Storied Jackson Medical Mall faces an uncertain future as UMMC clinics, health center depart

by Gwen Dilworth, Mississippi Today
May 22, 2025

Erica Reed could feel herself tearing up as she walked into work at Jackson Medical Mall on a Monday in April. 

It was the first time she had seen the lights out at the now relocated Jackson-Hinds Comprehensive Health Center’s adult medicine clinic – a harbinger of changes to come at the former shopping mall turned medical center. 

The transfigured shopping mall finds itself on the cusp of change as the University of Mississippi Medical Center, long one of the medical mall’s key stakeholders and largest lessee of space in the facility, readies itself to move many of its clinical services and reduce its square footage at the mall by about 75% in the next year. 

And with UMMC goes Jackson-Hinds Comprehensive Health Center, a federally qualified health center and one of the largest providers of primary health care services to poor and uninsured people in central Mississippi. The center has subleased space at the mall from UMMC for over a decade and is one of the last providers to offer primary health care services at the mall. 

“It was just very overwhelming when I walked in the clinic,” said Reed, who began working at the medical mall as a housekeeper in 2010 and rose through the ranks to become chief operating officer of the Jackson Medical Mall Foundation. “I had never seen the lights out. And so to see the lights out, you know, it was kind of a day like, ‘this is real.’” 

UMMC declined to answer any of Mississippi Today’s questions about its decision to leave the mall, future involvement at the mall or the impact that the changes will have on patients. 

Since the late 1990s, the medical mall has stood as an access point to health care and an economic anchor in a majority-Black neighborhood in Jackson with a high concentration of people living in poverty. People from across Jackson and Mississippi have also come to the mall to receive care. 

Jackson lawmakers argue that the loss of health care services will negatively affect patients who rely on the mall for health services and on the neighborhood as a whole. 

“The impact is going to be very severe on that area,” Rep. Chris Bell, D-Jackson, told Mississippi Today. “Not only just in the face of the residents who need medical services, but in the whole aspect of an empty medical mall with no cars, or very few vehicles in there, which shows no life, which adds opportunities for crime.” 

As Reed walked through the medical mall, she greeted each person she saw: patients, shop owners and fellow staff members. She picked crumpled receipts off the floor and threw them in the waste bin. The mall has grown into a home for her, she said. 

She has watched the mall adapt before, but the loss of primary care, pediatrics and other clinical services at the medical mall is one of the most significant adjustments the medical mall has yet faced. 

“We will persevere,” she said. “… One closed door is an opportunity for another open door.” 

A long history

When Jackson Mall opened its doors in 1970, it was the first shopping mall in Mississippi, drawing customers from across the state. But it didn’t take long for business to falter with the opening of Metrocenter Mall in 1978 and Northpark Mall in Ridgeland in 1984.

By the 1990s, the mall was largely vacant, with only a few tenants left. 

“The mall was but a skeleton of its onetime glory, surrounded by a decaying neighborhood,” wrote journalist Bill Minor in a 1998 column for the Clarion-Ledger. “For more than a decade it stood as a sort of elephant’s graveyard, a gargantuan relic of urban blight and a breeding ground for crime.”

Legislators and local leaders considered a range of failed proposals to revitalize the property in the late 1980s and 1990s. Plans proffered included a public arts school, an office building for state agencies, a federal Department of Defense accounting center, a latex glove plant and a temporary jail to ease prison crowding.

But the idea for Jackson Medical Mall, Executive Director Primus Wheeler recounted, was devised in an unexpected manner: drafted on a Piccadilly cafeteria napkin during a lunch meeting of Dr. Aaron Shirley, the first Black UMMC resident and then director of Jackson-Hinds Comprehensive Health Center, and Ruben Anderson, the first African American Supreme Court Justice in Mississippi. 

Anderson said it didn’t exactly happen that way, and he doesn’t remember the napkin. But a lunch at Picadilly’s – which has remained a tenant at the mall since 1970 – did launch the vision: a multi-institution medical and commercial facility that would bring together UMMC, Jackson State University and Tougaloo College. Shirley passed away in 2014.

Jackson Medical Mall Foundation – a collaborative nonprofit helmed by board members from each academic institution – purchased the crumbling mall property for $2.7 million and its first health clinic opened its doors to patients in 1997. 

Members from each academic institution remain on the foundation’s board today. The property is now worth $77 million, said Wheeler. 

The mall addressed UMMC’s urgent need at the time for additional space to expand its outpatient clinics, and gave it room to open additional services, including a diabetes center, an adult day care center and a prevention and wellness program. When UMMC clinics opened at the mall, it was the hospital’s largest presence away from its main campus on North State Street. 

UMMC has invested a total of $200 million in the medical mall over the years, according to the medical center. 

The medical mall foundation has also redeveloped the area surrounding the mall by creating affordable housing, bringing a grocery store to the area and selling an old pawn shop to a local bank aiming to help low-income people access banking services. 

The mall has served as a model for similar facilities across the country. In 2013, researchers estimated that there were 28 such facilities in the U.S. 

“It is something that wasn’t supposed to happen, wasn’t supposed to be successful, but with all the partners working together, it became a great success story,” said Wheeler. 

Health clinics’ departure

When Joey Goodsell began receiving cancer treatment at Jackson Medical Mall in 2023, he was impressed by the convenience of having all of his medical appointments housed at a single location. He was also struck by a palpable sense of community at the medical mall.

“It just felt like a neighborhood,” he said. 

But he has begun to notice changes. There are fewer cars in the parking lot, he said, and he recently received a notice that he will now have to go to UMMC’s main campus for certain health services.

UMMC has leased about half of the mall’s approximately 900,000 square feet of space since 2010. After May 2026, the medical center will maintain just 100,000 square feet of space at the mall, which will include renal and dialysis, dental, infectious disease, pharmacy, addiction and HIV services.

UMMC has shared little information publicly about their decision to leave the medical mall, but a February memo distributed to legislators outlined its plans to exit the mall in phases. 

UMMC will vacate unused, storage, administrative, education and subleased spaces in the mall by the end of this year, including clinic space subleased by Jackson-Hinds Comprehensive Health Center. The comprehensive health center has already removed adult medicine, cardiology, podiatry and social services from the mall. Its pediatrics clinic will leave in June and women’s health services by October.

UMMC will relocate the cancer center, OB-GYN and pain management services to its main campus by May 2026. 

In the memo shared with legislators, UMMC said that ongoing building infrastructure challenges at the mall have resulted in disruptions to UMMC business practices, and that the medical center has experienced challenges with city services including water, crime and aging roads and bridges in the surrounding area. 

Wheeler refuted these claims, saying that the building is in “great condition” because it was gutted in the late 1990s when the medical mall was created and has undergone constant renovations since then. The facility pumps in water delivered by tanker trucks when needed and crime is “basically nonexistent.” The mall has its own full-time security staff. 

“The place is just as solid and new as when it was first built in 1970,” he said. 

Mississippi Today spoke to patients from across the state who received health care services at Jackson Medical Mall. Many said they appreciated the convenience of the medical mall’s location and parking, clean facilities and the feeling of safety at the mall. But they also said some clinical services were crammed in areas that were too small, slowing patient visits, and that the roads around the facility are in disrepair. 

Goodsell said beyond a loss of convenience, he worries that the mall’s community will be lost once health services leave. 

“There’s this community that’s built up there, and people that have invested in putting a restaurant there,” he said. “And if all these people, if all the places move out of there, their livelihood is just evaporated.”

A ‘troubling trend’

At the same time that UMMC is scaling back services at Jackson Medical Mall, it is expanding outpatient clinical services in Ridgeland – a move that reflects a trend of UMMC outpatient clinics moving to wealthier, whiter areas in the Jackson suburbs. 

UMMC opened its Grant’s Ferry clinic in Flowood, which offers primary and specialty care, in 2010. 

Earlier this year, UMMC opened Colony Park South, another clinic offering primary and specialty care services, in Ridgeland. The movement of services to the new location allowed medical mall clinics to move to UMMC’s main campus, said LouAnn Woodward in an email to UMMC faculty staff and students in April. UMMC plans to open another clinic in Ridgeland next year. 

Census tract data shows that the area Jackson Medical Mall is located in has a median household income of $22,500 and that 93% of residents are Black. By comparison, Grant’s Ferry and Colony Park South have median household incomes of $92,665 and $169,844, respectively, and over 70% of residents are white.

The movement of health care services out of Jackson and into the city’s suburbs is a “very troubling trend” and will make it more difficult for Jackson residents to access health services, said Sen. John Horhn, D-Jackson, who won the city’s Democratic primary race for mayor last month.

“We’re seeing a hollowing out of health care providers … being available in Jackson, and patients are feeling the brunt of that hardship upon them,” said Horhn.

UMMC provides a free shuttle every 30 minutes to Colony Park clinic locations from its main campus in Jackson, and many outpatient clinical services are offered at UMMC’s main campus in Jackson. 

The Legislature sought to limit UMMC’s expansion outside of Jackson this year by restricting the medical center’s exemption from requiring state approval to open new educational medical facilities. The bill would limit this exemption to areas around its main campus and the Jackson Medical Mall. Gov. Tate Reeves vetoed the legislation, saying he opposed another unrelated provision in the bill.

Bringing primary health care to the mall is a priority, said Wheeler, who envisions new health services opening in the mall, the space being transformed into senior or dormitory housing and the Jackson Medical Mall Foundation implementing more of its own programs. The foundation will soon open a 500-seat auditorium in the space that formerly housed UMMC’s conference center. 

Horhn said he hopes to see the medical mall house a workforce training facility. 

The future of the medical mall remains uncertain, but whatever comes next, the foundation’s goal is to remain an anchor in the community, said Reed, the foundation’s COO. 

“We don’t want to let Dr. Shirley’s vision die,” she said. 

But it is clear the medical mall will look different than it has for the past 25 years. 

“It will not be a medical mall,” Wheeler said. 

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

The post Jackson Medical Mall faces uncertain future 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 primarily reports on the decision by UMMC to reduce services at the Jackson Medical Mall and its implications for the local, majority-Black, low-income community. The tone is sympathetic to concerns about healthcare access, economic impact, and community loss, emphasizing the perspectives of local leaders and patients who view the shift as a negative trend toward suburban and wealthier areas. While it presents UMMC’s rationale, the language and framing highlight challenges faced by underserved populations and the consequences of healthcare decentralization. The coverage leans slightly left by focusing on equity, community well-being, and social justice themes, but remains largely factual and balanced.

by Candice Wilder, Mississippi Today
May 22, 2025

Wendy White, director of the Jackson Heart Study Undergraduate Training and Education Center at Tougaloo College, has experienced what financial markets and world leaders have all felt this year: whiplash. 

In April, the Trump administration paused funding to the center, which is the nation’s largest and longest-running training program for early-career scientists and hub for research on heart disease in African Americans. 

In total, 36 college students lost their scholarships. Five staff members, including White, lost their jobs. As a result of the cuts, the center planned to end its undergraduate training program later this summer. 

Then came the whiplash. The administration reversed its decision in May. Relief. 

White is “cautiously optimistic” about the $1.7 million grant’s renewal and the future of this program that has been the crown jewel for this small, private, historically Black liberal arts college in Jackson, Mississippi. 

“It’s been a roller coaster of emotions ranging from gratefulness to frightening,” White said. 

Since January, federal agencies like the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation have slashed millions of dollars in grants and contracts to comply with federal directives to end research on diversity, equity and inclusion, as well as the study of misinformation. 

Some colleges have lost federal funds in President Donald Trump’s first 100 days of office. Others are trimming already lean budgets and launching fundraising campaigns to prepare for the worst, according to Inside Higher Ed.  

While Trump has signed executive orders supporting HBCUs to “promote excellence and innovation,” the cuts to federal agencies and programs have had a chilling effect at these schools, which are already dealing with decades of underfunding. HBCU professors and graduates say the losses have greater potential for harm and eliminate professional opportunities for students. 

Millions of dollars are potentially at risk. This year, Jackson State University received $7.2 million in federal research from NIH. Tougaloo College received $10 million.  

Low hanging fruit

White and other professors believe their grants were pulled because of words like  “race” or “gender” in the award’s abstract. 

“[These federal agencies] are going for the low-hanging fruit,” Bryon D’Andra Orey, political science professor at Jackson State University, said. “Our grants are on the chopping blocks simply because they are under this umbrella of D.E.I.” 

Orey received an email in late April from JSU’s Office of Research that his $510,000 National Science Foundation Build and Broaden (B2) grant was terminated. In 2021, the grant was awarded to study the emotional and psychological toll of racial discrimination and trauma on African Americans participating in democratic and political activities such as voting and activism. 

The research produced new insights on understanding racial disparities in the United States. It has also led to collaborations with prominent research institutions such as the University of Michigan. The collaboration brought resources, professional development, staffing and support that JSU lacked. 

Since the grant was awarded four years ago, 21 students have taken the seminar and graduated. It has provided exceptional learning opportunities and exposed students to new career possibilities, Orey said. 

“I’ve had students who have taken my classes apply to law schools, competitive Ph.D.  programs at Ivy leagues and get into congressional public policy and advocacy work,” Orey said. “They get to see career avenues other than federal government jobs.” 

A whole new world 

Michael J. Cleveland, a graduate of Tougaloo College, benefited from these types of programs and mentorship. Cleveland trained as an undergraduate from 2014-2017 through the Jackson Heart Study program. He had opportunities to shadow medical professionals at hospitals and clinics. 

In his sophomore year, he decided becoming a doctor wasn’t for him. Cleveland received guidance from his professors to pursue apprenticeships in community and public health research in Jackson. 

The course work and curriculum as an undergraduate set him apart from his peers at Morehouse School of Medicine when Cleveland applied to get his master’s degree in public health. It eventually led him to become the first African American healthcare executive administrative fellows at Salem Health Hospital and Clinic System in Oregon. 

The need for public health professionals of color in healthcare and medical settings is more important than ever, Cleveland said. 

“Being a JHS scholar opened me up to a whole new world,” said Cleveland, who is now the chief operating officer of Care Alliance Health Center, a community health center in Cleveland, Ohio. “I’ve accomplished all of who I am at 30 because of this program.”  

Future of research

Last month, Trump signed a new executive order that pledged to continue two existing White House efforts to support HBCUs during his first term in office. 

The White House Initiative on HBCUs aims to increase funding, improve infrastructure and provide access to professional development opportunities for students in fields such as technology, healthcare and finance. And the President’s Board of Advisors on HBCUs will include appointed members who will sit in the U.S. Department of Education and is meant to guide the administration’s efforts on supporting these institutions. 

“[The administration] is saying something on paper and in theory, but their actions aren’t aligned,” White said. “You can’t say you support [HBCUs] when you are cutting student loans, financial aid, research and other programs that support these students and institutions.” 

While the future of this program remains unclear, she warned of the larger, overlooked impacts of potential cuts to this undergraduate program: It could mean the end to a unique collaboration between two HBCUs and a predominantly white institution in the state. 

When the Jackson Heart Study began in the late 90s, it brought Jackson State University, a public HBCU, Tougaloo College and University of Mississippi Medical Center, a predominantly white medical school, together to create a first-of-its-kind partnership. 

The goal was to provide funding in research for the colleges, and promote careers in public health to students. Eliminating this partnership could undermine NIH’s credibility and a symbol of racial progress in Mississippi, White said. 

“We’ve spent more than two decades focusing on overcoming that legacy of medical mistrust for people in this city,” White said. “A move like this could set back decades of science and health research for this country. I just want us to ask, what are we doing about this?”

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

The post How Mississippi’s HBCUs are navigating Trump’s federal funding cuts 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-Right

The article focuses on how historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) are handling funding cuts under the Trump administration. It discusses the impacts on HBCUs, particularly regarding federal grants linked to diversity and equity research, alongside efforts by the administration to support these institutions. While the article critiques the funding cuts and the inconsistency between policy intentions and actions, it largely reports on these developments without expressing an overt political stance. The language used suggests concern for the financial impacts on HBCUs, but it does not strongly align with a particular political ideology beyond reporting on the effects of government actions.

by Mississippi Today, Mississippi Today
May 21, 2025

Mississippi Today is pleased to announce the addition of Katherine Lin to its Politics and Government team. Lin is a 2025 corps member of Report for America, joining 106 fellow journalists in placements across the country.

Report for America says this round of placements is the organization’s latest response to the growing crisis in local, independent news and an increase of 31% from initial plans to help meet today’s challenges.

“It’s a good day for journalism as we welcome 107 next-generation journalists into a compelling phase of their careers at a time when their energy, integrity, and skill are urgently needed,” said Kim Kleman, executive director at Report for America. “Our model of corps member recruitment and newsroom partnerships is a proven solution to today’s crisis in local news, bringing voice and coverage to undercovered communities and building back trust in media as a central pillar of our democracy.”

At Mississippi Today, Lin will report on development, where politics and economics intersect throughout the state.

“As Mississippi Today’s first development reporter, Katherine will focus on Mississippi economic and workforce development, small business and labor issues, data and how state government policies, actions and spending impact the state’s economy and workforce,” said Politics and Government Editor Geoff Pender.  “We are excited to have Katherine join the growing Mississippi Today team and, specifically our politics and government team. Katherine brings unique skills, energy and inquisitiveness that will serve our mission to help move this state forward.”

Lin is a recent graduate of Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism where she focused on economic and business reporting and reporting on economic inequality. Prior to that, she earned a Bachelor of Arts in History from the University of California at Berkeley.

“I’m excited to join the outstanding team at Mississippi Today,” said Lin. “I’ve been a fan for a number of years of their ambitious reporting and commitment to serving the people of Mississippi.”

About Report for America
Report for America is a national service program that places talented emerging journalists in local newsrooms to report on under-covered topics and communities across the United States and its territories. By creating a new, sustainable model for journalism, Report for America provides people with the information they need to improve their communities, hold powerful institutions accountable, and restore trust in the media. Report for America launched in 2017 as an initiative of The GroundTruth Project, an award-winning nonprofit journalism organization dedicated to rebuilding journalism from the ground up.

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

The post Katherine Lin joins Mississippi Today through partnership with Report for America 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 provides a factual announcement about Katherine Lin joining Mississippi Today as a reporter, in partnership with Report for America. It details Lin’s qualifications, the purpose of the Report for America program, and the mission of Mississippi Today in covering local news. The article does not present a clear ideological stance but rather focuses on the professional background of Lin and the goals of the program. It serves as neutral reporting on a development in journalism without endorsing any specific political viewpoint or agenda.