice wooden lockers provided by Bug-Eye himself. We go through the weight room with 10 racks of weights, all paid for by Fletcher Cox, who apparently does not forget where he comes from. “When Bug came through here, we only had two weight racks,” Tony says. “He wanted to make sure these kids have more.”
Tony says Fletcher’s mom, who was a single parent, didn’t want him to play high school football. “She was afraid he would get hurt,” Tony says. “I told her she didn’t need to worry about that. The only concern was how many people he was gonna hurt.”
There have been a few, first at Yazoo, then at Mississippi State and finally with the Eagles, where he has played all of his 11-year career after being the 12th pick of the first round of the 2012 draft.
Our tour guide suggests a ride around Yazoo. He wants to show us where Fletcher grew up in an area neighborhood called Jonestown. We take River Road, which runs along side the Yazoo River, for which the town is named. We are actually searching for Fletcher Cox Street, going slowly by the street signs until we pass Gentle Ben Street named for Gentle Ben Williams, another remarkable defensive lineman from Yazoo, the first Black football player at Ole Miss and a 10-year star with the Buffalo Bills. Turns out, Ben Williams and Fletcher Cox grew up in the same neighborhood, only a few streets apart. That has to set records for defensive tackles per capita.
“I got a lot of my best players from Jonestown,” Tony says.
I tell Tony that Willie Morris used to tell me about the Brickyard Hill neighborhood, where Willie Brown grew up and where Mushroom Street has become Willie Brown Street. We head that way and I quickly learn where the “half hills” of Yazoo City are. Willie Brown Street tops one of the biggest hills.
Brown, who played for the legendary Eddie Robinson at Grambling, made one of the most iconic plays in Super Bowl history 45 years ago. That’s when he intercepted Fran Tarkenton’s pass and returned it 75 yards for a game-clinching touchdown in the Raiders’ victory over the Minnesota Vikings.
Says Tony Woolfolk, “When I was growing up, Willie was everybody’s hero in Yazoo City. I played in football shoes that Willie Brown sent home to us. They were shoes that the Raiders had already used, but they were like brand new to us. We were playing NFL shoes. It meant the world to us.”
Tony makes another stop on the way back to the school. We’re at the Yazoo middle school, that sits in what used to be a public park in the early 1900s, Tony says. “Take a look at that sign over there,” Tony says.
So I do, and it commemorates the site of Mississippi’s first organized high school football game played in 1905. Yazoo City won, of course, beating Winona 5-0.
There’s just so much football history here in Yazoo. We haven’t even mentioned the Heidel brothers (Jimmy, Ray and Roy) of Ole Miss fame; Houston Hoover (Jackson State), who played seven years in the NFL for three different teams; Elex Price (Alcorn State), an eight-year pro with the New Orleans Saints; or Gov. Haley Barbour, who played both football and baseball for the Yazoo Indians. We could go on and on, but it’s time to go and Tony has a basketball game that evening.
I head back south toward Jackson, more than little hungry from all the sight-seeing. So I stop at the Hall of Fame Restaurant , a little spot I’ve long heard about on the east side of U.S. 49 in an area known as Little Yazoo. There, I am greeted by David Brown, who happens to be Willie Brown’s older brother and the proprietor. The resemblance between David and his younger brother is startling.
I ask him, “Did you play football, too?”
“Man, I taught Willie how to play,” David says, smiling.
“Hungry?” he asks.
“Starving,” I said.
He shows me the menu, and there it is right there at the top. I order the Willie Brown Burger. Five minutes later, I get it, the biggest and surely one of the best burgers I’ve ever encountered. I tell David you could do bicep curls with that hamburger.
He smiles. “You ain’t gonna be hungry for a while,” he says.
And he is right. I leave, sated both on the Willie Brown Burger and rich Yazoo history.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Did you miss our previous article…
https://www.biloxinewsevents.com/?p=207891
The University of Mississippi Medical Center has acquired Canton-based Merit Health Madison and is preparing to move a pediatric clinic to Madison, continuing a trend of moving services to Jackson’s suburbs.
The 67-bed hospital, now called UMMC Madison, will provide a wide range of community hospital services, including emergency services, medical-surgical care, intensive care, cardiology, neurology, general surgery and radiology services. It also will serve as a training site for medical students, and it plans to offer OB-GYN care in the future.
“As Mississippi’s only academic medical center, we must continue to be focused on our three-part mission to educate the next generation of health care providers, conduct impactful research and deliver accessible high-quality health care,” Dr. LouAnn Woodward, UMMC’s vice chancellor of health affairs, said in a statement. “Every decision we make is rooted in our mission.”
The new facility will help address space constraints at the medical center’s main campus in Jackson by freeing up hospital beds, imaging services and operating areas, said Dr. Alan Jones, associate vice chancellor for health affairs.
UMMC physicians have performed surgeries and other procedures at the hospital in Madison since 2019. UMMC became the full owner of the hospital May 1 after purchasing it from Franklin, Tennessee-based Community Health Systems.
The Batson Kids Clinic, which offers pediatric primary care, will move to the former Mississippi Center for Advanced Medicine location in Madison. This space will allow the medical center to offer pediatric primary care and specialty services and resolve space issues that prevent the clinic from adding new providers, according to Institutions of Higher Learning board minutes.
A UMMC spokesperson did not respond to questions about the services that will be offered at the clinic or when it will begin accepting patients.
The Mississippi Center for Advanced Medicine, a pediatric subspecialty clinic, closed last year as a result of a settlement in a seven-year legal battle between the clinic and UMMC in a federal trade secrets lawsuit.
The changes come after the opening of UMMC’s Colony Park South clinic in Ridgeland in February. The clinic offers a range of specialty outpatient services, including surgical services. Another Ridgeland UMMC clinic, Colony Park North, will open in 2026.
The expansion of UMMC clinical services to Madison County has been criticized by state lawmakers and Jackson city leaders. The medical center does not need state approval to open new educational facilities. Critics say UMMC has used this exemption to locate facilities in wealthier, whiter neighborhoods outside Jackson while reducing services in the city.
UMMC did not respond to a request for comment about its movement of services to Madison County.
UMMC began removing clinical services this year from Jackson Medical Mall, which is in a majority-Black neighborhood with a high poverty rate. The medical center plans to reduce its square footage at the mall by about 75% in the next year.
The movement of health care services from Jackson to the suburbs is a “very troubling trend” that will make it more difficult for Jackson residents to access care, Democratic state Sen. John Horhn, who will become Jackson’s mayor July 1, previously told Mississippi Today.
Lawmakers sought to rein in UMMC’s expansion outside Jackson this year by passing a bill that would require the medical center to receive state approval before opening new educational medical facilities in areas other than the vicinity of its main campus and Jackson Medical Mall. Republican Gov. Tate Reeves vetoed the legislation, saying he opposed an unrelated provision in the bill.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
The post UMMC hospital madison county appeared first on mississippitoday.org
Note: The following A.I. based commentary is not part of the original article, reproduced above, but is offered in the hopes that it will promote greater media literacy and critical thinking, by making any potential bias more visible to the reader –Staff Editor.
Political Bias Rating: Center-Left
The article presents a primarily factual report on UMMC’s expansion into Madison County, outlining the medical center’s services and strategic decisions while including critiques from Democratic leaders and local officials about the suburban shift. The inclusion of concerns over equity and access—highlighting that the expansion is occurring in wealthier, whiter suburbs at the expense of services in majority-Black, poorer neighborhoods—leans the piece toward a center-left perspective, emphasizing social justice and community impact. However, the article maintains a measured tone by presenting statements from UMMC representatives and government officials without overt editorializing, thus keeping the overall coverage grounded in balanced reporting with a slight progressive framing.
Nationally known comedian Rita Brent will host the Medgar & Myrlie Evers Institute’s “Medgar at 100” Concert on June 28.
Tickets go on sale Saturday, June 14, and can be ordered on the institute’s website.
The concert will take place at the Jackson Convention Complex and is the capstone event of the “Medgar at 100” Celebration. Organizers are calling the event “a cultural tribute and concert honoring the enduring legacy of Medgar Wiley Evers.”
“My father believed in the power of people coming together — not just in protest, but in joy and purpose, and my mother and father loved music,” said Reena Evers-Everette, executive director of the institute. “This evening is about honoring his legacy with soul, celebration, and a shared commitment to carry his work forward. Through music and unity, we are creating space for remembrance, resilience, and the rising voices of a new generation.”
In addition to Brent, other featured performers include: actress, comedian and singer Tisha Campbell; soul R&B powerhouse Leela James; and Grammy award-winning artist, actor, entrepreneur and philanthropist Q Parker and Friends.
Organizers said the concert is also “a call to action — a gathering rooted in remembrance, resistance, and renewal.”
Proceeds from the event will go to support the Medgar & Myrlie Evers Institute’s mission to “advance civic engagement, develop youth leadership, and continue the fight for justice in Mississippi and beyond.”
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
The post Rita Brent, Q Parker headline 'Medgar at 100' Concert appeared first on mississippitoday.org
Note: The following A.I. based commentary is not part of the original article, reproduced above, but is offered in the hopes that it will promote greater media literacy and critical thinking, by making any potential bias more visible to the reader –Staff Editor.
Political Bias Rating: Centrist
This article presents a straightforward, factual report on the upcoming “Medgar at 100” concert honoring civil rights leader Medgar Wiley Evers. The tone is respectful and celebratory, focusing on the event’s cultural and community significance without expressing a political stance or ideological bias. It quotes organizers and highlights performers while emphasizing themes of remembrance, unity, and justice. The coverage remains neutral by reporting the event details and mission of the Medgar & Myrlie Evers Institute without editorializing or promoting a specific political viewpoint. Overall, it maintains balanced and informative reporting.
Residents at Chapel Ridge Apartments in Jackson are left wondering what to do next after months dealing with trash pileups, property theft and the possibility of water shutoffs due to the property owner skipping out on the bill.
On Sunday, Ward 5 Councilman Vernon Hartley, city attorney Drew Martin and code enforcement officers discussed next steps for the complex, which, since April 30, has been without a property manager.
“How are you all cracking down on other possible fraudulent property managers around Jackson?” one woman asked Martin.
“ We don’t know they’re there until we know they’re there, and I know that’s a terrible answer, but I don’t personally have another one I’m aware of right now,” Martin said. “These individuals don’t seem to have owned another apartment complex in the Metro Jackson area, despite owning a whole bunch nationwide.”
Back in April, a letter was left on the door of the leasing office advising residents to not make rental payments until a new property manager arrives. The previous property managers are Lynd Management Group, a company based in San Antonio, Texas.
The complex has been under increased scrutiny after Chapel Ridge Apartments lost its solid waste contract mid-March due to months of nonpayment. The removal of dumpsters led to a portion of the parking lot turning into a dumping site, an influx of rodents and gnats, and an investigation by the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality. Local leaders pitched in to help remedy the situation, and in May, Waste Management provided two dumpsters for the complex.
However, the problems persisted. In May, JXN Water released the names of 15 apartment complexes that owe more than $100,000 in unpaid water fees. Chapel Ridge was on the list. JXN Water spokesperson Aisha Carson said via email that they are “pursuing legal options to address these large-scale delinquencies across several properties.”
“While no shutoffs are imminent at this time, we are evaluating each case based on legal feasibility and the need to balance enforcement with tenant protections. Our focus is on transparency and accountability, not disruption—but we will act when needed to ensure the integrity of the system,” Carson said.
And earlier this week, Chapel Ridge Apartments was declared a public nuisance. Martin said this gives the city of Jackson “the authority to come in, mow the grass and board up any of the units where people aren’t living.”
Martin said the situation is complicated, because the complex is owned by Chapel Ridge Apartments LLC. The limited liability corporation is owned by CRBM Realty Inc. and Crown Capital Holdings LLC, which are ultimately owned by Moshe “Mark” Silber. In April, Silber was sentenced to 30 months in prison for conspiracy to commit wire fraud affecting a financial institution. Earlier this month, both companies filed for bankruptcy in New Jersey.
Now, Martin said the main goal is to find someone who can manage the property.
“Somebody’s got to be able to collect rent from you,” Martin said. “They got to be able to pay the water. They got to be able to pay the garbage. They got to be able to pay for the lights to be on. They got to maintain the property, so that’s our goal is to put that in place.”
Chapel Ridge offers a rent scale based on household income. Those earning under 50% of the area median income — between $21,800 and $36,150 depending on household size — for example, pay $480 for a two-bedroom and $539 for a three-bedroom unit. Rent increases between $20 and $40 for those earning under 60% of the area median income.
Valarie Banks said that when she moved into Chapel Ridge nearly 13 years ago, it was a great community. The disabled mother and grandmother moved from West Jackson to the complex because it was neatly kept and quiet.
“It was beautiful. I saw a lot of kids out playing. There were people that were engaging you when you came out. They were eager to help,” Banks said. “ I hope that they could bring this place back to the way it once was.”
But after months of uncertainty, Banks is preparing to move. She said she’s not the only one.
“I have somewhere to go, but I’m just trying to get my money together so I can be able to handle the deposits and the bills that come after you move,” she said. “All of my doctors are around here close to me. In 12 years, I made this place home for me. … I’ve been stacking my rent, but it’s still not enough if I want to move this month.”
While she said she’s holding onto her rent payments for the time being, she realizes that many of her fellow residents may not be as lucky. Without someone to maintain the apartments, some residents are finding themselves without basic amenities.
“Some people are in dire straits, because they don’t have a stove or a fridge or the air conditioner,” she said. “Their stove went out, or the fridge went out, or they stole the air conditioner while you’re in the apartment.”
Banks isn’t the only one who is formulating a plan to leave. One woman, who asked to remain anonymous, said she’s been trying to save money to move, but she already has $354 wrapped up in a money order that she’s unable to pass off for her rent, due to the property manager’s recent departure.
“It really feels like an abandonment and just stressful to live where I’m living at right now. This just doesn’t happen. It just feels stressful. It doesn’t feel good at all,” she said.
She’s trying to remain optimistic, but as each day passes without someone to maintain the property, she’s losing hope.
“ I just hope that things get better some day, somehow, hopefully, because if not, more than likely I’m going to have to leave because I can only take so much,” she said. “I can’t continue to deal with this situation of hoping and wishing somebody comes, and they don’t.”
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
The post Future uncertain for residents of abandoned south Jackson apartment complex appeared first on mississippitoday.org
Note: The following A.I. based commentary is not part of the original article, reproduced above, but is offered in the hopes that it will promote greater media literacy and critical thinking, by making any potential bias more visible to the reader –Staff Editor.
Political Bias Rating: Center-Left
This article from *Mississippi Today* primarily focuses on the struggles of low-income residents at Chapel Ridge Apartments, emphasizing the human impact of property mismanagement, regulatory gaps, and systemic neglect. The piece maintains a factual tone, but it centers the voices of vulnerable tenants and local officials seeking accountability—hallmarks of a center-left perspective. While it does not overtly advocate for policy change, the narrative framing highlights social injustice and institutional failures, subtly aligning with progressive concerns about housing equity and corporate responsibility.
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