Author: Leroy Manning

The family of Dexter Wade is calling for justice after the 37-year-old man was allegedly fatally struck by a Jackson, Mississippi Police Department cruiser in March and later buried in a potter’s field without his family knowing. “My son — I never thought in a million years that he would leave me,” Wade’s mother, Bettersten Wade Robinson, said in a tearful press conference Monday in Jackson. “He was my oldest son and I wouldn’t have never thought this’d happened to him.” Wade Robinson reported her son missing on March 14, nine days after she had last heard from him on March 5.…

The Mississippi NAACP is crying foul after Capitol police set up safety checkpoints near Jackson State University. “Setting up roadblocks near precincts is a very suspicious form of voter intimidation,” said NAACP Jackson President Nsombi Lambright. State NAACP leaders said they were surprised to see Capitol police officers set up a roadblock and stopped drivers near JSU one day before Mississippi’s general election. “It was very alarming to us. It does raise a lot of questions about what the purpose of this checkpoint today was,” Lambright said. “They were checking both license plates and licenses off individuals passing by right…

Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch has asked the state Supreme Court to set execution dates for two men on death row. Fitch’s office filed motions Thursday that asked the court to schedule executions for Willie Jerome Manning and Robert Simon Jr. Manning, now 55, was convicted in 1994 on two counts of capital murder in the December 1992 killings of Mississippi State University students Jon Steckler and Tiffany Miller in Oktibbeha County. Simon, 60, and another man were convicted in the 1990 Quitman County slayings of a family of four. Manning and Simon were close to being executed more than…

U.S. House Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., has never supported Hamas terrorists despite false accusations Republican Gov. Tate Reeves hurled at the State’s only Black congressman over the weekend. Hamas is the ruling political organization in Gaza that launched a bloody terrorist attack on Oct. 7, killing more than 1,400 in Israel as militants took at least 199 people hostage. In social media posts on Friday, Oct. 13, Reeves called on Brandon Presley, his Democratic opponent in the Nov. 7 election for governor, “to return the money that Bennie Thompson raised for him at their DC fundraisers” because “Presley should not accept funds from…

Democratic candidate for Mississippi governor Brandon Presley has never expressed support for gender-affirming surgeries for transgender minors, despite repeated assertions to the contrary from Mississippi Republicans and incumbent Gov. Tate Reeves’s reelection campaign. In a Reeves ad that launched on Sept. 14, for example, the governor’s campaign claimed that “Brandon Presley supported sex changes for children.” As the source for its claim, the ad quoted a June 20 Mississippi Free Press article. Neither that report nor any other from this publication, however, has ever claimed that Presley supported gender-affirming surgeries for trans minors. The story Reeves cited was about Presley’s response when…

Berlin (06/11 – 58) UN Special Rapporteur of Human Rights Defenders, Mary Lawlor, has once again called on the authorities of Tajikistan to release imprisoned Tajik journalists and bloggers. Mary Lawlor posted on her social media account, formerly Twitter, that during a meeting with Tajikistan’s Permanent Representative to the UN, Jonibek Hikmat, in New York on October 24, she reiterated her call for the Tajik authorities to release the convicted human rights defenders and journalists, including Daler Imomali, Abdullo Gurbati, and Ulfatkhonim Mamadshoeva. Last year, in Tajikistan, eight journalists and bloggers were sentenced to various prison terms, ranging from 7…

Police chases in Mississippi’s capital city could soon pose less of a danger, Jackson Police Chief Joseph Wade and Deputy Chief Vincent Grizzell said on Oct. 20 as they unveiled 25 new handheld StarChase GPS-launching devices. “We know that it’s been a huge issue with police chases within the City of Jackson from JPD officers and our neighboring law enforcement officers,” Wade said at the press conference. Residents and local activists have criticized law enforcement in and around Hinds County for years over dangerous police chases, some of which have resulted in multi-vehicle accidents, the deaths of residents and hefty payouts to…

One year after a jury convicted a Jackson Police officer of manslaughter for the beating death of her brother, Bettersten Wade learned that another JPD officer had struck and killed her 37-year-old son, Dexter Wade, in an SUV and that the county had buried him an unmarked grave. Dexter Wade had been missing for nearly six months before the department informed his mother of her son’s fate. “They had me looking for him all that time, and they knew who he was,” Wade told NBC News’ Jon Schuppe, who first reported this story on Wednesday. The report says an off-duty corporal…

JACKSON, Miss. (WJTV) – Jackson State University (JSU) announced the performers for the university’s homecoming concert. On Thursday, October 12, Toosii, Big Boogie, Mariah the Scientist, and Rob49 will take the stage in the Lee E. Williams Athletic & Assembly. “Jackson, Mississippi, is not a traditional major city [like Los Angeles or New York] where large-scale concerts are routinely routed, so it is important that we create experiences for our students who are more than deserving to see some of their favorite artists,” said Cateatra Mallard, Center for Student Engagement & Leadership (CSEL). Doors open at 5:00 p.m., and the show starts at 6:00…

A majority-Black Mississippi school district received a judge’s approval Tuesday to shed federal supervision in a decades-old desegregation lawsuit that included a 2013 order to move away from harsh discipline that disproportionately affected Black students. U.S. District Judge Henry Wingate praised the Meridian Public School District for reducing the number of suspensions that led some students to drop out of school. “Meridian is no longer known for a school-to-prison pipeline,” the district’s superintendent, Amy Carter, told Wingate during a hearing in Jackson. The Justice Department announced in 2013 that it would enter a consent decree with the Meridian schools for the district…