Editor’s note: What appears below are the opening paragraphs of an article about the water crisis in Jackson, MS, that appeared originally in the Mississippi Free Press on April 21, 2021, (mississippifreepress.org) and is cross-posted here with permission. See the link below to go to the rest of the article, which is part of a three-part series.
It is 2021, and Gov. Tate Reeves is certain that the Jackson water crisis is nothing special. “Jackson has certainly got a lot of attention,” he told this reporter at a March 2 press event. “But at the height of the ice storm, Mississippi had 78 water systems that had boil-water notices.” By the time he said this, over 70% of those temporary outages had been repaired. But Jackson lagged far behind: weeks would pass before the water was again safe to drink.
The governor’s dismissal, two weeks into a crippling capital-city water crisis, was well-practiced. It echoed his earlier veto of a 2020 bill to allow Jackson residents a flexible repayment plan for outstanding water and sewer debt. (Just this week, Reeves relented, filing a version of the bill with more state control.)
“(The bill) provides no justification for its limited application,” Reeves wrote when he vetoed the 2020 bill. “There are ‘disproportionately impoverished or needy’ Mississippians throughout the state that have overdue balances for water and sewer services.”
This is one narrative of the Jackson water crisis. In the minds of some, especially Jackson’s most vocal opponents in the Legislature, it is the narrative: Jackson is nothing special, just another mismanaged city that fumbled a century’s worth of prosperity in a single generation, victim of little more than the self-inflicted wounds of petty corruption and laziness.
Another narrative is visible, far wider and far more complex. It begins, if one must pick a discrete beginning, 50 years ago.
‘We Will Not Drink from the Cup of Genocide’
Jimmy Swan, a once-popular country-music segregationist, was onstage in a white suit at a Jackson auditorium in the first days of January 1970. His musical career was over, and the first of two failed runs for governor was behind him. Still, he had the rapt attention of a crowd of more than 1,500 white people, all attending a boisterous rally for the newly minted Southern National Party.
A top goal was resisting the wave of school integration that was finally coming to southern states, after nearly two decades filled with violent white resistance gaining steam since the U.S. Supreme Court made segregated public schools illegal.
“Private schools are the only answer in this dark crisis,” Swan wailed, and so it would come to pass. New segregation academies and private-school attendance were exploding in Mississippi, and the capital city was no exception.
See the rest of this article, along with the first two parts of the three-part series by Nick Judin, at the Mississippi Free Press site at this link: https://www.mississippifreepress.org/11498/under-the-surface-part-3-a-legacy-in-decline
