Mississippi Summer-1994

...When Molpus became secretary of state, lease rents from land, known as sixteenth sections, set aside under Mississippi law to benefit the state's public schools, were bringing in revenues far below market value...

...The opposition was intense, especially from the influential Mississippi Power and Light Co., but lobby reform passed the House and was signed by the governor in early March...

...In front of the Mississippi State Capitol, resting securely between the artillery that points toward Mississippi Street, is a statue dedicated "to the women of the Confederacy whose pious ministrations to our wounded soldiers soothed the last hours of those who died far from the objects of their tenderest love...

...Molpus believes that strategy is economically and politically discredited...

...Molpus's audiences at the fundraisers I attended were racially mixed, and his key financial support comes from a broad middle-class base rather than a few heavy contributors...

...His point—one he makes over and over—is that without economic incentives fundamental change is impossible...

...In 1991 he got the state legislature to agree to mail-in voter registration...

...As surrounding states begin to legalize gambling and the building boom in Mississippi slows, the state's surpluses, Molpus believes, will diminish...

...Jackson, the state's largest city, has emerged as a Southern arts center...

...On the potential backlash issues that could harm him, he is not vulnerable the way a traditional liberal would be...

...Mississippi has traditionally advertised itself as a low-wage, low taxes state...

...The mail-in voter registration reform FALL • 1994 • 459 Molpus fought for as secretary of state made it clear where he stood politically, and in helping found Parents for Public Schools, a Jacksonbased group committed to getting white students to return to the public schools (both of his children go to public school in Jackson), Molpus showed that he was willing to get personally involved in Mississippi's toughest racial fights...

...This year Molpus again challenged that establishment, helping lead the fight for lobby-law reform...

...Traveling with him as he tours the state makes one a believer...

...When reform Democrat Ray Mabus won a stunning victory in the 1987 governor's race on a platform promising "basic, drastic change," it left Molpus, then entering his second term as secretary of state, nowhere to go...

...In 1989, at ceremonies marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of the murder of civil rights workers James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman, Molpus, who was born in the small Mississippi town where the three were murdered, used the occasion to deliver a speech many thought would end his political career...

...In Fordice, the owner of a Vicksburg construction company, Molpus has a formidable opponent who will have no trouble raising money for what may turn out to be the most expensive governor's campaign in Mississippi history...

...We acknowledge that dark corner of our past," Molpus declared...

...He thinks Mississippi needs to build more prisons to house the career criminals who commit most of its crimes, and he is convinced that simply handing out condoms in the high schools won't do much to stop Mississippi's soaring teenage pregnancy rates...

...The most telling sign of the old Mississippi is, however, to be found at the Governor's Mansion in Jackson, where Kirk Fordice, a Republican who came into office on a campaign based on opposing affirmative action and reducing welfare, has been deftly playing the race card since 1992...

...But he has also taken an office once thought of as largely ceremonial and made it a significant force in Mississippi politics...

...Even more impressive are the political changes going on in Mississippi...

...The De La Beckwith verdict was not an isolated event...

...Today we pay tribute to those who died...

...But he also has someone from whom he can distinguish himself on virtually every issue of consequence...

...But equally revealing is the chain of circumstances that brought Beckwith to trial for the third time...

...But the old Mississippi is also alive in other ways...

...Molpus doesn't share these liabilities...

...The souvenir counter at the Jackson airport still carries picture postcards of the Confederate flag, and at the grave of James Chaney, one of three civil rights workers killed during the Mississippi Freedom Summer of 1964, the work of vandals who used high-powered rifles to deface his headstone is still visible...

...There was no mistaking the fact that those it would most benefit were voters who were not part of the political establishment...

...We wish we could undo it...

...Four years later, in losing to Fordice by a narrow 51 percent to 47 percent margin, Mabus found that his support among black voters had slipped and that his reputation as an outsider—he is a Harvard Law School graduate who once worked for the prestigious Washington law firm of Sargent Shriver—hurt him in a race with a good old boy...

...There, thirty years after his first and second trials ended in hung juries, Byron De La Beckwith, the man accused of killing Medgar Evers in 1963 after his fingerprint was found on the fatal rifle, was found guilty by a Mississippi jury...

...They have made it virtually impossible for Mississippi to reach a decision that fails to leave its historically black universities better off...

...One has to go back to Bobby Kennedy in the years following his brother's death to find a contemporary politician so unafraid of being serious and so able to convey that seriousness to whites and blacks alike...

...Such thinking is a dramatic departure from the past...

...But when Mabus lost to Fordice in 1991, everything changed...

...That opportunity comes from 458 • DISSENT the state's financial situation...

...When he says that Mississippi is at a "defining moment" —that it has to choose between returning to its dark past or moving into a future that will be shared by all—his passion is unmistakable...

...Molpus would have the state undertake two investment programs immediately...

...Molpus changed all that (he has renegotiated 4,600 leases since 1983) and also began an aggressive campaign with regard to timber sales from the sixteenth section lands...

...We have to decide who we compete with," he says...

...We deeply regret what happened here twenty-five years ago...

...Throw in additional revenues from tourism and new construction, and it is easy to see why the state expects to balance its $2.5 billion 1995 budget and still spend $410 million more than it will in 1994...

...But if Mississippi takes advantage of its current situation, it can, he argues, assure itself long-term prosperity...

...This summer, when the volunteers and organizers of the Mississippi Freedom Summer held their thirtieth reunion, Fordice went out of his way to make it clear that as far as he was concerned, little good could come from it...

...It ought not to be Mexico but Sunbelt states like North and South Carolina...

...Coming from him, the words have credibility...

...There is no avoiding the statue...

...The state of Mississippi, the Court said, must find more equitable ways to undo the vestiges of its old dual educational system—especially with regard to financing...

...Then it involved the Mississippi Supreme Court, which said the Beckwith trial could go forward despite the passage of time, and finally it involved Hinds County Assistant District Attorney Bobby DeLaughter, who pursued the case despite enormous pressure to let it drop...

...460 • DISSENT...

...Can Molpus win on such a platform...

...It began with Jackson ClarionLedger investigative reporter Jerry Mitchell, who brought to light the role the state's once-powerful Sovereignty Commission played in screening jurors for the second trial...

...At the same time he was making his office more efficient, Molpus was also making it more responsive to the state's changing politics...

...In winning the secretary of state job—first by a margin of 70 percent to 30 percent, then by 80 percent to 20 percent, and finally in an election in which he ran unopposed—Molpus has shown that he has enormous popular appeal...

...Molpus, now forty-four, believes that Mississippi has a unique opportunity to institute lasting change...

...Equally telling is the role now FALL • 1994 • 457 being played by Mississippi's African-American community in the education controversy known as the Ayers case...

...Its revenues from gambling (its first dockside casino opened in 1992), combined with a building boom, have brought the state a revenue windfall...

...Currently, one out of four Mississippians over age twenty-five cannot read at an eighth-grade level...

...These people feel that they want to relive what happened for their own reasons," he observed...

...Molpus is banking on his record as secretary of state to give him credibility with voters...

...This summer the city was host to the International Ballet Competition, and while the competition was playing to capacity audiences at Jackson's Municipal Auditorium, next door at the Mississippi Museum of Art, a Degas exhibit was going on...

...With this kind of internal investment, Mississippi would, Molpus believes, be in a position to attract the high-tech, high-skilled industry it needs...

...Your only choice is whether you pass it on the left or the right...

...It sits in the middle of a walk...

...I think the sooner we put that behind us the better...

...The jury's decision says much about the new Mississippi...

...In a state that has historically made registration difficult—especially for blacks—the mail-in ballot was an important departure from business as usual...

...The most publicized of these occurred last February 5 at the Hinds County Courthouse...

...The first would involve upgrading Mississippi's infrastructure so that everything from roads to bridges to sewage systems was in good shape and paid for without the state's having to issue costly bonds...

...His timing could not be better...

...Every decent person in Philadelphia and Neshoba County and Mississippi feels that way...

...You couldn't go anywhere in downtown Jackson without seeing a pennant advertising the exhibit or running into clusters of ballerinas, rushing from their hotels to the competition...

...In 1987, when Ray Mabus scored his upset victory, he did it by winning the black vote by a nine-to-one margin and losing the white vote to Jack Reed, his Republican opponent, by roughly two to one...

...The brightest sign for Mississippi is, however, that in 1996 it may get the most progressive governor in its history: Dick Molpus, currently the secretary of state...

...He couldn't run for governor without unleasing a bitter intraparty fight...

...We've wasted too much time on intramural battles," Molpus tells his audiences...

...It was a defining moment for Molpus and Mississippi, and watching him campaign these days, what is striking is how natural it is for him to talk about moral and political issues when he meets with voters...

...In 1975 Jake Ayers, the father of a Jackson State University student, sued the state of Mississippi for not providing equal education at historically black universities like Jackson State...

...For Fordice, the key to holding on to his constituency is making sure that the old racial tensions remain...

...Mississippi is in the midst of an economic upturn...

...As visible as it is, the old Mississippi is not, however, dominant the way it once was...

...He has spent his entire business and political life in Mississippi...

...In a few short minutes, Molpus had done what everyone was sure no white elected official in Mississippi would ever do—publicly apologize for the racial violence his state once condoned...

...Mississippi's lobbyists, whose political spending has grown by a whopping 175 percent since 1990, will now have to make disclosures on virtually everything they spend...

...The second would involve the state's investing more in its public schools and attacking the problems that make much of its work force ill-suited to compete in the job market...

...The result is that since 1983 Molpus's office has turned over $289 million to Mississippi's hardpressed public schools...

...But he also believes that it is possible to go to voters and argue that Mississippi should stop being a state that because of its lack of growth makes its own college graduates one of its leading exports...

...At the same time his appeal to black voters, roughly 35 percent of the electorate, isn't simply that of a white Mississippian who knows the times have changed...

...District Judge Neal Biggers, Jr., of Oxford, hearings are now being held, and the black plaintiffs in the case are making a strong bid to guarantee that the state College Board does not carry out a plan that, under the guise of efficiency, would close one of Mississippi's three historically black universities and merge another with a historically white university...

...Seventeen years later, on June 27, 1992, in the United States v. Fordice, the Supreme Court in an eight-to-one ruling upheld Ayers's complaint...

...Faced with a sitting governor whose appeal to voters will be based on keeping welfare low, being tough on crime (Jackson had a record eighty-seven murders last year), and reducing the size of government, Molpus knows the risk he is taking in insisting that it is time for Mississippi to change direction...

...Any settlement of the Ayers case is a long way off, but the plaintiffs for the black universities have already won a significant victory...

...Under the supervision of U.S...

...Molpus has not formally announced his candidacy, but as he tours the state, raising money and meeting with supporters, it is clear that he has his eye on the 1995 governor's race...

...In the 1990s it is being challenged more intensely than at any time since the 1960s...

...Last year Mississippi received $65 million in gaming revenue, and the industry is expanding at a rate that in 1995 should generate at least $80 million...