Mississippi Today
J.Z. George’s descendant advocates for removing the statue of the Confederate icon from the nation’s Capitol
The great-great-great grandson of Confederate icon J.Z. George wants to see his ancestor's statue moved from the U.S. Capitol back to Mississippi.
Each day, hundreds visit the Capitol's Statuary Hall to glimpse the two statues from each state. Mississippi is the only state represented strictly by Confederate leaders. They are George and Jefferson Davis, the former president of the Confederacy.
In recent decades, states such as Alabama and Florida have replaced statues of those who fought in the Civil War or supported secession with notable leaders or trailblazers. States pay for the statues, which represent deceased citizens “illustrious for their historic renown or for distinguished civic or military services such as each State may deem to be worthy of this national commemoration.”
Beyond Confederate figures, Ohio replaced a slave-supporting governor with inventor Thomas Edison. California replaced a little-known minister with former President Ronald Reagan. North Carolina replaced a white supremacist politician with evangelist Billy Graham.
Mississippi, however, has stood pat.
It is time that changed, said George's ancestor, Charles Sims of New Braunfels, Texas, a combat veteran, Ole Miss graduate and founder of The Dream 2020. “Racial hatred or racism shouldn't be honored.”
He would love to see Medgar Evers, a World War II veteran buried in Arlington National Cemetery, take the place of George, a Civil War veteran, he said. “I'd like to replace a soldier with a soldier.”
Medgar Evers fought in Normandy and later became part of the Red Ball Express, a convoy system that used Army trucks to haul food, gasoline, ammunition and other supplies to U.S. forces as they raced across France.
When Evers returned home, he and his brother and other Black soldiers tried to vote, only to be turned away by white men with guns. After that, he began battling in the civil rights movement and became the first field secretary for the Mississippi NAACP.
Sims knows all about fighting. He spent more than eight years in the Army, much of it in combat in Iraq.
Many of those in his lineage, like George, were slave owners. Three of his ancestors signed the Mississippi Articles of Secession, which called for the state to secede from the nation: “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery—the greatest material interest of the world.”
Two years after the Civil War ended, Reconstruction began, and so did a reign of terror against Black Mississippians and those who supported them.
George became known as the “Great Redeemer” for his role in returning white supremacy to power after Reconstruction ended. That work culminated in the 1890 Constitution, designed to disenfranchise Black Mississippians through poll taxes and constitutional quizzes.
“There is no use to equivocate or lie about the matter,” future Gov, and U.S. Sen. James K. Vardaman declared, “Mississippi's constitutional convention of 1890 was held for no other purpose than to eliminate the n—– from politics.”
The changes worked. Within a decade, the number of Black registered voters fell from more than 130,000 to less than 1,300.
Other Southern states followed Mississippi's lead, barring Black voters in every way they could. Grandfather clauses. White primaries. Violence. Voter intimidation.
“We cannot erase the past, but neither should we be a prisoner of it, either,” Sims said. “J.Z. George was the architect of the Jim Crow laws. I am not proud of this. … I think the statue should be removed from the Capitol because we cannot honor racial hatred.”
He said family members may not agree on whether the statue should be removed from Statuary Hall, but all agree that if that happens, the statue should come home to the Cotesworth Plantation in Mississippi.
Leslie McLemore, who helped found the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, said he would vote for civil rights pioneer Fannie Lou Hamer to take George's place at Statuary Hall.
After 44 years as a sharecropper, she joined the movement and eventually captivated a nation with her story and her songs, he said. “She inspired a generation of people to get involved in the movement. To honor somebody like that is special.”
Sims said he once heard civil rights pioneer James Meredith, the first known Black American to attend the University of Mississippi, remark, “Mississippi is at the center of the universe, the center of the racial issue, the center of the poverty issue.”
Those words struck a chord with Sims. “I thought, ‘Wow, Mississippi could be the center of something.'”
Despite these days of division, Sims feels the winds of change.
“I feel it is important to change the narrative about Mississippi and show that we have the ability to reach across party and racial lines in search of conflict resolution,” he said. “This is to highlight that we have the power to sit down and talk to people about the things that divide us.”
The past can be overcome, he said, “once people stop shouting at each other and begin listening to each other.”
Some people believe there's been so much hatred for so long that they can't reach out to a Black family because “they're not going to accept my hand in reconciliation,” he said. “Well, that's how I've done it, and I'm not close to done.”
He has met with the families of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Jacob Blake, all victims of police violence. He also met with the niece of Rosa Parks, who refused to give up her bus seat and sparked the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott.
“It's been truly amazing,” Sims said. “If I could do this as the great grandson of Jim Crow, what is anybody else's excuse?”
The truth is that people aren't willing to do what it takes to move the nation forward, he said. “If we value reconciliation, we have to be willing to put the hard work in to achieve it. If we value the dream, we have to be willing to live it and pray about it fully, not just talk about it fully.”
In his “I Have a Dream” speech delivered to those gathered at the 1963 March on Washington, Martin Luther King Jr. said, “I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave-owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood. I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.”
When Sims heard those words, he said he felt they were aimed at him. “I think Dr. King sent me an invitation through history.”
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This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
Lawmakers may have to return to Capitol May 14 to override Gov. Tate Reeves’ potential vetoes
Legislators might not have much notice on whether they will be called back to the Mississippi Capitol for one final day of the 2024 session.
Speaker Jason White, who presides over the House, and Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann, who presides over the Senate, must decide in the coming days whether to reconvene the Legislature for one final day in the 2024 session on Tuesday at 1 p.m.
Lawmakers left Jackson on May 4. But under the joint resolution passed during the final days of the session, legislators gave themselves the option to return on May 14 unless Hosemann and White “jointly determine that it is not necessary to reconvene.”
The reason for the possible return on Tuesday presumably is to give the Legislature the opportunity to take up and try to override any veto by Gov. Tate Reeves. The only problem is the final bills passed by the Legislature — more than 30 — are not due action by Reeves until Monday, May 13. And technically the governor has until midnight Monday to veto or sign the bills into law or allow them to become law without his signature.
Spokespeople for both Hosemann and White say the governor has committed to taking action on that final batch of bills by Monday at 5 p.m.
“The governor's office has assured us that we will receive final word on all bills by Monday at 5 p.m.,” a spokesperson for Hosemann said. “In the meantime, we are reminding senators of the possibility of return on Tuesday.”
A spokesperson for White said, “Both the House and Senate expect to have all bills returned from the governor before 5 p.m. on Monday. The lieutenant governor and speaker will then decide if there is a reason to come back on May 14.”
The governor has five days to act on bills after he receives them while legislators are in session, which technically they still are. The final batch of bills were ready for the governor's office one day before they were picked up by Reeves staff. If they had been picked up that day earlier, Reeves would have had to act on them by Saturday.
At times, the governor has avoided picking up the bills. For instance, reporters witnessed the legislative staff attempt to deliver a batch of bills to the governor's Capitol office one day last week, but Reeves' staff refused to accept the bills. They were picked up one day later by the governor's staff, though.
Among the bills due Monday is the massive bill that funds various projects throughout the state, such as tourism projects and infrastructure projects. In total, there are more than 325 such projects totaling more than $225 million in the bill.
In the past, the governor has vetoed some of those projects.
The governor already has taken action of multiple bills passed during the final days of the session.
He allowed a bill to strip some of the power of the Public Employees Retirement System Board to become law without his signature. The bill also committed to providing a 2-and-one-half percent increase in the amount governmental entities contribute to the public employee pension plan over a five year period.
A bill expanding the area within the Capitol Complex Improvement District, located in the city of Jackson, also became law without his signature. The CCID receives additional funding from the state for infrastructure projects. A state Capitol Police Force has primary law enforcement jurisdiction in the area.
The governor signed into law earlier this week legislation replacing the long-standing Mississippi Adequate Education Program, which has been the mechanism to send state funds to local schools for their basis operation.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
On this day in 2007
MAY 10, 2007
An Alabama grand jury indicted former state trooper James Bonard Fowler for the Feb. 18, 1965, killing of Jimmie Lee Jackson, who was trying to protect his mother from being beaten at Mack's Café.
At Jackson's funeral, Martin Luther King Jr. called him “a martyred hero of a holy crusade for freedom and human dignity.” As a society, he said, “we must be concerned not merely about who murdered him, but about the system, the way of life, the philosophy which produced the murderer.”
Authorities reopened the case after journalist John Fleming of the Anniston Star published an interview with Fowler in which he admitted, despite his claim of self-defense, that he had shot Jackson multiple times. And Fleming uncovered Fowler's killing of another Black man, Nathan Johnson. In 2010, Fowler pleaded guilty to second-degree manslaughter and was sentenced to six months behind bars.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
‘This doesn’t need to be a slap on the wrist,’ DA says of Noxubee County case
A capital murder investigation helped lead to unrelated federal charges against former Noxubee County Sheriff Terry Grassaree and his deputy that involved the sexual abuse of a jailed woman.
On Tuesday, Grassaree pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI when he denied receiving nude photos and videos from a woman locked in his jail. He faces up to five years in federal prison when he is sentenced Aug. 7.
His former deputy, Vance Phillips, pleaded guilty last year to bribery, which experts say could have been the perks the woman received, including a contraband cellphone. No date has been set for his sentencing.
District Attorney Scott Colom said Thursday he would like to see serious punishment for Grassaree for such abuse. “This doesn't need to be a slap on the wrist,” he said.
He said the discovery of this abuse began with a capital murder case. In 2015, Kristopher Haywood died in a convenience store attack in Macon when someone blasted the 28-year-old twice in the head with a shotgun.
A Noxubee County grand jury indicted Jonathan Shumaker, his girlfriend, Elizabeth Layne Reed, and Justin Williams and his brother, Joshua, on capital murder charges. Shumaker was also found in possession of a shotgun and charged with possession of a firearm by a felon. (These charges were dropped last year after an audio recording surfaced that exonerated them.)
But when Colom inherited the case as the new district attorney in 2016, he said he discovered the evidence and some of the witnesses contradicted the description of what happened.
Three years later, as he prepared for trial, he said his office interviewed Reed, who shared that deputies had been having sex with her inside the jail, “but you're not going to do anything about it.”
Colom promised that he would.
He said he reached out to federal authorities in 2019 for assistance out of concern that it might be difficult to investigate law enforcement in such a small county.
He said his office took the lead. One of his workers messaged Deputy Phillips from Reed's Facebook page a photograph of a positive test for pregnancy.
“That's how we got Vance to corroborate that Reed was telling the truth about the unlawful sex,” Colom said. “We knew we had a serious problem then.”
Any sex that an officer has with someone behind bars is a felony under Mississippi law and carries up to five years in prison. The maximum penalty under federal law is also five years.
There is no way for those behind bars to give consent, Colom said. “They're in a vulnerable situation. Their liberty and freedom can be used against them.”
Reed told Colom's office that the sex began with Phillips after he began transporting her to doctors' visits. He first took her to his trailer to have sex and then had sex with her while the female correctional officers were at lunch, Colom said.
The encounters also took place in deputies' offices, the interrogation room and even the evidence shed, he said.
The deputy continued to demand sex with her on an almost weekly basis between May 2017 and October 2019, according to a lawsuit she filed against Noxubee County and the sheriff's office. “Reed, under the coercion of Phillips' authority and her incarceration, acquiesced in Phillips' demands.”
Another deputy, Damon Clark, who gave her cigarettes and a touchscreen cell phone, took her up front to a shower, where “he laid me on the floor [and] got on top of me,” she told authorities.
Clark has never been charged. “I never coerced Reed into sex,” he wrote in his response to the lawsuit, but he never answered whether he had sex with her.
Reed told authorities that one other deputy digitally penetrated her and another groped her and “sexted” her.
Colom said their investigation into sexual abuse corroborated much of what Reed alleged. It was then, he said, “we realized we had a serious problem with the Noxubee County Sheriff's Office under the regime of former Sheriff Terry Grassaree.”
Their investigation showed Grassaree knew about his deputies' activities, but rather than referring the matter to authorities, he sought to “get in on the action himself,” Colom said.
Reed's lawsuit said Grassaree demanded “a continuous stream of explicit videos, photographs and texts” from her in jail. She also alleged in the lawsuit that Grassaree touched her in a “sexual manner.”
The county settled the lawsuit for an undisclosed amount.
Colom said he decided to turn over his investigation to federal authorities with the agreement they would prosecute since they could pull far more potential jurors. Getting enough people to serve as jurors has long been a problem in Noxubee County, which has a population of less than 10,000, much less finding impartial jurors, he said.
On July 13, 2020, an FBI agent interviewed Grassaree, who denied that he received nude photos and videos from Reed in jail.
Two years later, reporters from the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting at Mississippi Today and The New York Times began asking Colom about the case. Colom responded that he was waiting for federal authorities to prosecute as they agreed. Afterward, he contacted federal authorities again and told them reporters had reached out to him, asking questions.
In October 2022, a federal grand jury finally indicted Grassaree and Phillips.
Colom said federal authorities “never gave me a good reason for why they took so long.”
He said even more troubling in his investigation was the discovery of “illegal activities” by the sheriff's office “that were unrelated to sex.” There have been no indictments in that case.
Noxubee County residents already have a lot of skepticism toward law enforcement, he said, “so when you actually do have corruption, it has to be aggressively handled. We can't have police forces where the people we are trusting to protect and serve are only concerned about themselves and their own illegal agendas.”
He still hopes federal authorities will prosecute, he said. “It would send a strong message to the citizens in Noxubee County that you care about them.”
Asked if his office could bring state charges now, he said that was impossible because “the statute of limitations has run.”
Federal authorities have a five-year statute of limitations, but the statute of limitations in Mississippi is only two years.
Colom said he didn't move sooner because federal officials “had agreed to prosecute the charges and kept telling me they were going to do something.”
A spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney's office in Jackson responded Thursday, “The Department of Justice follows the facts, law, and principles of federal prosecution when determining how to proceed in an investigation and what charges, if any, can be filed. Federal agents and prosecutors will continue working hard every day to hold public officials in Mississippi, like Sheriff Grassaree, accountable for corrupt use of their office and efforts to mislead investigators.”
Former U.S. Attorney Michael Hurst, who served from 2017 to 2021, said prosecuting public corruption was one of his top priorities, especially when it involved law enforcement who “violated their oath and victimized our citizens.”
He said if the U.S. attorney's office had sufficient evidence beyond a reasonable doubt to prosecute, “we prosecuted them, no matter who they were, period. In many instances, federal prosecutors are the last line of defense in our society of ensuring that our citizens are protected, their rights are upheld, and that criminals — especially corrupt public officials — are held accountable.”
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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