Mississippi Today

Mother calls for man exonerated of raping and murdering her child to go free

Published

2 months ago

July 3, 2025

mississippitoday.org – @MSTODAYnews – 2025-07-03 15:52:00

by Jerry Mitchell and Catherine Legge, Mississippi Today
July 3, 2025

Prosecutors fighting the release of death row inmate Jimmie Duncan after a judge found him “factually innocent” of raping and murdering 23-month-old Haley Oliveaux are “not speaking for Haley’s family,” her mother says.

Speaking publicly for the first time, Allison Layton Statham called for Duncan to go free in a July 22 bail hearing. “This innocent man is on death row,” she told Mississippi Today. “Justice needs to be done.”

In April, a judge threw out Duncan’s conviction, questioning their conclusions and citing the failures of his court-appointed counsel.

Prosecutors have appealed the judge’s decision and are fighting his release on bail, saying Duncan poses both a flight risk and “a safety risk to not only the victim’s family, but also the general public.”

Statham disagreed and said she wants all of the evidence, including a sealed video of a bite-mark expert examining her child’s body, made available so that everyone can know the truth. “Authorities are still wanting to bury the truth,” she said. “What they did was railroad him.”

For a long time, Haley’s paternal aunt, Jennifer Berry, awaited word of Duncan’s execution, she said. “We’ve mourned quite a few people in our family, and we have never mourned like we mourned when that child died.”

Haley Oliveaux ’s paternal aunt, Jennifer Berry, had awaited word of Jimmie Duncan’s execution in the child’s death but, since digging into the case, now believes he should go free.

Since talking with a documentary filmmaker in February and digging into the case, she believes he should go free. “I’ve been in turmoil since realizing this,” she said. “He’s a young man who was falsely accused of a crime he didn’t commit.”

She has petitioned prosecutors, the attorney general and the governor for a meeting but has yet to receive a reply.

The judge’s dismissal marks at least 10 wrongful convictions involving pathologist Dr. Steven Hayne, who has since died, or bite-mark expert Michael West, who once claimed he matched a suspect’s teeth to a half-eaten bologna sandwich. Eight of these wrongful convictions happened in Mississippi.

In 1994, the American Board of Forensic Odontology suspended West for a year for overstating credentials and misidentifying bite marks, and a dozen years later, he was forced to resign from the American Board of Forensic Pathology.

In 2008, the state of Mississippi barred Hayne from doing autopsies. He once wrote in his autopsy report about removing and examining a victim’s ovaries. The problem? The victim was male.

That same year, Levon Brooks and Kennedy Brewer were exonerated after spending a combined 30 years in prison. West’s bite-mark testimony helped convict Brooks of the rape-murder of a 3-year-old girl in Noxubee County. When another 3-year-old girl was raped and killed, West gave bite-mark testimony that helped lead to a death sentence for Brewer.

DNA discovered the truth: a serial killer had raped and murdered both girls. He confessed to his crimes, and Brooks and Brewer were freed.

It remains unknown how many other wrongful convictions these experts may have played a role in. Hayne once said he conducted up to 30,000 autopsies in Mississippi. West has said he analyzed more than 300 bite marks and investigated more than 5,000 deaths. He no longer believes bite marks should be used in court and did not respond to requests for comment on the dismissal of Duncan’s conviction.

Berry felt compelled to come forward now and call for a review of each case in Louisiana and Mississippi involving these discredited experts, she said. “Every case they put their fingers on needs to be reopened and examined.”

‘I wasn’t going to lie for them’

On the morning of Dec. 18, 1993, Statham said as she left for work Oliveaux was bouncing on her bed, tossing her “moo cow” in the air. She said she left her daughter in the care of the 25-year-old Duncan, whom she loved and had been living with for several months.

Duncan, who has maintained his innocence for more than three decades, told police he made Oliveaux oatmeal for breakfast and put her in the bathtub, where the water measured less than 3.5 inches. While doing dishes, he said he heard a noise and found her face down in the water. He said he grabbed her out of the tub and ran next door. The neighbors, paramedics and doctors were unable to save the life of Oliveaux, who had suffered recent seizures.

When Statham said she arrived at the emergency room, Duncan was distraught, apologizing over and over. Police charged Duncan with negligent homicide.

At the hospital, when West Monroe Police Detective Chris Sasser examined the body and saw the girl’s anus dilated and “laying open,” he concluded she “had been sodomized,” according to the police report. “It was a horrible sight.”

Rather than use a nearby pathologist, then-District Attorney Jerry Jones had the girl’s body transported two hours away to Mississippi for Hayne to do the autopsy. After the pathologist examined Oliveaux, he called in West to examine suspected bite marks.

Video captures West’s initial examination, starting at 9:35 p.m. He mentions a bruise on her left elbow, possible abrasions and contusions, and visible diaper rash. No mark can be seen on her cheek, and West makes no mention of one.

Twenty minutes later, Hayne telephoned Detective Sasser and said at about the time of the child’s death, she suffered lacerations and penetration to the anus, which the pathologist attributed to sexual assault, as well as multiple contusions to multiple surfaces on the body and lacerations and contusions to the scalp, according to the police report.

Hayne also said there were adult bite marks on the child made at or about the time of death and asked for the suspect’s dental molds.

After receiving this information, Sasser contacted a prosecutor, and the charge was upgraded to first-degree murder, which can carry a death penalty in Louisiana.

Publicity photo of Michael West for “The Innocence Files”

After the molds arrived the next day, the video resumed. West can be seen jamming a mold of Duncan’s teeth into the child’s cheek. West identified these as bite marks belonging to the suspect.

Hayne did the autopsy. He concluded that Haley’s death was a homicide, that her injuries suggested she had been sexually assaulted at or about the time of her death and that she had been forcibly drowned.

Other pathologists questioned Hayne’s conclusions. A rape kit came back negative. The Louisiana State Crime Lab tested Duncan’s clothing, the child’s clothing and her bath toys for any seminal fluid. There was none.

In the days following her daughter’s death, Statham said prosecutors called her into their office. She said they asked her if her daughter ever said or implied that Duncan wanted her to suck his penis like a baby bottle.

She told Mississippi Today that her toddler daughter could hardly speak. “She could say, ‘I want burgers,’ or ‘I want M&Ms,’” she said.

After she told them no, she said they replied, “If you don’t tell the truth, you could be implicated.”

She was 21 at the time. “My baby died, and the man I loved had been hauled off,” she said. “It was very intimidating. I was scared. But I wasn’t going to lie for them.”

Months later, police got a statement from jail inmate Michael Cruse. He quoted Duncan as saying the baby pointed at his penis and he said “something about a bottle or bobble.” Cruse later testified that Duncan said he blacked out and when he came to, he was trying to have sex with the baby and killed her because he “couldn’t get the baby to be quiet.”

To demonstrate his innocence, Duncan took a polygraph test. He reportedly showed no deception when he said he didn’t kill the child or hold her head underwater. Jurors never heard this, because polygraphs are inadmissible as evidence.

By the time the trial began in 1998, much of the important physical evidence was gone. The rape kit had been lost. So had Hayne’s autopsy slides. Samples of her blood that no one had tested for toxicology — a standard practice for autopsies — had been destroyed. So had Hayne’s detailed reports on his slides.

All that experts had available to examine were Hayne’s autopsy report and a few photos of the child’s body and injuries.

In his opening remarks at the 1998 murder trial, the district attorney said Duncan “rode that baby like a bull” and “in a sexual frenzy … bit her behind the ear … bit her elbow … She screamed, and she died in a bathtub full of water so bloody you couldn’t see the bottom.”

With West’s credentials now under question, prosecutors relied on another expert, who looked at West’s photos and identified Duncan as the one who made bite marks on the child. That expert didn’t see West’s video. Neither did the defense experts. Neither did the jury.

Questions about his credentials led Mississippi to bar using the late pathologist Dr. Steven Hayne for autopsies.

Hayne backed up the prosecution theory that Duncan drowned the child to cover up his sexual assault. He told jurors the bruise on her head was “consistent with a digit, such as a thumb or finger, pressing down on the back of the head.”

Asked if the child could have suffered a seizure, Hayne said no because “the brain showed no sign of seizure activity.”

Hayne testified that the child wouldn’t have survived her anal injuries, and another doctor told jurors there would have been so much blood, it would be like someone having their head cut off.

But police never found a drop of blood anywhere in the house, never found any evidence of cleaning. The detective later said if there had been any blood or semen at the scene, they would have discovered it.

Hayne testified that fragmented tomato, pickle and onion were in the child’s stomach, but no oatmeal — a detail prosecutors seized on as proof that Duncan concocted this cover story to conceal his horrific crime.

When police arrived, they found oatmeal in the kitchen, in the bathtub and on Duncan’s clothing. The neighbor saw uncooked oatmeal when he cleared Oliveaux’s throat before performing CPR.

The prosecutors told jurors the uncooked oatmeal was proof he planted it.

The jury convicted Duncan and sentenced him to death.

‘Bad medicine, bad science and bad lawyering’

Tucker Carrington, who wrote a book on Hayne and West with journalist Radley Balko, “The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist,” said the Louisiana case bears similarities to the case of Jeffrey Havard, convicted of capital murder for allegedly raping and killing an infant in Natchez in 2002, thanks to Hayne’s testimony.

Havard has said he was bathing his girlfriend’s 6-month-old baby, Chloe Britt, when she slipped from his hands and hit her head on the toilet.

But as in Duncan’s case, law enforcement officers thought the baby had been sexually assaulted. At trial, a parade of doctors and nurses testified about anal rips and tears they saw, describing the worst anal trauma they had seen, and prosecutors called Havard a monster.

The autopsy report, however, showed no such damage, only anal dilation and a small contusion. The rape kit came back negative.

Despite that, Hayne’s testimony backed the prosecution’s theory of sexual assault, and Havard was sentenced to Mississippi’s death row.

After examining the case, renowned pathologist Dr. Michael Baden concluded that Britt’s injuries were consistent with her being accidentally dropped and that she wasn’t sexually assaulted. “Dilation of the anus occurs normally in children when they die as muscles relax and when seen by a casual observer can be misinterpreted as evidence of perimortem penetration,” he said.

Other pathologists agreed with Baden that the anal dilation had been misread as abuse, and in 2014, Hayne told a reporter he didn’t believe a rape took place. He said the anal contusion could have resulted from a bowel movement.

He originally testified that the baby had died from shaken baby syndrome. Now he said he didn’t believe that was true because science had since determined such conclusions were flawed.

At least 37 people have been exonerated in shaken baby cases after being wrongly imprisoned, according to the National Registry of Exonerations.

Graham Carner of Jackson, Jeffrey Havard’s current attorney, said his client’s case is filled with “bad medicine, bad science and, frankly, bad lawyering.”

After a three-day hearing where the defense called Hayne to testify, the trial judge reduced Havard’s sentence from death to life. His appeal for freedom is now pending in U.S. District Court.

Havard’s lawyer, Graham Carner of Jackson, said the case is filled with “bad medicine, bad science and, frankly, bad lawyering.”

After a three-day hearing where the defense called Hayne to testify, the trial judge reduced Havard’s sentence from death to life. His appeal for freedom is now pending in U.S. District Court.

“Innocence is different than not guilty, and innocence is different than you didn’t get a fair trial,” Carner said, “but I believed as soon as I dug into Jeffrey’s case that he was an innocent man and I believe that to this day.”

‘Science, like law, evolves over time’

The damage that Hayne and West have done to Mississippi is immense, said former state Supreme Court Justice Oliver Diaz Jr., and he is stunned the state has never reviewed their cases for possible wrongful convictions.

“They operated in Mississippi for years unchecked,” he said. “Mississippi used Hayne as the state medical examiner, even though he did not meet the statutory qualifications.”

Hayne’s testimony helped convict Tyler Edmonds, who was just 13 when he falsely confessed that he and his half-sister had both killed her husband. He said she had told him she would “fry,” but he would go unpunished.

At trial, Hayne testified that the fatal wound was consistent with two people pulling the trigger, saying, “I can’t exclude one [shooter], but I think that would be less likely.”

The Mississippi Court of Appeals concluded such testimony was scientifically unfounded: “You cannot look at a bullet wound and tell whether it was made by a bullet fired by one person pulling the trigger or by two persons pulling the trigger simultaneously.”

Former Mississippi Supreme Court Justice Oliver Diaz Jr. said he is stunned the state has never reviewed the cases Dr. Steven Hayne and Dr. Michael West worked on for possible wrongful convictions.

Diaz said Hayne’s testimony prompted him to dig deeper. “Two hands on a trigger? You don’t have to do any research to know that’s ridiculous,” he said. “That’s what led me to look at Hayne closer.”

What he found was disturbing. He didn’t realize Hayne was essentially acting as state medical examiner, but he wasn’t a board-certified pathologist.

Diaz wound up writing a scathing dissent centered on the pathologist that prompted other justices to change their minds, he said. “As science, like the law, evolves over time, one generation’s expert is another’s quack.”

He now regrets the first vote he cast on the high court, a death penalty case that relied on the words of Hayne and West, he said. “Based upon their testimony, my first Supreme Court vote was to execute an innocent man, Kennedy Brewer.”

He and other justices later supported the dismissal of Brewer’s conviction, and his last opinion called for the end of the death penalty. “It’s not a workable system when errors like this can take place,” he said. “No matter how careful we are, we’re going to vote to execute innocent people.”

What the jury never heard

In November 1993, Statham brought her daughter twice to the hospital for seizures after she stopped breathing. One doctor suggested she could be suffering from Stevens-Johnson Syndrome, a potentially life-threatening reaction, often to medication, that can cause lesions in the mouth and the genital area. The disease can also cause seizures.

Nearly three weeks before her death, a chest of drawers fell on Haley, who suffered three skull fractures and a subdural hematoma that caused her to spend six days in the hospital. Duncan and Statham told child social services that she had been climbing to reach her piggy bank.

But the jury never heard about this serious injury because of a deal that Duncan’s original lawyers made with prosecutors.

Pathologists say it’s critical to know everything possible about a person’s medical history before drawing conclusions about a death. Testimony shows police knew Oliveaux’s medical history, but it remains unclear if Hayne knew that history before concluding she had been raped and killed.

In a six-day hearing last September, two pathologists called Hayne’s conclusions unfounded, said they saw no evidence of a rape or homicide, and believed Haley drowned accidentally, perhaps after suffering a seizure.

In one sworn statement, former jail inmate Michael Lucas said he heard Duncan tell Cruse that he didn’t kill the toddler. An investigator testified that Cruse now admits he lied at the 1998 trial because he wanted leniency for the felony he was facing.

Duncan’s lawyers told those at the hearing that they planned to show West’s video involving Haley, warning that it was graphic and disturbing. An excerpt of that video had first surfaced in 2009 when the Reason website published it. The video appalled many in the legal and forensic science communities.

The video showed West jamming, dragging and scraping Duncan’s dental mold across the child’s body dozens of times. Some of those in the courtroom gasped, some covered their eyes, and others, including Duncan, wiped away tears.

After seeing the video, Lowell Levine, past president of the American Board of Forensic Odontology, called what West did “fraud.”

In 2009, the National Academy of Sciences concluded there was no basis in science for forensic odontologists to conclude a person is “the biter” to the exclusion of all other suspects.

Adam Freeman, past president of the American Board of Forensic Odontology, testified that the bite marks identified on Haley weren’t bite marks at all. He called these determinations “junk science” that can’t be defended scientifically.

In 2015, he helped conduct a study on the reliability of bite marks. In all but a few cases, board-certified dentists couldn’t even agree if they were looking at a bite mark. As a result, he resigned from leadership in protest and stopped doing any bite-mark analysis.

Nationwide, at least 34 wrongful convictions have occurred since 1989 because of bite marks, six of them in Mississippi that all involve West, according to the National Registry of Exonerations.

Dr. Robert Bux, who served as chief medical examiner for the El Paso County Coroner’s Office in Colorado Springs, questioned how Hayne could say the child’s injuries matched shoving her face underwater.

If that were so, “I’d expect to see injuries on the front part of her body, particularly on her forehead or nose, cheeks, anterior parts of shoulders, anterior parts of the knees,” said Bux, who helped investigate Pat Tillman’s death in Afghanistan.

The autopsy showed lacerations to the anus. Bux said these could have been caused by an infection, a diaper rash, a hard stool or vigorous washing. “There’s no way to know. You have to look at it microscopically, and it wasn’t looked at,” he said.

Up until 2007 or so, people believed anal dilation proved sexual abuse, he said. “A dilated anus means nothing. We saw it all the time in adults and children.”

The lack of blood at the scene suggests something other than a violent assault, he said. “It’s absolutely bloodless. I mean where is the blood in the sink? Where’s the blood on the victim?”

He rejected the claim by Hayne that the child stopped bleeding because she was dead. Blood gives way to gravity, he said. “It’ll come out drip, drip, drip, so, you’re going to see it, and you’re going to see it for hours, and you’re going to see it for days. I don’t think you can just wash that off because it’s going to continue to ooze after she’s dead.”

Her death appears to be “a tragic accident of drowning,” he said. “I don’t see any evidence to me that would support that it was forced.”

She drowned, possibly because she suffered another seizure, he said, “but I can’t prove that because Hayne didn’t do any investigation that would help us on that.”

Hayne’s lack of research and examination prompted Duncan’s lawyers to twice ask for the exhumation of Oliveaux’s body before the 1998 trial. The judge denied the requests.

Her mother said if her daughter’s body needs to be exhumed to answer any questions, she supports that. “It might give us some answers to what happened then,” Statham said.

If prosecutors win their appeal, Duncan would remain on death row and face execution. ProPublica and Verite News reported that Duncan’s bid for freedom has become more urgent with Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry pushing for executions. In March, Louisiana held its first execution in 15 years, using nitrogen oxide to put Jessie Hoffman Jr. to death.

If Duncan faced another trial, jurors would hear a much different story, his lawyers said. “Rather than the State’s sensational story of pure horror — including rape, biting, blackouts, a panicked forcible drowning, and a cover-up involving massive quantities of blood that Mr. Duncan, cold and calculating, cleaned up before seeking help for the child — the jury would instead hear the true story: Haley tragically but accidentally drowned in the bathtub.”

After the 1998 trial, Statham spiraled downward. She could have survived her daughter’s death, but surviving this horror story proved nearly impossible, she said.

Duncan’s conviction didn’t just destroy his life, she said. “All of our families were destroyed by this. We’re still collateral damage in this.”

Catherine Legge is an award-winning documentary filmmaker who lives in Toronto. Formerly executive producer of original video for GEM, she also spent two decades traveling around the world as a documentary director at CBC. Her indie films under her banner Play Nice Productions have been shown in 250+ countries including “The Unsolved Murder of Beverly Lynn Smith,” “Met While Incarcerated/From Prison With Love,” and “Billion Dollar Caribou.” Her current film and podcast “The Murder That Never Happened” takes place on death row in Louisiana.

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

The post Mother calls for man exonerated of raping and murdering her child to go free 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

The article reports on the legal case of Jimmie Duncan without taking a partisan stance, focusing on facts, court proceedings, and statements from both supporters and prosecutors. It presents perspectives from the victim’s family members advocating for Duncan’s release and from prosecutors opposing it, as well as critiques of forensic experts involved. The language is measured and fact-based, avoiding emotive or loaded terms that suggest ideological bias. The article highlights systemic issues in forensic science and wrongful convictions but does so through documented evidence and expert opinions, maintaining a neutral tone overall.

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Mississippi Today

Lackey family members show value of education

Published

4 days ago

August 21, 2025

Staff Editor

mississippitoday.org – @MSTODAYnews – 2025-08-21 11:12:00

by Simeon Gates, Mississippi Today
August 21, 2025

As children during the 1950s, Hilliard Lackey and Lillian Troupe often had to skip school to pick cotton with their sharecropping parents.

They grew up together in the small north Mississippi town of Marks, both raised by devoutly Christian families.

Marks has struggled with poverty for generations, and problems were compounded by Mississippi’s history of underfunding public education for Black students. Schools remained segregated, and both said it was common for Black children around them to drop out or miss school so they could work in the fields.

Water towers in Marks, Miss.

“That was the life we knew, the life we inherited,” Hilliard Lackey said.

Hilliard and Lillian met as classmates in sixth grade, started dating in high school and married in 1966. Despite the challenges of the time, their parents and church leaders encouraged them to be ambitious and succeed.

Today, several members of the Lackey family have doctoral degrees: Hilliard and Lillian Lackey; their daughters, Tahirih Lackey and Dr. Katrina Davis; the couple’s daughter-in-law, Tracy Knight Lackey; and his stepbrother and sister-in-law, Dr. Robert Long and Vanessa Rogers Long.

Pew Research Center found that as of 2023, about 26% of all Black Americans 25 and older have a bachelor’s degree or higher, and 11% have advanced degrees. In Mississippi, 18.5% of Black residents have a bachelor’s degree or higher.

Hilliard Lackey is a longtime professor of urban higher education and lifelong learning at Jackson State University. He attended what was then called Jackson State College, earning his bachelor’s in history and political science, pre-law track, in 1965. (It became Jackson State University in 1974.)

Hilliard Lackey – who later earned a master’s degree in educational administration, an education specialist degree in the same topic, and a doctorate in higher education administration – was the first in his family to go to college.

“I left home and came to a whole new city, a whole new environment. It’s a college,” he said, looking back on the experience. “And I was astounded, and scared, and frightened and bewildered.”

The H. P. Jacobs Administration Tower on the Jackson State University campus in Jackson, Wednesday, Aug. 13, 2025.

Lillian, then still named Troupe, attended Coahoma Community College before transferring to what was then called Alcorn Agricultural and Mechanical College – since 1974, Alcorn State University. She graduated from Alcorn with a bachelor’s in business education in 1966 and earned a masters in education administration from Jackson State in 1974.

She was still living and working in Marks during community college.

“I went to Coahoma … rode the school bus, came home, got out of my clothes, went to the field, picked cotton,” she said. “And so I picked my way out of the cotton field to Alcorn.”

alcorn state university — The Chapel, one of the iconic buildings at Alcorn State University in Lorman, Miss.

In June, West Coast Bible College & Seminary awarded Lillian Lackey an honorary doctorate for her years of community service.

Two of Hilliard and Lillian Lackey’s four children have doctorates. Davis has a medical degree and is a urogynecologist. Tahirih Lackey has a doctorate in civil environmental engineering and is a research hydraulic engineer at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Research and Development Center.

Both sisters say their parents’ emphasis on education and success and their religious faith influenced their career paths.

Davis recounted that every Sunday, each member of the family stood in front of the fireplace and discussed what they’d done that week to achieve their goals. She and her siblings attended a variety of academic and athletic summer programs before and during college.

Hilliard and Lillian Lackey converted from Christianity to the Baha’i faith as adults. They raised their children “essentially as Christian Baha’is,” according to Hilliard Lackey, and let them choose what religion to follow when they were 15 years old.

“They pretty much told us, ‘Whatever you want to be, you can be, and we’ll be there to help you,’” Davis said.

“I would recognize that my parents, they were always helping other people. Like, throughout my whole life they demonstrated those concepts,” Tahirih Lackey said.

“None of us thought we had any barriers,” Davis said. “If there were barriers, they were from our own mental blocks.”

Hilliard Lackey’s stepbrother, Dr. Robert Long, is a dentist in Clarksdale. Long also credits his upbringing for his success, saying his parents raised him and his siblings with a strong work ethic and Christian values.

“They instilled in us that nobody is going to give you anything, nobody is obligated to give you anything,” Long said.

Long grew up in a small rural town in Quitman County, 15 miles from Marks. He had a similar upbringing to Hilliard Lackey. His parents encouraged him to get an education.

He attended Earlham College, where he majored in biology and found a mentor who inspired him to become a dentist.

He described his undergraduate experience as a “culture shock” and an “academic shock.” He chose to persevere through the challenges.

“I knew I could go home,” he said, “but I didn’t want to go home.”

Vanessa Rogers Long grew up in a middle-class family in the small community of Memphis, Mississippi, and, like most of her family, has lived a life dedicated to service.

She was the first Black hospital administrator for the Mississippi Department of Corrections. She founded Mississippi Delta Connection, which is part of Links Inc. She also mentors teens on service and leadership skills. She has received several honors, including having her sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha, dedicate a bench to her at her alma mater, LeMoyne-Owen College.

“Service is what I do,” she said.

Hilliard and Lillian Lackey are also deeply involved in community service, including their “Lackey Scholars” program inspired by a former teacher. Hillard Lackey estimates they’ve helped more than 500 high school students from Quitman County attend and graduate from Jackson State since 1967. In addition, they mentor dozens of students from Quitman County’s Madison Shannon Palmer High School to act as role models for their peers and the community.

Hilliard Lackey, a longtime Jackson State University professor, shows a cellphone image of himself and his wife, Lillian Troupe Lackey, on Thursday, July 3, 2025, at their north Jackson home. They have four children, two of whom have earned doctorates along with several other family members.

“That’s just been our thing, it’s always been,” Lillian Lackey said. “To help somebody, if they were hungry, if they were cold, if they were whatever.”

When asked what he would tell first-generation college students, Hilliard Lackey said: “Education is an equalizer. It gives an advantage to the disadvantaged. It levels the legacy playing field.”

Jackson State University professor Hilliard Lackey, left, reviews the history of the Poor People’s Campaign, to a group of supporters who gathered at the Mississippi Capitol in Jackson, Miss., Monday, June 11, 2018, to demand lawmakers and statewide elected officials address the need for union rights, living wages, fully funded anti-poverty programs and support of public education. (AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis)

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

The post Lackey family members show value of education appeared first on mississippitoday.org

Political Bias Rating: Center-Left

This article emphasizes the value of education, community service, and overcoming historical racial and economic challenges, themes often highlighted in center-left discourse. It acknowledges systemic issues like underfunding of Black education in Mississippi while focusing on personal achievement and community upliftment without overt political partisanship. The tone is positive and supportive of education as a tool for social mobility, aligning with moderate progressive values but avoiding strong ideological language.

Mississippi Today

This superintendent took a failing Delta school district to a ‘B’ rating. Now, she’s leaving

Published

5 days ago

August 20, 2025

Staff Editor

mississippitoday.org – @devnabose – 2025-08-20 04:55:00

by Devna Bose, Mississippi Today
August 20, 2025

INDIANOLA — The top of the Jeep was down, and Miskia Davis was behind the wheel, leading a parade through downtown Indianola.

It was 2019, just two years after the now 50-year-old Davis became superintendent of Sunflower County Consolidated School District. Back then, she wasn’t sure this moment would ever come.

She recalled feeling the first cool breeze of October as she waved at people who lined the street, smiling and celebrating.

Sunflower County Consolidated School District teachers and students celebrated their first “C” rating from the Mississippi Department of Education with a parade in October 2019.

But it had — the district’s first “C” rating, its first passing grade, and the community had shown up to a parade to celebrate the achievement. Generations of teachers and Sunflower County graduates stood on the sidewalk, proudly cheering the assembly of cars and students.

“It was … Oh my God,” Davis said. “My children were like, ‘We did something.’”

The work hadn’t been easy, but it had been worth it, Davis thought — the number crunching, the doubt and lukewarm welcome she felt from the community, the tough decisions she’d had to make.

Now, she’s ready to move on.

Daughter of the Delta

From starting kindergarten to subbing for elementary classes, Davis’ childhood and career in Sunflower County and her identity as a daughter of the Delta were her strengths in the classroom, she said.

“I grew up in Drew, poor and with two young parents,” Davis said. “We didn’t have elaborate meals, and when I went home, the lights may have been off. But it made me who I am, and these children were experiencing the same things I experienced as a child.”

So Davis was relatable. But as a young high school teacher at Ruleville Central High School, some of her students looked older than her and many were taller than she was. She was forced to learn how to command respect, too.

One particular child taught her an invaluable lesson. He was a star football player in her biology class, and he was failing the course by two points. He caused trouble in class and Davis was determined to fail him, despite more experienced teachers prodding her not to, to look past her own ego.

So Davis gave him another chance. She had him do extra work and spent hours talking to him. She learned why he behaved poorly in class — he was one of seven children to a young, single mother.

“He was angry at the world, and I just happened to be in the world,” she said. “It taught me the power of relationships. I think that’s the most important catalyst in transforming education.”

It was during that time that her superintendent “saw something” in her and pushed her to become a school leader. That kickstarted her journey in administration.

Sunflower County Consolidated School District Superintendent Miskia Davis discusses the district’s academic turnaround at Zoe Coffee Co. in Cleveland, Miss., on Friday, July 11, 2025. Under Davis’ leadership, the district rose from an F rating to a B.

Davis soon learned she had a particular gift for turning failing schools around. Under her leadership as principal, Ruleville Middle School went from failing to an “A” letter grade in three years.

Her school improvement strategy began to take shape, similar to her teaching style. Davis was both a disciplinarian and someone to whom teachers and students could relate. She prioritized building strong relationships with teachers who were invested in their students. But she didn’t shy away from making controversial decisions, either. In Ruleville, she fired nearly all of the staff when she arrived.

But as Davis was gaining her footing as an administrator, Sunflower County School District was struggling.

After consistent failing grades resulted in the state takeovers of Indianola, Sunflower and Drew school districts, the Legislature decided to consolidate the three systems in 2012.

District consolidation is a massive undertaking for any community, but especially for Sunflower County — smack dab in the middle of the Delta, an under-resourced region with a shrinking population, high poverty rates and a deep history of racial exploitation.

Davis arrived in 2014 to a school district that had lost hope — a district that she didn’t recognize.

All Sunflower knew was ‘failure’

Davis never wanted to be superintendent.

She spent three years working under the leader of the consolidated district. But when the superintendent was dismissed in 2017, Davis was appointed to the head role in an interim capacity. She got the job in January of 2018 without ever applying.

So with another state takeover looming, Davis went to work. The biggest challenge? The district and the community seemed resigned to failure.

“We had been failing so long, that’s all we knew,” she said. “No one was even sad.”

Early on, Davis visited a school to discuss recent test results. She was so struck by teachers’ apathy that she stopped the meeting midway and had them tear off a scrap of paper and write “yes” or “no” to a question: Did the teachers believe their school could ever be successful?

More than half said no.

“They were teaching my children,” Davis said, tearing up. “And they didn’t think they would ever be successful.”

Davis went to the school board to tell members that she wouldn’t be renewing many of those teachers’ contracts. That’s when she realized she didn’t just need to boost test scores — she needed to change attitudes.

The hashtag #WINNING, pictured here in a parade in October 2019, was coined by Superintendent Miskia Davis. Under her leadership, it was used to celebrate every win in Sunflower County Consolidated School District. Davis hoped it would change the district’s culture and propel teachers and students toward academic achievement.

The hashtag #WINNING was born.

“We started to celebrate every little accomplishment,” Davis said. “We got T-shirts, shades, whatever. That was our mantra.”

Children received certificates for a week of perfect attendance. When students did well on benchmark assessments, teachers were ushered into the hallway to be celebrated by students and colleagues. Davis created the “Killin’ It” awards, given to students and teachers for meeting their testing benchmarks.

They were just certificates, at the end of the day. But it led to a changed school culture, a renewed belief that they could succeed.

As an administrator, Davis leaned on what she knew worked as a teacher, relationship-building and strong discipline (she even sent her nephew to alternative school for fighting), and combined it with a data-driven approach and an eagle-eyed focus on testing.

She put an academic coach in every building, whose sole responsibility was supporting teachers.

Davis took teacher Dylan Jones out of the classroom and put him in the central office, where he was tasked with tracking district metrics.

Jones uncovered which consultants were working and which were uselessly costing the district millions. The district went from contracting with 30 firms to just four.

Jones also created an accountability system for teachers. With one click, Davis could see how each teacher’s students were performing, and she gave everyone access to the data. If teachers weren’t meeting their goals, Davis hosted regular meetings and had them explain — in front of everyone — what they needed to succeed.

Davis’ methods weren’t popular at first. Educators went to the school board and complained that the system was “punitive.” Some even quit. But Davis was steadfast and implored board members to see the work she and her team could do, if given the chance.

The district’s rating didn’t budge in 2018.

But in fall 2019, after Davis’ first full year as superintendent, Sunflower County Consolidated School District had earned its first “C” rating.

What happened after the first ‘C’

Those early years were difficult, Davis remembered, because she felt so isolated, just her and her team “in the trenches.”

She hosted community meetings, imploring local parents, leaders and business owners to support the district.

“They told me to come back when we were no longer failing,” Davis said.

So after that first “C,” when she started seeing the district’s hashtags on Facebook, when more people started coming to school events, when she started to get invited to speak at the local Rotary Club, it was bittersweet.

Teachers, too, took a while to come around. Their performance was being closely monitored through the accountability system, but soon they realized that Davis wasn’t giving them mandates outside of improving test scores. She gave them autonomy in their classrooms. Teachers had the final say on how to improve their students’ achievement. That kind of trust isn’t common, Sunflower County teachers told Mississippi Today.

It wasn’t until 2021, when voters passed a $31 million bond issue that would pay for major school renovations, that Davis felt the full support of the community.

Davis even won over Betty Petty, a local matriarch and fierce advocate for kids and parents.

“She has actually shown a presence at the schools, constantly meeting with teachers and making sure all children are learning,” Petty said. “We had community meetings where she would actually come out and listen to our concerns.”

Petty attended the ribbon-cutting ceremony at Gentry High School last July. Before renovations, plumbing problems caused flooding when it rained, so students had to wade through water to get from class to class. Davis said she’d never forget the sight of generations of Gentry graduates in the school atrium, looking around in wonder at the new facility.

“At first, I chose the community,” Davis said. “But eventually, the community chose me.”

Gentry High School in Indianola, Miss., on Friday, July 11, 2025. The school is part of the Sunflower County Consolidated School District, which improved from an F to a B rating under the leadership of Superintendent Miskia Davis.

The legacy she leaves behind

Strong schools make strong communities, but it can take time for results to show. Indianola Mayor Ken Featherstone hopes to see the dividends soon.

Featherstone took office four years ago, around the same time the district got its first “B” grade. It has maintained the grade ever since, the highest in the entire region.

He, like Davis, was reared in the Delta, but empathizes with her struggle garnering the support of a community deeply impacted by gun violence and low investment from state officials.

Ken Featherstone, mayor of Indianola, Miss., speaks about Superintendent Miskia Davis’ impact on local schools during an interview in Indianola on Friday, July 11, 2025. Featherstone praised Davis for leading the Sunflower County Consolidated School District from an F to a B rating.

“People are very result-oriented,” he said, leaning back at his desk in city hall. “You till the soil, but it’s not until you start your seed breaking the ground do you see other people starting to water it. That’s just human nature.”

He’s hoping the district’s academic gains will be a boon for Indianola’s struggling economy.

“We’re seeing things slowly come to our area,” Featherstone said. “To get manufacturing jobs to come to our area, we have to improve our public school system. Directors and presidents of manufacturing plants … they need to know where their kids are going to attend school.”

Davis announced in October 2024 that she would be leaving the superintendent job at the end of the school year. Now, she travels the state, consulting with other districts on how to replicate what she did in Indianola, as a director of District and School Performance and Accountability for The Kirkland Group, an education consulting firm based in Ridgeland.

Her departure was a tough blow, Featherstone said, and leaves the district’s hard-fought success hanging in balance.

Petty and her network of parents are concerned, too.

“I don’t think any of us know what will happen moving forward,” she said.

Davis said there was no big epiphany. She just felt her mission was accomplished. She said she’s adamant that the district’s “best days are ahead,” under new superintendent James Johnson-Waldington.

Johnson-Waldington, who was most recently serving as superintendent of Greenwood Leflore Consolidated School District, is also Sunflower-grown, and he was Davis’ principal when she taught at Ruleville Central High School. He plans on employing strategies similar to Davis: holding teachers accountable and celebrating their achievements.

After all, if it’s working, why change it?

“I feel a good kind of pressure,” Johnson-Waldington said. “I like challenges, and this is a new challenge for me. I’m not taking a failing school district to success. This is about maintaining and growing, and I accept that challenge for the very reason that this is home. I’m going to work very hard to maintain what Miskia has done.”

Davis leaves behind a legacy, Featherstone said, that makes her hometown proud. He was in the crowd that day at the parade. He remembers the excitement, the pride.

“Older teachers were there, and you could see the look on their faces that they knew they had reared someone who threw the oar out to a sinking district and brought it back up,” he said.

“She made us see ourselves in a better light, and we can’t thank her enough.”

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

The post This superintendent took a failing Delta school district to a ‘B’ rating. Now, she’s leaving appeared first on mississippitoday.org

Political Bias Rating: Center-Left

This article presents a positive and detailed profile of an educational leader working to improve a struggling school district in a historically under-resourced and economically challenged region. The focus on community uplift, education reform, accountability, and addressing systemic challenges aligns with themes often emphasized by center-left perspectives. However, the article maintains a largely neutral and factual tone without overt political framing or partisan language, emphasizing pragmatic solutions and community collaboration rather than ideological positions.

Mississippi Today

Theology student’s ‘brain drains back home’ despite economics, safety concerns

Published

6 days ago

August 19, 2025

Staff Editor

mississippitoday.org – @BobbyHarrison9 – 2025-08-19 12:17:00

by Romy Felder, Mississippi Today
August 19, 2025

Editor’s note: This Mississippi Today Ideas essay is published as part of our Brain Drain project, which seeks answers to why Mississippians move out of state. To read more about the project, click here.

Though I imagine I’ll never return, more often than not, my brain drains back to Mississippi. My whole adult life has been a journey up and down the Hudson River, from New York City to the Adirondacks, but inevitably, I find my thoughts leaking toward another river.

I grew up fearing being left behind in the Rapture, but in earnest, it feels like I’m the one who left everyone behind. I’m not proud of this, but I’m certainly not ashamed. I have roots in the Northeast now, and a life that isn’t easily transplanted elsewhere, especially to the Red Clay Hills of Neshoba County. Life took me from Mississippi, and life keeps me away.

I left Mississippi for New York in 2015, and I estimate that I’ve returned only 11 times. My sporadic trips home have been mostly because I’m consistently broke, but now it’s a combination of that and concerns for my safety.

My mother, also limited by finances and Mississippi’s minimum wage, has visited me twice in 10 years, once in the spring of 2016 and then when I graduated from Yale Divinity School in 2023.

I haven’t been back since I came out as a trans woman and began medically transitioning in the winter of 2024. I try not to be overwhelmed with guilt or grief for the imagined, shared life I don’t experience with my mother. Rather, I’ve learned to cherish what we do have.

Romy Felder

It’s strange to be who I am, mostly for her but also for me. She has learned to love me regardless of whether or not she understands what I’m doing. In her mind, if you go to college, you become a nurse or a lawyer. You settle down, probably in Jackson, maybe Oxford, most likely in my hometown of Philadelphia, and commute by car more than an hour to work. You probably see your mom weekly. She sees her grandkids as often as possible.

That is not how life turned out. We do talk on the phone. Sometimes we get into once-a-week phone call sprees, other times, I drop off for weeks, maybe a month, when I’m depressed.

When I come home, she picks me up from the airport and drives me back a few weeks later. We crack the windows, smoke cheap Mississippi cigarettes and try to cram 10 years of a strange-to-us mother-daughter relationship into a 90-minute ride to the airport in Jackson. Usually, we talk about suffering, death, sin, God, the end of the world, and what the hell I am doing with my life.

You go to college to get a job, to make more money than your parents and to buy a strange suburban-but-rural McMansion just beyond city limits where you start a family around the age of 25 at the latest.

According to my mother, I went to the University of Mississippi and got brainwashed. She tells me often that it’s like she doesn’t know who I am, and she’s mostly right. She hasn’t met anyone I’ve dated in person since high school. She hasn’t seen me in person since transitioning, and I changed my name to Romy. I explain my relationship with my family to friends, peers, new partners and congregations, always with an articulate sense of heartbreak that I’ve learned to intellectualize and package up in a story of “working-class origins,” single motherhood, a white Christian nationalist rural community and my stumbling through adulthood “refusing not to live by my values.”

I originally left Mississippi to be an AmeriCorps Vista volunteer in the Capital Region of New York. I’d never been there. I took a Greyhound from Memphis to New York City to Albany, New York with two large suitcases and a backpack. Several of my friends from college had moved to New York City, and their couches and shared beds provided a safe launching pad for more of us. I had also fallen in love with a fashion student turned designer that I met on a trip to the city the year prior. Though that romance flamed and flickered for many years and ultimately flamed out, my reason for staying in the North was the life I was increasingly stumbling into.

I went there because, at the time, I had an insatiable desire to live out my values and politics. After all, I was maybe one of two socialist public policy majors at the Trent Lott Leadership Institute at the University of Mississippi, and I didn’t want to be a lawyer, a lobbyist or a policy wonk.

I wanted to be poor and engage in building sustainable autonomous communities. I wanted to learn how to be a person who had no work/life distinction, but a vocation and calling.

Through AmeriCorps, I luckily found a small group of activists, urban homestead types, organizers and ex-social workers living together helping others at the margins and themselves start businesses and worker-cooperatives while struggling through mental health crises, and taking on an impossible but seemingly always plausible dream of a directly democratic community owned, operated and governed only by those who live there.

This was my first “job” out of college. It was my dream come true, and the most difficult thing I’d ever done. I burnt out pretty hard after two years, and probably made somewhere between $25,000 and $30,000 during that whole time. Since then, the most I’ve made in a year is my current PhD stipend of about $34,000.

I was, however, helped along by friends, colleagues and the activist communities that I was stumbling into. Through them, I was encouraged to go to Union Theological Seminary, land a job at a prestigious artist residency in the mountains, go to Yale Divinity School, discern that I was called to be a priest and come to know myself as a trans woman.

My life outside of Mississippi has been sustained solely by relationships that transgress the boundaries between work and life, co-workers and friends. I regularly reflect on and often worry about how fragile this all is, and if my own vocational and intellectual pursuits have been worth what I’ve left behind or never had.

I’m not sure I’ll ever know. However, I’ve managed to find profound meaning in it all so far, and it keeps me digging myself into this hole in which I will hopefully find what I am looking for, or dig my own damn grave.

Originally from Philadelphia, Romy Felder (she/her) is currently a PhD student at Union Theological Seminary. She is also pursuing the priesthood in the Episcopal Diocese of New York. She has a background in worker-cooperative development, community organizing, popular education and arts management. Romy lives cavalierly but contentedly in Brooklyn, New York.

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

The post Theology student's 'brain drains back home' despite economics, safety concerns appeared first on mississippitoday.org

Political Bias Rating: Left-Leaning

This essay reflects a distinctly personal and ideological perspective rather than neutral reporting. The author frames Mississippi as economically limiting and socially unsafe, particularly for marginalized identities such as transgender individuals, while presenting Northern activist and academic communities in a sympathetic and aspirational light. References to socialism, worker-cooperatives, and critiques of conservative Mississippi culture suggest a worldview aligned with progressive or left-leaning politics. The tone is introspective and critical of traditional Southern expectations, while valorizing alternative, activist-driven lifestyles. As such, the piece is less about balanced reporting and more an expression of lived experience through a progressive lens.