Mississippi
Historical marker honors students who integrated Mississippi University for Women
COLUMBUS, Miss. — In the spring of 1966, Laverne Greene-Leech, along with her best friend, Diane Hardy, and Barbara Turner Bankhead had just graduated from Hunt High School, where Black students attended the segregated school system in Columbus, Mississippi.
That fall, the three 17-year-olds arrived at the Mississippi State College for Women, along with three graduate students — Mary Flowers, Jacqueline Edwards and Eula Houser — as the school’s first Black students.
On Thursday, the state will unveil a historical marker on the campus, now known as the Mississippi University for Women, honoring their journey. It will be placed in Pioneers Plaza, beside Carrier Chapel, during a ceremony starting at 3 p.m. The marker is the result of a collaboration between the History Department at MUW and Chuck Yarborough’s history class at Mississippi School for Mathematics and Science.
Greene-Leech said she and her friends never set out to make history, The Dispatch reported.
“We just wanted an education,” she said.
Greene-Leech’s plan was to go to Mississippi Valley State, one of Mississippi’s three historically black colleges and universities. Hardy, however, planned to apply to MSCW “just to see their reaction,” Greene-Leech recalled. She and Turner decided to apply also, as a show of support for their friend. She said her parents weren’t too excited about that decision.
“They didn’t think it was a good idea,” she said. “They were afraid for me. But they said, ‘If this is what you want to do, we’ll stand behind you.’”
It didn’t take long for the girls to understand where they fit into campus life, which was nowhere really.
“Students then were required to live on campus, but they told us there was no place for us to stay, so we went back and forth from home,” Greene-Leech said. “They had a cafeteria, but we weren’t allowed to eat there. We had to move off the sidewalks to let the white student pass.”
The social clubs that almost every student was a part of were off limits to them, as well.
Greene-Leech said there were a few white students who were accepting, but it was a handful of teachers who made The W tolerable, at least for a while.
The mental and emotional stress took its toll. Greene-Leech left The W after the first semester of her sophomore year.
“It was just too much,” she said.
In 1973, she returned, but left again without finishing her degree. Greene-Leech went to work after that year, eventually landing at the Lowndes County School District, where she worked for 32 years, first as a library assistant, but for most of her career as the district’s media director.
Greene-Leech said she didn’t give The W much thought for years.
Slowly, though, she began to notice things changing. Gertrude Lewis and Marjorie Carter became The W’s first Black faculty members in 1970, and Black enrollment built steadily over the years. Male students joined the study body in the ’80s.
“When I saw Black students and Black faculty members and later, the boys, I knew it was finally a school for all people,” she said. “That was when I was proud of The W and the part we played in it becoming what it is today.”
When she heard about plans to put up a historical marker, she said, she shed tears of joy.
“I was happy that we did play a little part in the story. I cried because I look at the institution and see what it has become,” Greene-Leech said.
Her only regret is that her lifelong friend Hardy will not be present for the ceremony. Hardy died in 2013.
Still, she said she’s eager to attend the ceremony and is especially excited to meet and talk to the students, many of whom are the same age she was in the fall of ’66.
“I know they have absolutely no idea of what it was like almost 60 years ago,” she said. “It really touches me, what they did with this. It brought me to tears.”
GULFPORT, Miss. (WLOX) – The Mississippi Aquarium in Gulfport is spreading holiday cheer with a new event, ‘’A Magical Mississippi Christmas.’
The aquarium held a preview Tuesday night.
‘A Magical Mississippi Christmas’ includes a special dolphin presentation, diving elves, and photos with Santa.
The event also includes “A Penguin’s Christmas Wish,” which is a projection map show that follows a penguin through Christmas adventures across Mississippi.
“It’s a really fun event and it’s the first time we really opened up the aquarium at night for the general public, so it’s a chance to come in and see what it’s like in the evening because it’s really spectacular and really beautiful,” said Kurt Allen, Mississippi Aquarium President and CEO.
‘A Magical Mississippi Christmas’ runs from November 29 to December 31.
It will not be open on December 11th, December 24th, and December 25th.
Tickets can be purchased online or at the gate.
The event is made possible by the city of Gulfport and Coca-Cola Bottling Company.
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Copyright 2024 WLOX. All rights reserved.
Mississippi
Mississippi asks for execution date of man convicted in 1993 killing, lawyers plan to appeal case to SCOTUS
Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch, a Republican, is seeking an execution date for a convicted killer who has been on death row for 30 years, but his lawyer argues that the request is premature since the man plans to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Charles Ray Crawford, 58, was sentenced to death in connection with the 1993 kidnapping and killing of 20-year-old community college student Kristy Ray, according to The Associated Press.
During his 1994 trial, jurors pointed to a past rape conviction as an aggravating circumstance when they issued Crawford’s sentence, but his attorneys said Monday that they are appealing that conviction to the Supreme Court after a lower court ruled against them last week.
Crawford was arrested the day after Ray was kidnapped from her parents’ home and stabbed to death in Tippah County. Crawford told officers he had blacked out and did not remember killing her.
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Mississippi death row inmate Charles Ray Crawford, who was convicted and sentenced to death in 1994 in the 1993 kidnapping and killing of a community college student, 20-year-old Kristy Ray. (Mississippi Department of Corrections via AP)
He was arrested just days before his scheduled trial on a charge of assaulting another woman by hitting her over the head with a hammer.
The trial for the assault charge was delayed several months before he was convicted. In a separate trial, Crawford was found guilty in the rape of a 17-year-old girl who was friends with the victim of the hammer attack. The victims were at the same place during the attacks.
Crawford said he also blacked out during those incidents and did not remember committing the hammer assault or the rape.
During the sentencing portion of Crawford’s capital murder trial in Ray’s death, jurors found the rape conviction to be an “aggravating circumstance” and gave him the death sentence, according to court records.
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During the sentencing portion of Crawford’s capital murder trial, jurors found his prior rape conviction to be an “aggravating circumstance” and gave him the death sentence. (iStock)
In his latest federal appeal of the rape case, Crawford claimed his previous lawyers provided unconstitutionally ineffective assistance for an insanity defense. He received a mental evaluation at the state hospital, but the trial judge repeatedly refused to allow a psychiatrist or other mental health professional outside the state’s expert to help in Crawford’s defense, court records show.
On Friday, a majority of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected Crawford’s appeal.
But the dissenting judges wrote that he received an “inadequately prepared and presented insanity defense” and that “it took years for a qualified physician to conduct a full evaluation of Crawford.” The dissenting judges quoted Dr. Siddhartha Nadkarni, a neurologist who examined Crawford.
“Charles was laboring under such a defect of reason from his seizure disorder that he did not understand the nature and quality of his acts at the time of the crime,” Nadkarni wrote. “He is a severely brain-injured man (corroborated both by history and his neurological examination) who was essentially not present in any useful sense due to epileptic fits at the time of the crime.”
Photo shows the gurney of an execution chamber. (AP Photo/Sue Ogrocki, File)
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Crawford’s case has already been appealed multiple times using various arguments, which is common in death penalty cases.
Hours after the federal appeals court denied Crawford’s latest appeal, Fitch filed documents urging the state Supreme Court to set a date for Crawford’s execution by lethal injection, claiming that “he has exhausted all state and federal remedies.”
However, the attorneys representing Crawford in the Mississippi Office of Post-Conviction Counsel filed documents on Monday stating that they plan to ask the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn the appeals court’s ruling.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
The rest of the night will be calm. We’ll cool down into the mid to upper 50s overnight tonight. A big cold front will arrive on Thanksgiving, bringing a few showers. Temperatures will drop dramatically after the front passes. It will be much cooler by Friday! Frost will be possible this weekend. Here’s the latest forecast.
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