Freedom of Expression

Klansman James Ford Seale had long been presumed dead by The Clarion-Ledger, Los Angeles Times, Associated Press and others. The FBI had a 1,000-page case file on Seale as the prime suspect in a civil-rights-era murder-drowning of two black men in Franklin County, Mississippi, in 1964. But four decades later in the summer of 2005, a team of Jackson Free Press (JFP) reporters, a Canadian filmmaker, and the brother of victim Charles Moore—Thomas Moore—unearthed a bombshell: Seale was “still alive, and lived in Roxie, near the intersection of Highways of 84/98 and 33 in a Winnebago-type trailer on land believed to belong to his brother”; the report appeared in JFP’s July 26, 2005 edition. In January 2007, the FBI would indict Seale on federal charges of kidnapping and conspiracy stemming from the murders.

“We as Mississippians must tell our own stories,” wrote Jackson Free Press editor Donna Ladd, who couldn’t be more proud that her investigative team, a crew of black and white journalists all under 25, all hail from her native state. The JFP, as its known, is a free newspaper that has resurrected the alt-weekly tradition of maverick investigations and cultural provocation in the heart of the Deep South. It’s an old-school “alternative.” There is little snark, no sex advice columns, no escort ads and not even a single tobacco ad. Started in 2002, it has cultivated an audience uncommon in the South and practically nonexistent among alt-weeklies — young, white conservatives and black professionals, many of whom are lifelong Jacksonians. When she started the paper with Todd Stauffer, Stephen Barnette and Jimmy Mumford in 2002, Ladd was often told Jackson wasn’t ready. “They told me, ‘You’ll never do a newspaper that black people and white people will read in any significant way.’”

“They’ve figured out how to talk about those issues in a community so that they’re not black or white,” said Harvey Johnson, Jackson’s former mayor. He’s been on the receiving end of both the paper’s criticism and commendation, and yet JFP’s online readers voted him Most Underappreciated Jacksonian in 2005. It’s not a lightweight award, as the paper has a maddening Internet presence with all the same addictive qualities that drive national political sites like The Daily Kos or Little Green Footballs. Comment threads frequently run longer than the original stories. Johnson adds, “Although it’s a weekly newspaper, its Internet capabilities make it a daily.”

Jackson is a town that Craigslist has yet to take over (or perhaps vice-versa). Though it has been a downfall of many alt-weeklies, the Web has been a windfall for the JFP, allowing them to saturate their market with comment-heavy blogs and even create their own reader-driven Jackson-specific wiki, Jackpedia. (Sample entry: “Chimneyville — Jackson’s nickname after being burnt to the ground three times during the Civil War.”) While some members of the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies once balked at accrediting the paper for looking so different from traditional alt-weeklies, it now invites Todd Stauffer, Ladd’s partner, to speak on interactive Web design at its annual conference.

While the investigations into the Klan have given the JFP loads of national press, it’s their City Hall coverage that has built a loyal following. “Any cover with the mayor on it doesn’t stay on the stands more than a day,” says Ladd. Mayor Frank Melton was elected in 2005 with an unusually aggressive get-tough-on-crime platform that included personal street-patrolling by the mayor and burning down abandoned homes. In September 2006, the Jackson Free Press broke the story that the mayor and a team of young men broke into a privately owned and occupied duplex and demolished it with sledgehammers. One resident interviewed for the piece said, “They busted toilets, they busted furniture, they tore up stoves and put holes in the walls. They just demolished the house the second time. [The resident] was still standing outside the house. [Mayor Melton] put him in cuffs.”

The paper’s coverage of Melton has shown the Jackson Free Press just as dogged to expose the roughshod excess of the city’s black political establishment as it has been in its pursuit of unsolved civil-rights-era killings from the state’s legacy of white demagoguery. But taking on City Hall and former Klansmen is a precarious business in a town where everybody seems to know everybody.

“Mississippi isn’t a state, it’s a club,” says former city councilman Ben Allen, invoking an old adage about the state’s tightly-knit business and political culture. Allen heads Downtown Jackson Partners, an agency that manages Jackson’s business improvement district, and describes himself as a Reagan Republican. “Do I agree with [JFP’s] national politics? No. Do I agree with their role as urban warriors with their total and complete devotion to Jackson? Of course.” Among the political disagreements he has with the Jackson Free Press is its focus on unsolved civil-rights-era murders. He doesn’t dispute the paper’s investigative success but questions whether it’s the best use of the paper’s limited resources. 

Mississippi isn’t a state, it’s a club.” – former city councilman Ben Allen

“I am talking about both black and white people here,” says Allen, who is white. “We want to put these race issues away and move on.” As proof he isn’t venturing down the road of “don’t dredge up the past” apologetics, he opens his cell phone and calls Kamikaze, a black hip-hop artist and columnist for the Jackson Free Press. On speakerphone, his “Hey Kaz” is met with a “Hey homie” from Kamikaze.

Kamikaze is one of the state’s best rappers. He’s also a journalist who covered the 1996 Atlanta Olympics and was most recently an entertainment columnist for Jackson’s daily newspaper, The Clarion-Ledger. He jumped ship to the JFP after he said his former editors made it clear to him they weren’t interested in his political coverage. At JFP, he’s used his column role as a launching pad for an unlikely political coalition called the Jackson Progressives. “It’ll be putting young faces into office,” says Kamikaze. “Jackson is run by an old guard. They have a death grip on the city.” Which is not to say Kamikaze distrusts anyone over 40. Since he’s started the column, he says middle-aged blacks and whites now regularly attend his hip-hop shows.

Jackson Progressives is a somewhat misleading title, as the group counts among its members many young Republicans, not to mention city employees, black professionals, hip-hoppers and even the odd American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) lawyer. “When we’re out in a restaurant and people come in and look at our table, we get a lot of angry looks,” says Kamikaze.

Did he mention he’s a close friend of Mayor Melton? Kamikaze brokered a series of interviews and nighttime “ride-alongs” Melton granted to Ladd. But after the paper exposed his sledgehammer antics, relations became frosty once again. “Everything about the mayor is fair and accurate,” says Kamikaze. “I told him what he did was really screwed up … [and] we’re still friends.”

At times, these densely threaded social relationships threaten to combust. In the paper’s first six months, Stauffer had sleepless nights over their cover story exposés on Trent Lott and the Dixiecrats’ and the Southern Strategy. This was after Lott’s infamous comments at Strom Thurmond’s retirement party. “I thought that was it,” says Stauffer, convinced they’d hemorrhage so many advertisers that they’d be forced to close. Today, the couple has learned that people read them either because of or despite the controversy. As Kamikaze puts it, “You have people who hate Donna but who spend all day posting on the [JFP] Web site.”

When Ladd left Mississippi in 1983, the day after she graduated from college (she attended Mississippi State in Starkville), it was because there wasn’t a creative, progressive community to be part of. “I didn’t think I would live here again,” says Ladd, who has spent over two decades as a writer and editor, including freelance work for The Village Voice and a stint as the founding editor of the Colorado Springs Independent. Stauffer and Ladd traveled to Jackson in 2001 intending to work on a book and use the city as an inexpensive base for travel. After Sept. 11, 2001, with their freelance contracts in New York drying up, they soon realized they weren’t likely to move back East. With the help of new friends and mentors, they wrote a business plan for a new alternative newsweekly to cover the city of Jackson. The Jackson Free Press, named after the crusading ’60s civil rights paper, the Mississippi Free Press, was born. “It was the closest to a real religious experience I’ve had,” says Ladd. “If there was ever a force outside myself forcing me to do something, it was this paper.”

The dialogue between blacks and whites, conservatives and liberals that she’s been waiting for most of her life has finally begun to happen. She feels she’s playing a role in slowing the city’s brain drain. Despite the city’s 40,000 college students, many leaders openly worry about losing the city’s best and brightest to cities with more booming economies and pluralist cultures. “They just leave,” says Ladd. “They feel there’s not a place for them here.”

As alt-weeklies continue to consolidate, gutting their investigative teams and replacing them with a consumer’s-guide crowd of hipster-urban transplants, the JFP has run 50 yards in the opposite direction, digging up dirt on City Hall, taxpayer fraud and public schools while writing for an audience of longtime city dwellers. It’s not a strategy that most alt-weeklies would bank upon.