#jackson-30

#jackson-30

Big Mama Thornton exuded uncompromising intensity. Her voice conveyed struggle and defiance, fury and hurt, like few others. She was a Black, gay multi-instrumentalist who refused to let a racist society or a rapacious industry confine her.

"No change may be made to this designation, except for a correction of a scrivener's error, a correction in the case of a misidentification of the individual's sex at birth due to a verifiable disorder of a sex development condition, or a correction of a license that has previously been voluntarily altered to record a sex other than the sex of the person as previously recorded at birth."

Mrs. Wilkes Dining Room has been around for decades, serving delicious Southern food. The all-you-can-eat spread included about 30 different dishes, with dessert options like banana pudding and peach cobbler.

When Norman Sylvester was 12, long before he garnered the nickname "The Boogie Cat" or shared a stage with B.B. King, he boarded a train in Louisiana and headed west, toward the distant city of Portland, Oregon. He'd lived all his life in the rural South, eating wild muscadine grapes from his family's farm, fishing in the bayou and churning butter at the kitchen table to the tune of his grandmother's gospel singing.

They began organizing themselves and eventually created the first self-governed, autonomous city for freed people. It was called Mitchelville, named for the Union army Maj Gen Ormsby Mitchel, who led what would become known as the Port Royal Experiment, a model for how the country might transition away from slavery that served as a precursor to the Reconstruction period.

On March 16, 1965, a thirty-nine-year-old woman named Viola Liuzzo got into a late-model Oldsmobile and drove eight hundred miles from her home in Detroit, Michigan, to Selma, Alabama. Days earlier, following the Bloody Sunday protests, where voting-rights demonstrators had been tear-gassed and beaten, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., had issued an appeal to people of conscience across the country to come to Alabama and participate in what had already become one of the most consequential theatres in the movement for equality.

Maybe we ran into an old acquaintance at the supermarket and said "Let's catch up sometime" or told our friends we would "check out" the boring-sounding show they spent the past five minutes recommending? That's what country-music superstar Jelly Roll appeared to do after the Grammys last week when, in response to a question about the state of the country, he said he had "a lot to say"

I'm chowing down on a mini King Cake, my breakfast. It's a braided cinnamon Danish sprinkled with purple, green, and gold edible glitter, with a cream cheese filling and a little plastic baby perched astride. The baby represents the infant Jesus and is said to bring luck (and an obligation to host the next fête, if he shows up in your slice.)

On Thursday, Mississippi Today reported that several officials, who requested anonymity out of fear of retribution, said NPS told them to remove visitor brochures from the Medgar & Myrlie Evers Home National Monument and edit out details about Beckwith. Among the details reportedly flagged for removal: that Evers was found lying in a pool of blood after he was shot. The brochures referred to Beckwith as "a member of the racist and segregationist White Citizens' Council."

At the turn of the 1960s, when free jazz was making its initial seismic impact, multi-instrumentalist Phil Cohran-he later added the name Kelan-was living in Chicago and playing trumpet for Sun Ra's Arkestra. He contributed to crucial recordings by the band during his tenure, including We Travel the Space Ways, but Cohran was a restless autodidact who never stuck with any one project for long.