mon DAY, mA rch 22, 2010 • 50¢
House sends health care overhaul to Obama Three of four Mississippi congressmen vote against it
Health care bill passes by slim margin The House passed a $940 billion health care bill, 219-212, which cleared the Senate in late-December. The bill now goes to President Obama for his signature. A reconciliation bill containing a package of fixes was also approved by the House and now awaits a Senate vote. Each square equals one vote
Democrats 219
Republicans 178
By The Associated Press WASHINGTON — A transformative health care bill is headed to President Barack Obama for his signature as Congress takes the final steps in Democrats’ improbable and history-making push for near-universal medical coverage. On the cusp of succeeding where numerous past congresses and administrations have failed, jubilant House Democrats voted 219-212 late Sunday to send legislation to Obama that would extend coverage to 32 million uninsured Americans, reduce deficits and ban insurance company practices such as denying coverage to people with pre-existing medical conditions.
Voted against party line: 34 Democrats
on A7 Key elements of the bill
The associaTed Press
President Barack Obama addresses the nation Sunday night as Vice President Joe Biden looks on. Three of four Mississippi congressmen voted against the bill. Rep. Bennie Thomspson, a Democrat who represents Warren County, part of Hinds and much of the Delta, voted for it. Reps. Gene
Taylor and Travis Childers, both Democrats, and Republican Rep. Gregg Harper voted against it. Childers’ office issued a press release in which the congressman said, “My oppo-
sition to this bill lies largely in its high cost, especially in today’s economy.” Hours after the historic vote Sunday night, Obama addressed the nation in a televised speech.
“This is what change looks like,” Obama said in remarks that stirred memories of his 2008 campaign promise of “change we can believe in.” “We proved that this government — a government of the people and by the people — still works for the people.” Obama will travel outside Washington Thursday as he now turns to seeing a companion bill through the Senate and selling the health care overhaul’s benefits on
behalf of House lawmakers who cast risky votes. It is most likely that he will sign the bill on Tuesday, but the plans are not yet final, said a senior administration official. Obama’s young presidency received a much-needed boost from passage of the legislation, which would touch the lives of nearly every American. The battle for the future of the health insurance system — affecting one-sixth of the economy — galvanized Republicans and conservative activists looking ahead to November’s See Health care, Page A7.
Jail escapee Attorney retraces steps taken in civil rights work picked up in Chicago 40 yeArS lATer
By Tish Butts tbutts@vicksburgpost.com
When Peter Swords came to Mississippi 44 years ago to help free jailed civil rights workers, he didn’t know it would change his life, but it did. Last week, the attorney came back to retrace his steps. “I had a radical conversion when I came down here. I lost interest in making money or anything like that. I got very interested in people trying to do things for other people – social service groups,” said Swords, now 74. “I would not be teaching nonprofit law today if I had not come down here.” As a lawyer with the firm of Cadwalder, Wickersham & Taft in New York City, Swords was assigned to work with a Jackson law office led by Denison Ray in 1966 and 1967. He worked on cases in Port Gibson and Grenada. “The Claiborne County story about civil rights is a real miracle,” he said. “They would arrest the movement people and try to get them to jail where they would not cause any trouble,” he said. “Our job was to go down and get them out of jail.” During that time, he represented Port Gibson resident Rudolph “Rudy” Shields, jailed during the voter registration movement, and 14 school-aged children, jailed in Grenada for trespassing at a movie theater. He said he traveled to both cities last week but was unable to visit with any of the people he had represented. Swords did not win the Shields case in Claiborne County, but he was able to get the 14 released in Grenada — just after the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under the Law came to the state. President John F. Kennedy, whose campaign included a
By Pamela Hitchins phitchins@vicksburgpost.con
ary Baptist Church on East Pearl and Waters streets. During last week’s visit to Grenada, he had hoped to talk with the 14 on how they felt about peeking out of a candy store window as 30 law officials with shotguns and rifles were trying to scare the group, “which they did quite effectively,” Swords said. Instead, he visited Bell Flower, where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had once delivered a message. In Vicksburg through today, Swords and his wife, Brenda, toured the Vicksburg National
A prisoner who escaped from the Warren County Jail Wednesday after beating a jailer was captured this morning in Chicago, Sheriff Martin Pace said. Leon Bryant, 33, 4920 Halls Ferry Road, was arrested without incident just before 6 by the U.S. Marshals Great Lakes Task Force, Pace said. Bryant was found at the apartment of an acquaintance on the Leon west side of Chicago, Bryant the second location in the city that officials had checked for the fugitive, the sheriff said. “We had begun receiving information Friday that he was in the Chicago area,” Pace said today. Bryant had been wanted in Warren County on 2008 charges of selling cocaine. He had been caught Tuesday afternoon after returning here from Texas on a Greyhound, and held in the county jail overnight. When jailer Kenneth Robinson picked up laundry the next morning from Bryant’s cell block on the second floor, Bryant overpowered and attacked him, Pace said. He fled using the elevator to the basement level, touching off a manhunt throughout the city and county. Robinson was treated at River Region Medical Center for cuts and swelling to his head and then released. Bryant was in the Cook County Jail, Pace said. He will have an extradition hearing,
See Swords, Page A7.
See escapee, Page A7.
KATIE CARTER•The Vicksburg PosT
Attorney Peter Swords of New York sits at Ahern’s Belle of the Bends Sunday, talking about his return
to the state where he represented civil rights workers 40 years ago and changed his life’s ambitions.
‘I had a radical conversion when I came down here. I lost interest in making money or anything like that.’ Peter SwordS aTTorney pledge to end racial segregation laws common in the South, called for lawyers and young associates at large law firms in areas such as New York and Philadelphia to address the problem in the South. Swords said authorities were committing a federal crime by infringing on Civil Rights Act of 1964, passed after Kennedy was assassinated, which provided rights to public accommodations,
such as restaurants, motels and movies, on a race-neutral basis. “One of the most exciting things, I mean the scariest part of my life, was after I came back to Jackson. Two or three days later, I’m sent back up to Grenada with affidavits for these kids to sign,” Swords said. He was greeted by a bomb scare at the law office’s Grenada headquarters at Bell Flower Mission-
WEAThEr
DEATh
ToDAY In hISTorY
conTAcT US
InDEX
Tonight: Partly cloudy; low near 42 Tuesday: Partly cloudy; high near 71
• Robert Donerson
1765: Britain enacts the Stamp Act of 1765 to raise money from the American colonies. (The Act was repealed the following year.) 1882: President Chester Alan Arthur signs a measure outlawing polygamy. 1978: Karl Wallenda, the 73-year-old patriarch of “The Flying Wallendas” high-wire act, falls to his death while attempting to walk a cable strung between two hotel towers in San Juan, Puerto Rico.
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