One of my favorite reporting trips ever was touring around Noxubee County with then-freelance writer Torsheta Jackson in the thick of the COVID-19 pandemic. Because she grew up in East Mississippi county, over on the Alabama border, Torsheta was the tour guide, driving us around in her big truck I had to lift myself into. First, she showed me where she grew up in Shuqualak, the child of educators. Along the way, she pointed out slabs where industry, grocery stores and schools used to stand before her hometown became a shell of its former self over the decades after forced integration in 1970.
We walked around the ruins that now dominate the little downtown next to the railroad tracks and talked about poverty, neglect, white-flight cycles and disinvestment in the county settled by rich white planters—including Mississippi State University founder Stephen D. Lee’s family—and built by enslaved people. The county has always been majority-Black, but usually under white control, from newspapers, to industry, to local education decisions and resources. It was also the site of vicious white terrorism to keep it that way.
Downtown Shuqualak, journalist Torsheta Jackson’s hometown, is a “proverbial ghost town,” she reports, since large population losses, factory closures, school consolidation and even the dismantling of the historic building (the E.F. Nunn & Co. Building, 1870, near this abandoned building) to sell the parts. Photo by Donna Ladd
In the county seat of Macon, Torsheta showed me the county’s only remaining grocery store—white-owned and too expensive in a county where hunger is far too rampant, she said. She then took me to see the library with the gallows where they used to hang people right in the building in front of crowds on the front lawn, now marketed as a tourist attraction. We looked straight out the front window of the library at the tall Confederate statue standing in front of the courthouse across the street in the 82%-Black town. The Board of Supervisors voted in July 2020 to remove it; last I checked, it was still there as post-George Floyd anti-racism enthusiasm wanes.
Torsheta showed me
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