Digging Deep in Dixie

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While the investigations into the Klan have given the Jackson Free Press national attention, it’s the paper’s 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 the mayor personally patrolling the streets. 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. In July, Melton was indicted on federal civil rights charges.

The paper’s coverage of Melton has shown that the Jackson Free Press is 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 council president Ben Allen.

As some alt weeklies consolidate, gutting their investigative teams and replacing them with a consumer’s-guide crowd of hipster-urban transplants, the Jackson Free Press 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. In doing so, it has begun a dialogue between blacks and whites, conservatives and liberals, that Ladd has been waiting for most of her life.

Ladd left Mississippi in 1983, after she graduated from college, because it lacked a creative, progressive community. She spent nearly two decades as a writer and editor for publications including the Village Voice and the Colorado Springs Independent before returning to Jackson in 2001. She and Stauffer wrote a business plan for a new alternative newsweekly to cover the city of Jackson, and the Jackson 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.”

Reprinted from the Next American City(Spring 2008), a quarterly reporting on the front lines of urban innovations. Visit it online at americancity.org.

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