Mississippi Edition

A longtime colleague remembers the service of the late Mississippi House Speaker Billy McCoy. Also, the alarming trend of trying youth offenders as adults in Mississippi. And environmental advocates are talking about a Gulf Coast version of the Green New Deal. Plus, novelist Margaret Wilkerson Sexton is in our Book Club.

A longtime House Democrat is remembering the public service career of former Mississippi House Speaker Billy McCoy, who died Tuesday.  Representative Steve Holland of Plantersville says his fellow Democrat was instrumental in passing the state's current education funding formula, but will be most remembered for legislation creating a four-lane state highway system. Holland spoke with MPB's Ezra Wall.

Services for Billy McCoy will be Friday afternoon at 2 at Gaston Baptist Church. He was 77.

A new report out today shows, nearly five-thousand children in Mississippi have been charged as adults in the last twenty-five years. Of those, three out of four are African American. It's part of an online story available today from the public radio show, Reveal. Reporter Ko Bragg talks about her findings with MPB's Ezra Wall.

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An environmental initiative is being launched that focuses on helping communities of color on the Gulf Coast.  The Gulf South for a Green New Deal is a plan crafted by community leaders, indigenous peoples, farmers, and small business members.  Gordon Jackson is the Chair of the Environmental and Climate Justice Committee for the Biloxi NAACP.  He tells MPB's Kobee Vance, while the Green New Deal is a good idea, it need to be tailored to fit the needs of the Gulf South. Fifty groups across five southern states have co-sponsored the initiative , and more than 100 organizations have endorsed the policy.

In her debut novel, Margaret Wilkerson Sexton told the story of three generations of a black New Orleans family in World War 2, the 1980s and post-Katrina. That book, “ A Kind of Freedom” was met with high praise and a nomination for the National Book Award. Now, Wilkerson Sexton is out with her next book, “The Revisioners.” It’s the story of a former slave and her neighbor in 1924 and then her descendant’s relationship with her white grandmother. The themes are similar. But was that intentional? Margaret Wilkerson Sexton tells us.