Mississippi

It has been almost forty years since I last lived in Mississippi, but, in a sense, it will always be "home" because I grew up there. My parents are dead now, but I still have other family there, as well as friends that I grew up with, and so I retain an interest in what happens there. When I see a story in the news with the name of that state in the headline, I tend to pay attention and read it. So it was that when I recently came across this story in The Daily Beast, of course I had to read it.

The thing is, when I see these stories about Mississippi, they are almost always bad news. This one was no exception. The first paragraph pointed out some of the appalling statistics about the state:

• It has the nation's highest poverty rate.
• It has the second-highest teen pregnancy rate and the highest teen birth rate.
• Its schools rank 48th out of the 50 states.
• It ranks second among states (to Louisiana) in the percentage of its citizens that it locks up.
• Its infancy mortality rate is the highest in the nation at 9.67 deaths per 1,000 live births, which is close to Botswana's rate.
• Life expectancy is the lowest in the country and is lower than in Guatemala and Pakistan.
• Few states invest less in public education or public health.
• It is one of the worst states for women's rights and has never sent a woman to Congress.

In short, if Mississippi were a country, it would be considered part of the Third World and a particularly backward part of that world at that.

There seems little hope that any of this will change for the better in the short term. Mississippi is dominated by arch conservatives, all men of course, in its government and they are perfectly happy with the status quo since it gives them all the power and they are determined to hold the line against change. Such men are typified by their governor, Phil Bryant, who in a recently well-publicized comment, laid the blame for America's educational woes squarely in the laps of working mothers. Mediocrity, he opined, can be traced directly to moms in the workplace.

Mississippi has been in the news over the past year because it has tried to close all abortion clinics in the state and deny access to this health care for its women. It currently has only one such clinic remaining, in the state capital of Jackson, that is waging a battle in the courts to stay open. 

Its latest approach in dealing with issues of pregnancy, specifically teen pregnancy, is to collect cord blood from babies born to girls under 16, with a view to using DNA to establish the fathers and then prosecuting for statutory rape older men who have impregnated teenagers. One has to admit it is a novel approach.

There is, however, a possibility that the law could be turned against the girls themselves if drugs are found in the cord blood. Currently in the state, two women who suffered stillbirths are being prosecuted under the state's murder statutes because they had drugs in their system at the time of the births.

The idea that a state could more profitably address the issue of teen pregnancies, as well as decreasing the need for abortions, through sex education and freer access to contraceptives seems a totally alien idea to the people who maintain their iron grip on Mississippi's government.  

All of this is appalling and depressing, and yet when you meet the people of the state on a personal level, they are friendly and welcoming and just want to live their lives in peace and see better futures for their children - just like all of us. What they need is a leader, someone to inspire them to strive for a more compassionate government and to dare to break the chains of dogma that make them slaves to an unsavory history. Those of us who care for the state and its people and watch from the outside as it continues to be bound to its past can only hope that such a leader will find his or her way to the forefront and that Mississippi can soon join the majority of the states in the 21st century.  

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And speaking of Mississippi, that's where I'll be for the next several days, visiting friends and family there. While I'm on the road, I may or may not have an opportunity to post here, but I will return before the Summer Solstice. 

Liar, liar, pants on fire!!!

Haley Barbour is the Republican governor of Mississippi. He and I have at least one thing in common: We grew up in that troubled state in the same generation. We both came of age in the 1960s. Strangely, Barbour remembers those days a bit differently than I do.

He recently gave an interview to a conservative magazine and website in which he claimed that it was his generation - my generation - that led the switch in the South from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party and that it was all because of that integration thing. He said that the old Democrats fought "tooth and nail" against integration but by the time the '60s generation came along, they realized that it was indefensible, so the people who changed from Democrat to Republican were a whole different generation than those who fought integration. Barbour's generation, he said, led the switch because they had gone to integrated schools and an integrated college and they "never thought twice about it."

This is a pack of lies from beginning to end!

It is true that the old Democrats fought tooth and nail against integration, but in 1964 those old Democrats became new Republicans because that was the party that would let them be who they were. I know exactly when the switch occurred. I was there.

I remember vividly in the fall of 1964 a day or two after the presidential election, I was having lunch at a cafe in Belmont, Mississippi and eavesdropping on the conversation of two old men at the next table. They were bemoaning the fact that Lyndon Johnson had beaten Barry Goldwater in an overwhelming landslide. One of the few states that Goldwater had carried was Mississippi, along with some others of the Old South. One of the old men turned to the other and said, "Well, Johnson may have got the most votes but you and me know that the BEST people voted for Goldwater."

That was the autumn when Mississippi and the South became Republican. President Johnson had predicted that his signing the Civil Rights Act would mean that Democrats would lose the South for a generation. He was right.

As for Barbour attending integrated schools, no he didn't! Schools in Mississippi did not begin to be integrated until 1970 when it was forced by the Supreme Court. As for the colleges - well, Barbour went to the University of Mississippi in the mid '60s. Ole Miss had grudgingly admitted its first black student in 1962. One black student who had to be escorted around campus by U.S. Marshals. The next year, they admitted one more black student. By the middle of the decade, there was a handful - literally - of black students there, but to say that the white students "never thought twice about it" is about as bald-faced a lie as I am likely to hear or read in my lifetime. The white students made life for the black students as miserable as they possibly could through isolating and ostracizing them. I don't know, of course, but I would be very surprised to learn that, while a student at Ole Miss, Haley Barbour, the new Republican, had gone out of his way to befriend or defend or even acknowledge any of those black students.

Why is Barbour telling these lies? Perhaps because the media, what passes for journalism these days, will let him get away with them. There are those who say he wants to run for president in 2012 and is trying to clean up his image. Well, he can try, but there are some of us who still remember what Mississippi and the South were like in the 1960s and it was not the fairy tale land that Barbour is talking about. It was a place where people cheered when they heard that the president of their country had been murdered and cheered again a few years later when his brother and Martin Luther King were murdered. It was a place where white people could get away with murdering black people, where the Ku Klux Klan murdered James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner and got away with it.

Mississippi has changed a lot since those days, but mostly it hasn't been changed by Barbour's and my generation. It's been changed by those later generations who actually did go to integrated schools, who grew up watching Bill Cosby on television and realized that maybe his family didn't look so different from theirs - except perhaps richer.

Mississippi, like the rest of the nation, still has a long way to go, but it won't get there with liars like Haley Barbour for leaders.

(For more and much better writing on this topic, read Eugene Robinson's column in today's Washington Post. He remembers, too.)

Mississippi dreamin'

I see in the news from my home state that Mississippi is making itself notorious again. At least, the school board in Itawamba County is. It seems that they have canceled the senior prom because a lesbian student wanted to attend with her girlfriend and she wanted to wear a tuxedo. This was just too much for the sensibilities of these sensitive souls who were apparently afraid their their own kids might catch "the gay" from attending a social event with a lesbian couple. So they canceled the event and expressed the hope that some "private group" might sponsor a prom for the kids. What they didn't say but probably meant was that the "private group" should sponsor a prom for the straight kids.

It's hard to believe that in the year 2010, the sexual orientation of a teenage girl is enough to cause grown-up people to behave this way. Why do they feel so threatened by this? What are so they afraid of? Do they really think that the homosexual couple is so powerful and attractive that they are going to subvert the straight kids to their way of loving?

They would probably say that homosexuality is a sin and they don't want the supposedly morally pure straight students to be exposed to it. But if they are Christians, as I'm certain they would profess to be, and if they are really confident of the rightness of their convictions, shouldn't they be concerned also for these socalled sinners? Shouldn't they want to expose them to "normalcy" so that perhaps it will rub off on them or they will be converted and thus saved from a life of sin? Moreover, do they really think that we live in a segregated society where gay people are not a part of every group and every activity, where they are not a part of the tapestry of our everyday lives, even in Mississippi? I would venture to say there might even be some gay people who are members of boards of education in Mississppi. Possibly even in Itawamba County.

Homosexuals do not choose to be homosexual any more than heterosexuals choose to be heterosexual. They are born that way. It is not a disease and cannot - nor does it need to be - cured. It is not a sin. It is just another way of being human. It could have been a valuable lesson for the students of that Itawamba high school to learn that not every human being has to believe and act and look exactly as they do, but that that makes them no less human and no less worthy of respect. The board of education could have stood up and acted like responsible adults and taught them that lesson. Instead, they chose to continue to live in a dream world where uniformity of opinion and belief and life style is all that matters.

So what have the kids of Itawamba County and of Mississippi learned from this? "Don't be different and, if you are different, don't tell! And, for gods' sake, don't stand up for your rights!"

What they have probably learned is that their society approves of and rewards the cowardly conformist. What a lesson for high school seniors to take with them into the world.