Jackson Free Press

For better or worse, you talked about them. A lot. Some deserved it. Others? Well ...

Janis Lane, Central Mississippi Tea Party president

“I’m really going to set you back here,” Janis Lane began her screed about the “diabolical” nature of women this summer. Then, she proceeded to undo much of the women’s movement when she continued, saying: “Probably the biggest turn we ever made was when the women got the right to vote.”

Making offensive statements about women became common during the 2012 election cycle. Such harebrained remarks, particularly about abortion, cost candidates Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock in Missouri and Indiana their bids for the U.S. Senate. But coming from Lane, a woman who leads a political organization, the comments just seemed bizarre. That’s probably why a video of Lane making the statement to the Jackson Free Press went viral weeks before the election.

In a statement, Lane said she was offering a tongue-in-cheek response to the JFP’s ridiculous line of questioning about the role of women in conservative politics and said the newspaper’s female editors “have conspired to discredit the Tea Party by crafty editing of the secretly recorded video to take out all context.”

Women, we tell ya.

—R.L. Nave

Ryan Buchanan, rising football star

Ryan Buchanan is getting attention and recognition from college recruiting websites that few Mississippi private-school football players have ever enjoyed.

ESPN.com, Rivals.com and Scout.com have all listed the Jackson Prep quarterback as a four-star commitment, a rarity among private-school players in this state.

Buchanan chose to get the recruiting distractions out of the way for his senior season by verbally committing to Ole Miss in the summer. That decision paid off. Buchanan led Jackson Prep to an undefeated season that included a 34-10 thumping of rival Jackson Academy in the Class AAA-Div. 1 championship game.

In the fall, Buchanan will be the first quarterback to join the Ole Miss team straight out of high school since Raymond Cotton in 2009. He has a chance to be the first to do so and lead the team in passing over the course of a season since Michael Spurlock in 2005.

—Jacob Fuller

Mike Chaney, insurance commissioner

Mike Chaney, insurance commissioner

Mississippi Insurance Commissioner Mike Chaney is in an enviable spot. He’s one of only a dozen ICs nationwide who are elected rather than appointed by a governor. That leaves him free to do what he believes is right for his constituents, even if his actions put a burr under the saddle of a certain cowboy-boot-sportin’ governor.

Chaney, a Vietnam vet and a Republican, seems to be a pragmatist first. While he’d rather see that Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, wiped off the books and out of our memories, he’s doing what the law mandates for his office by setting up a health-insurance exchange.

On that, he’s way ahead of the game. Because former Gov. Haley Barbour pushed for a free-market exchange as early as 2007, Mississippi already has a website where folks can find health insurance. Chaney seems to be OK with taking the $21 million the federal government has handed to the state to build an exchange. His reasoning? Mississippi would give up control if the feds did it for us.

—Ronni Mott

LaRita Cooper-Stokes, Ward 3 councilwoman

Much like today’s reality TV stars, whether you love ’em or hate ’em, the Stokes duo is fun to watch.

Like her husband, Kenneth Stokes, before her, LaRita Cooper-Stokes made headlines from her first day as Ward 3 Councilwoman, and not just for on-the-agenda city business.

Cooper-Stokes finished first in three elections for the seat in 2012. First, she took the most votes in a February special election to replace her husband. Then she defeated Joyce Jackson in a runoff election later that month. After Jackson successfully challenged the legality of the runoff election in a week-long court hearing, Cooper-Stokes defeated her again to keep the seat.

Refusing to attend bi-weekly work sessions and special meetings, honoring local pastors at almost every regular meeting, and standing as the only council member against the city’s $90 million water enhancement project are just a few of the things that make Cooper-Stokes the city’s most intriguing councilperson.

—Jacob Fuller

Ted Duckworth, developer

Duckworth Realty founder Ted Duckworth is no newcomer to real estate development. He has been leading brick-and-mortar progress around the city, and far beyond, since 1989.

Now, in a time when so many companies and developers are fleeing Jackson for the suburbs, Duckworth is focusing major resources in the capital city.

Duckworth has set his sights on the former home of the Mississippi Schools for the Blind and Deaf. In February, District Land Development Company, headed by Duckworth Realty, finalized a $3.3 million deal with the state Department of Finance and Administration to purchase the former school campus just off Interstate 55.

Duckworth plans to turn the land into a 500,000-square-foot, mixed-use development with retail, hotel, restaurant, office and residential space. Duckworth hopes to see The District at Eastover bring nearly 600 jobs and almost $2 million in revenue to the city in the next four-to-seven years.

—Jacob Fuller

Cedrick Gray, Jackson Public Schools superintendent

When the Rev. Jesse Jackson is flown in for your official introduction, you’re kind of a big deal. Since the Jackson Public Schools board of trustees tapped Cedrick Gray as the district’s first permanent superintendent in over a year, people have gone out of their way to make Gray feel welcome in the capital city.

In his entry plan, Gray said he wanted to work closely with school board members, community and civic leaders as well as parents, teachers and students. Gray has also said he would focus on early childhood education, K-12 literacy and adolescent issues that affect academic performance later in life.

Gray’s tenure has not been without controversy, however. Questions have surfaced about Gray’s handing of finances at his former district in Fayette County, Tenn. Under his leadership, JPS is also suing the city of Jackson for declining the district’s amended budget request.

—R.L. Nave

Delbert Hosemann, secretary of state

Mississippi Secretary of State and lawyer Delbert Hosemann ran and won his 2007 campaign largely on his southern-goofy name, literally, with his ads saying little about his qualifications. But voters seem to like what he’s been up to—he won re-election in 2011.

This past year, much of the state’s notice in the national press has swirled around the issue of voter ID, which 62 percent of Mississippi voters approved in a 2011 ballot initiative. As the guy responsible for shepherding the initiative into reality, Hosemann sits in the eye of that political hurricane. The state’s history of minority voter intimidation and suppression means that the feds and a plethora of civil-rights organizations will get involved each time Mississippi wants to make a substantive change in voting laws that will potentially decrease voter participation.

Whether you agree with his staunchly Republican position in the matter or not, you’ve got to give him props for standing his ground. History will reveal whether his stand gives him a white hero’s Stetson or the black villain’s version.

—Ronni Mott

Alan Huffman and Michael Rejebian, authors

A book about a little-known political field, opposition research, took former Clarion-Ledger journalists Alan Huffman and Michael Rejebian to the stage of the “The Daily Show” with Jon Stewart this year. “We’re with Nobody: Two Insiders Reveal the Dark Side of American Politics” (William Morrow Paperbacks, 2012, $15.99) detailed their exploits in the often-weird and not-so-nice world of digging up opposing candidates’ weaknesses. The authors’ TV appearance (and the fact that it is an election year) gave the book a big bump, putting it into Amazon’s top 30 list.

Jackson native Huffman authored three books prior to “We’re with Nobody,” and a fifth, “Here I Am, the story of war photographer Tim Hetherington,” will be released next March. Both Huffman and Rejebian—a Dallas, Texas native—are University of Mississippi alumni, and partners in a political consulting firm. Rejebian has served as the director of communications and political adviser for the Office of Mayor, City of Jackson, and is a political adviser to the Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood.

—Ronni Mott

Jesmyn Ward, award-winning author

Jesmyn Ward so accurately captures the raw experience of Hurricane Katrina in her novel, “Salvage the Bones,” because she lived it. Her family home in rural DeLisle, Miss., flooded during the storm, and Ward and her family ended up stranded in a field. Ward later worked in New Orleans and drove through traumatized neighborhoods daily.

“Salvage the Bones” won the 2011 National Book Award for fiction and the 2012 Alex Award.

Ward hopes to make her mark as a non-white writer with a universal message. She told The Paris Review: “It infuriates me that the work of white American writers can be universal and lay claim to classic texts, while black and female authors are ghetto-ized as ‘other.’ … The stories I write are particular to my community and my people, which means the details are particular to our circumstances, but the larger story of the survivor, the savage, is essentially a universal, human one.”

—Kathleen M. Mitchell

Carolyn Meyers, Jackson State University president

It wasn’t until recently that Jackson State University President Dr. Carolyn Meyers really felt like the capital city was home. Meyers was born in Newport News, Va., and previously served as president of Norfolk State University, also a historically black university. In November 2010, she joined JSU as the first female to preside over the 135-year-old school.

Now that she feels at home, Meyers has wasted no time sprucing up the place. In addition to making improvements on campus, Meyers envisions a downtown where JSU’s presence is seen and felt. Among those plans include finalizing plans for 101 W. Capitol St., which would house classrooms and a government institute.

Meyers is also looking to build stronger relationships with the greater Jackson community. JSU is Mississippi’s urban institution and the school plans to live up to the designation. “This is your university,” Meyers tells Jacksonians. “Own it.” —R.L. Nave

Tate Reeves, Mississippi lieutenant governor

Tate Reeves borrows his political philosophy from former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee. “I’m an unabashed conservative, but I ain’t mad at anybody about it,” Reeves quipped last year.

The former state treasurer and a protégé of former Gov. Haley Barbour, Reeves is as red-blooded a Mississippi politician as they come. In fact, Reeves was so ecstatic that a tough abortion regulation law could end abortion in Mississippi, that his premature jubilation became one of the bases for an abortion clinic’s lawsuit to block the law. Still, Reeves appointed quite a few members from the minority Democratic Party to key committee chairmanships, including Economic Development and Judiciary B. That move led to the demise of a strict immigration bill and a so-called fetal heartbeat bill, two highly coveted items on his own party’s wish list.

—R.L.Nave

Diane Derzis, Jackson Women’s Health Organization owner

Diane Derzis is every bit the brassy broad you’d expect from a southern woman who makes a living providing abortion services to women in the Deep South. Now Derzis, who owns the Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Mississippi’s sole abortion clinic, is the only thing standing between Mississippi officials who want to shut the clinic down and women who need to have those services available. Naturally, she’s not going away without a fight.

This spring, Derzis filed a lawsuit to block a state law the Legislature passed requiring doctors at free-standing abortion clinics have admitting privileges at a local hospital. Derzis’ clinic has not been able to obtain the privileges and recently filed another lawsuit. Derzis, a Virginia native, also owns clinics in Columbus, Ga.; Richmond, Va.; and Birmingham—the site of 1998 bombing by domestic terrorist Eric Rudolph. Because of the dangerous nature of her work, Derzis packs a pistol everywhere she goes but, given the success of those that target abortion clinic regulations in recent years, she jokes about the not needing it: “There’s really not any reason right now for (pro-lifers) to kill anybody—because they’re winning.”

—R.L. Nave

Skylar Laine, American Idol contestant

Onstage Skylar Laine never fails to deliver a spirited and fiery performance. Laine, 18, placed in the top 5 during Season 11 of “American Idol.”

Her mother, Mary Harden, says Laine’s stage presence has always been a big part of her personality. “She just gave it her all ... full of fire ... always a ball of energy. Just what you see on stage is what she was and what she always has been,” Harden said.

Laine is a Brandon native, and her family has owned Jackson eatery The Beatty Street Grocery for more than 70 years.

Her fans, especially those in Mississippi, have been instrumental in helping Laine’s star rise even higher. Her “Season 11 Highlights” EP features five tracks and debuted on July 3 at No. 12 on the Country Chart and No. 68 on the Billboard 200. Currently, Laine is writing music with hopes of moving to Nashville and working on her first album.

—ShaWanda Jacome

James Stern, nonprofit director

He doesn’t always befriend white supremacists. But when he does, it’s Edgar Ray Killen. James Stern is the most interesting man to visit the Jackson Free Press’ offices in a long time.

Shortly after being paroled from prison, Stern told the JFP his fascinating life story. A minister who helped broker a gang truce between the Bloods and Crips in Los Angeles, Stern was jailed on wire fraud chargers in California and extradited to Mississippi, where he met Killen, one of the chief orchestrators of the 1964 Freedom Summer murders in Neshoba County.

At Parchman, Stern, who is African American, said Killen turned over the rights to Killen’s life story as well as the deed to land the Killens own. Through an attorney, Killen and his wife, Betty Jo, denied making any deals with Stern. In turn, Stern filed a defamation lawsuit against the Killens.

Stern, who has since founded an organization to promote racial healing, explained his rationale for suing his former friend: “When you come out of jail with a conviction on you, you have nothing better to do than protect your good name. As a black man, you can’t allow people to just attack your name.”

—R.L. Nave

Natasha Trethewey, U.S. poet laureate

Gulfport native Natasha Trethewey turned to poetry when she was 19 to make sense of her mother’s murder at the hands of an abusive ex-husband. Nearly 30 years later, the 46-year-old earned the titles of both the Mississippi state and United States poet laureate. Her book, “Native Guard,” is a 2007 Pulitzer Prize winner, and she is the Robert W. Woodruff professor of English and creative writing at Emory University in Atlanta, Ga.

Trethewey is the first southerner named as national poet laureate since Robert Penn Warren, the original laureate. As a biracial poet (her mother is black; her father white), Trethewey’s poetry explores issues of race and the history of the South. “Native Guard” tells the story of an all-black regiment in the Union Army in the Civil War.

—Kathleen M. Mitchell

Arden Barnett, concert promoter

Anyone plugged into the music and entertainment scene in Jackson can’t go a week without hearing the name Arden Barnett. Through his company Ardenland, Barnett has become a major player in the concert and live music scene in Jackson, taking over nearly all the booking for Duling Hall. Over the summer he was highly involved in the Jackson and Hattiesburg stops of the Flaming Lips’ world-record-breaking tour of eight

concerts in 24 hours.

A Forest native, Barnett has been a concert and event promoter since 1979. He moved to Jackson in 1986 and is working to build Jackson’s music scene.

“We’re on par with damn near any city, if you ask me,” Barnett told the JFP in September. “For our size of a town, I think our music scene is as good as anyone.”

—Kathleen M. Mitchell