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Losing the Battle to Win the War: A Transparent Government is Democracy

I learned a powerful lesson from American hero Bob Moses back in 2003 at the commemoration of the lives of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner in my home county 39 years to the day after popular local white businessmen and law enforcement executed them for fighting for Black freedom.

“One of the best things about this country is that you can live a life in struggle,” Mr. Moses said from the pulpit of Mt. Zion Methodist Church, the Black church the civil-rights workers visited on their last day alive as it lay in ashes. He had just asked all of us to recite the preamble to the Declaration of Independence with him: “I hold these truths to be self-evident ….”

It was that day when I first understood what freedom and democracy really are—essentially the right to keep fighting repeatedly not to just achieve it, but to keep it. That our expectation can never be that it will be there without care and attention, without work, without losses along the way. As Mr. Moses’ words seared into my consciousness, it hit me in the face that “the American dream is just that: a struggle,” as I wrote then. And in struggles, you win some, and you live to fight another day. You just must be willing to keep going, to not give up, to demand and protect democracy.

Government Transparency is Key to Progress

I thought of Mr. Moses’ lesson Thursday when attorney Rob McDuff sent me a recommendation written by Tom Hood, the director of the Mississippi Ethics Commission where reporter Nick Judin and I had a complaint pending after House Speaker Philip Gunn blocked Nick from a Republican caucus meeting where the majority of that chamber meets in secret to discuss legislation and block voting. When Rob, Nick and I (as editor and CEO) filed complaints to the Ethics Commission to force a public decision, we did not expect to win. In fact, I expected that every member of the committee, all political appointees, would vote against us to protect the habits of the secretive powerful in

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