2020
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hinking of a recent year as eventful as 2020 would be quite the challenge. Nevertheless, the Jackson Free Press chose a handful of Mississippians who have made headlines this year, for better or worse, and reflects on their undertakings over the last year. Read the following intriguing recaps to learn more.
AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis
courtesy state of Mississippi
The Most Intriguing OF
Dr. Thomas Dobbs
December 23, 2020 - January 5, 2021 • jfp.ms
Gov. William Winter
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Gov. William Winter passed from this earth on Dec. 18, another tragedy for a year composed of little else. Eulogies emerged rapidly, from across the state and the nation. Winter was a giant in the state’s history, an alchemical figure. His story—a segregationist turned devoted racial unifier—remains the lasting dream for Mississippi’s lingering institutions of white supremacy. Winter’s extant political opponents refer to him as a gentleman, and true enough: there was something of an entirely different age about his demeanor and his tact. But a diplomatic bearing is not William Winter’s legacy. The governor’s legacy is the reward of a ceaseless career of self-critical growth. Winter saw long before his colleagues that the repairing of a broken society requires the powerful to put the reconciliation of generations to come above the alluring nostalgia of the past. That nostalgia persists. But so does the integrated educational system created by Winter’s landmark achievement, and the Institute for Racial Reconciliation bearing his name, now based in Jackson. Winter’s 97 years of life began between the two governorships of strident racist Theodore Bilbo. In 2020, Mississippi mourns his polar opposite. In the years to come, leadership will come of age that benefited from Gov. Winter’s hopeful vision of Mississippi’s future, and his honest assessment of its past. And that will be his greatest legacy of all. —Nick Judin
State Health Officer Dr. Thomas Dobbs rose to the top of the Mississippi State Department of Health in 2018, and he is as surprised as you are that you know his name. That he was taking on a position of such significance so soon before the publichealth crisis of the century is not something that Dobbs could have easily anticipated. But that his role as the state’s top medical expert would put him at the crumbling fault line of a culture at war with itself is beyond all imagining. To many Mississippians, Dobbs is a candid advocate for the state’s health-care system. His calm demeanor does little to mask the dire nature of his COVID-19 pronouncements—his repeated warnings, which too few have taken seriously—have consistently come to pass. To the denialists who have never successfully grappled with the real weight of the pandemic, he is a figure of utter contempt: “Doomsday Dobbs,” a regional stand-in for grander subjects of reactionary hatred, from Dr. Anthony Fauci to Bill Gates. To others still, he is simply not enough, remaining an adviser in a crisis that calls for a general. His position as state health officer is legally distinct from Gov. Tate Reeves’ direct authority. His public-health orders carry the weight of law. And yet he consistently defers to the willfully uninformed, inconstant leadership of the governor. With more than 5,000 Mississippians dead from COVID-19, in Dobbs’ own estimations, such a critique has to be entertained. Yet looming above it is a far more grim assessment: The powers legally invested in any position, be it the state health officer or the office of the governor, are only relevant so far as they are heard, understood, enforced and obeyed. In an earlier era, Dobbs might have been the ironclad authority some now wish for him to be. But in this American twilight, noisy with the din of misinformation, atomized into endless political struggle, he is first and foremost a witness. —Nick Judin
