If you know Guys & Dolls, you’re already singing the rest of this line: “His name is Paul Revere, and there’s a guy that says, when the weather’s clear, ‘Can do!’” - http://www.musictory.com/music/Guys+And+Dolls/Fugue+For+Tinhorns )

Two Mississippi cannabis reform organizations have joined forces to end marijuana prohibition in their state, and if successful will pull off one of the most comprehensive pieces of citizen-generated legislation dealing with cannabis that we have seen yet. Proposition 48 is a ballot initiative that would not only legalize both medical and recreational marijuana in Mississippi but industrial hemp production as well. Additionally, Prop 48 calls on the Mississippi Governor to pardon all persons convicted of non-violent marijuana crimes.

Ray Charles Staten Sr. should have celebrated his 60th birthday this month. Instead, his family marked the fourth anniversary of his death. It all started, according to a lawsuit that settled in March 2015, when a small debt became a death sentence in the spring of 2011.

The last round of voter restrictions came after the 2010 Republican wave, when new GOP majorities passed voter identification laws and slashed ballot access in states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Florida. Now, three months after the 2014 Republican wave, another class of state lawmakers are prepping another assault on voting rights under the same guise of “uniformity” and “ballot integrity.”

Headlines are telling a bleak story this election season, particularly for women of color. Fast food and home care workers—the vast majority of them minority women who are living in poverty—have been striking for a living wage.

This week the Durham, North Carolina-based nonprofit MDC released its latest State of the South report highlighting how the American dream of intergenerational upward mobility is more elusive for young people born at the bottom of the income ladder in the South than anywhere else in the country.

The American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of Mississippi, and the Roderick and Solange MacArthur Justice Center filed a class action suit late yesterday against the Scott County (Mississippi) sheriff, district attorney, and judges after learning that the Scott County Detention Center has held people for as long as a year without appointing counsel and without indicting them. The county’s practices violate the Sixth and Fourteenth Amendments’ rights to counsel, to a speedy trial, and to a fair bail hearing.