A new guided missile Navy destroyer ship will be named in honor of former Mississippi governor and U.S. Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus.

Current Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro made the announcement this week at the Surface Navy Association’s 37th National Symposium in Arlington, Virginia.

The USS Ray Mabus will be built at Pascagoula’s Ingalls Shipbuilding, and Mabus’ daughter Liz Mabus will sponsor the ship.

“I am honored to announce four new ships which represent the future of our fleet,” Del Toro said in a news release.

Mabus served as Mississippi’s governor from 1988 until 1992 and was 39 years old when first elected. Before then, he was the state auditor. He later became the nation’s secretary of the Navy from 2009 until 2017, making him the longest serving Navy secretary since World War I.

Mabus was a surface warfare officer on the USS Little Rock in the early 1970s. He was later the ambassador to Saudi Arabia under President Bill Clinton.

“Serving my country in uniform as a young LTJG aboard a guided missile cruiser and then, decades later, leading our naval services are the greatest privileges and most consequential times of my life,” Mabus, an Ackerman native, said in a news release. “The highest honor of my life is to know that sailors will defend our country and represent our values around the world for years aboard a ship bearing my name. That LTJG would never have imagined and this former SECNAV could not be more thankful, more honored, or more moved.”

According to the news release, during Mabus’s tenure as secretary, “the Navy went from building fewer than five ships per year to having more than 70 under contract. He championed the ‘21st Century Sailor and Marine’ initiative to build and maintain the most resilient and ready force possible. He directed the Navy and Marine Corps to change the way they use, produce, and acquire energy, setting an aggressive goal of relying on alternative sources for at least 50% of their energy by 2020.”

Mabus also, at the direction President Barack Obama, developed the plan, the bulk of which was passed by Congress, to restore the Gulf of Mexico after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon explosion and massive oil spill.

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

The Mississippi chapter of the ACLU has submitted a proposal to redraw the state’s legislative districts that creates two new majority-Black Senate districts and pits two pairs of incumbent senators against one another. 

The plan, submitted on behalf of Black residents and the state branch of the NAACP, creates a new majority-Black Senate district in north Mississippi’s DeSoto County and in south Mississippi’s Hattiesburg area. 

“Any proposed maps that attempt to meet the court order by diluting or undermining existing Black-majority voting districts in other parts of the state will fail the requirements set by the court and federal law,” Mississippi ACLU Director Jarvis Dortch said in a statement. 

The plan tweaks the boundaries of the existing 52 Senate districts. 

To accommodate new majority-Black districts, the plan places Republican Sens. Kevin Blackwell and David Parker, both of DeSoto County, in the same district. The same scenario would happen to Republican Sens. John Polk and Chris Johnson of Hattiesburg. 

Neither the Senate nor the House has released a redistricting proposal, and the federal courts have not yet ruled on a submitted plan. 

Senate Rules Committee Chairman Dean Kirby, a Republican from Pearl, said on Mississippi Today’s “The Other Side” podcast that Senate leaders were “very close” to releasing a redistricting plan.  

For the House, the ACLU’s plan would make the District 22 seat in Chickasaw County currently held by Republican Rep. Jon Lancaster of Houston, who is white, a majority-Black voter district. This portion of the plan does not put any incumbents against each other. 

House Speaker Jason White, a Republican from West, said he did not know when the House leadership planned to release its redistricting plan but that it was one of his priorities and he plans to “get it done.” 

The ACLU proposal stems from a successful legal challenge the organization filed against state officials that argued the legislative districts drawn in 2022 by the state Legislature diluted Black voting strength. 

LISTEN: Podcast: ‘Deja vu all over again’: Senate President Protem Dean Kirby outlines 2025 issues

A federal three-judge panel agreed, ordering the state to create more majority-Black districts and conduct special elections within the impacted districts this year. 

Only a couple of legislative districts will significantly change, but the Legislature will also have to tweak many districts to accommodate new maps. State officials in court filings have argued that the redrawing would affect a quarter of the state’s 174 legislative districts.

While the court ultimately placed the burden on the Legislature for creating a new map that satisfies federal voting laws, it ordered that the ACLU and the plaintiffs should be ready with an alternative plan if they object to the state’s plan that must be adopted by the conclusion of the 2025 session, which ends in the spring.

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

Jan. 16, 1959

The Minneapolis Lakers met the Cincinnati Royals in an NBA game before a crowd in Charleston, West Virginia. Local fans were eager to see their hometown basketball hero, “Hot Rod” Hundley, play alongside rookie phenom Elgin Baylor, but Baylor sat out to protest racism he and other Black players had experienced the night before. 

“The first thing I said was I was really hurt by that,” he recalled. “I thought about it and I said, ‘I’m not going out there. We’re not like animals in the circus or something and then go out there and put a show on for them.’” 

After arriving in Charleston, a local hotel had denied rooms to him and the two other Black players, Boo Ellis and Ed Fleming. Hundley exploded, telling a hotel official, “You listen to me! You know who this is? Now find us some rooms! All of us!” The official refused, and the Lakers relocated elsewhere. 

The indignities didn’t end there. When the team tried to eat at a local restaurant, they refused to serve the Black players, too. Upset by Baylor’s absence at the game, a local promoter urged Maurice Podoloff, the president of the NBA, to discipline Baylor, calling the player’s absence from the lineup “most embarrassing to us.” 

The NBA president responded, “I would find it hard to punish a man for trying to protect his self-respect and dignity.’’ 

Baylor became one of the best basketball players of all time, a talented NBA executive and an ambassador for the sport. But it wouldn’t be his last encounter with racism. That came when he worked with Donald Sterling, then team owner of the LA Clippers. 

After audio tapes revealed his racism, Sterling was banned from the league. Three years before Baylor’s death in 2021, the Lakers unveiled a statue of him outside the arena, and he published a book about his life in basketball called “Hang Time.”

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