SUMMARY: Tuesday's election outcomes represented successes and failures for both parties. In Kentucky, Democrat Andy Beshear beat Republican Gov. Matt Bevin by a very slim margin, while Mississippi elected a Republican governor. And Virginia voters put both houses of the state's legislature under Democratic control. Amna Nawaz reports and Judy Woodruff speaks with the University of Virginia’s Kyle Kondik.
SUMMARY: Award-winning author Jesmyn Ward writes the stories of the people and places she found absent in literature while growing up. Her new fiction novel, “Sing, Unburied, Sing,” weaves the supernatural with genuine characters that are molded by the rural and poverty-stricken life in her Mississippi hometown. Ward joins Jeffrey Brown to talk about her community and the stories that have come from it.
SUMMARY: Rich in soil, music and culture, the Mississippi Delta is one of those unique regions that has come to hold a special place in the American imagination. But in terms of economic mobility and poverty, this stretch of land is far behind anywhere else in the developed world. Kai Ryssdal takes a look at the storied and complex history of the Mississippi Delta.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): While all eyes were on Ohio this week, we look now at another Cleveland, this one in the Mississippi Delta, where poverty and economic mobility are worse than anywhere else in the developed world.
This report is part of our series How the Deck is Stacked. It’s funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and a collaboration from American Public Media’s Marketplace, and “PBS Frontline” and the “NewsHour.”
Kai Ryssdal of Marketplace has the story.
KAI RYSSDAL, Marketplace: The Mississippi Delta is known for music and for juke-joints like this one, and for rich agricultural land.
Cotton was once the main crop here, now mostly corn. Despite how fertile the ground is here, one in five households live below the poverty line, and, in fact, Mississippi is ranked 50th out of 50 states by poverty rate; 68-year-old Catherine Wilson has lived here her whole life.
CATHERINE WILSON, Cleveland-area resident: Back then, in the '60s, just like we had to move from home to home because we didn't have enough to eat, enough money to survive on.
KAI RYSSDAL: In 1964, President Johnson introduced legislation to deal with a national poverty rate that was almost 20 percent. It became known as the War on Poverty. Jobs training, adult education and loans were all part of the plan.
In April of 1967, Senator Robert Kennedy visited the Delta to have a look for himself at how bad the poverty was.
So, this is 1967. That's Bobby Kennedy right there. And who is that lady in the striped dress? Yes. Pretty good, huh.
CATHERINE WILSON: That's good.
KAI RYSSDAL: That's a smile, right? Do you remember that?
CATHERINE WILSON: Yes, I remember the day he came, all right.
KAI RYSSDAL: What did he want to know? What did he ask you about?
CATHERINE WILSON: Asking about what did we want to see done. They said they want jobs and housing.
KAI RYSSDAL: Blacks in the Delta had historically worked the land, but mechanization and pesticides meant fewer jobs and less money.
CATHERINE WILSON: We have come a long ways since back then. We were so poor and struggling, we didn't have anything. But right now, a lot of people have got jobs. They couldn't get no jobs back then.
KAI RYSSDAL: Catherine Wilson lives alone in a place called Freedom Village, built originally to house those displaced farm workers.
Peter Edelman was an aide to Bobby Kennedy. He was with him on that 1967 trip to the Delta.
PETER EDELMAN, Former Aide to Sen. Robert Kennedy: He said to me as we went from one house to the next that he — this was worse than anything he'd ever seen in a Third World country.
SUMMARY: Clean coal technology is key to the Obama administration's plans for combating climate change. But a high-profile power plant, once a poster child for clean coal's promise, has run billions over budget in construction costs, faces federal investigations and allegations of fraud. William Brangham talks with Ian Urbina, who investigated the story for The New York Times.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM (NewsHour): The New York Times investigation published this week examines problem at the Kemper power plant in Central Mississippi. The plant is still under construction, but its price tag has run billions of dollars over budget. It's the subject of two federal investigations and a lawsuit by Mississippi rate payers who say they have been defrauded.
The problems at Kemper also call into question the Obama administration's reliance on this clean coal technology to fight climate change.
New York Times investigative reporter Ian Urbina wrote the story about Kemper. And he joins me now.
So what is clean coal?
IAN URBINA, The New York Times: It's sort of the promising notion that we could still burn coal, but without so much pollution.
And behind the promise is technology that would allow you in different versions to pull carbon out of the emissions from coal plants.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: So that it doesn't get up into the atmosphere and drive climate change?
IAN URBINA: Correct.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: And was the — is the idea that the technology is proven, but we just don't know how to do it economically? What's the question been about it?
IAN URBINA: Yes, so the technology, as you say, is proven, and we know how to make it work. The challenge is, can we scale it up, so to move it from the model stage to big enough plants to make a difference, and can we do so affordably?
The affordably is really where it gets complicated, because that means can we do so in a fashion that's cheaper than natural gas? Can we do so quickly enough so that the prices don't change and then, by the time you get the plant online, it's no longer the same price tag? And this has been the big stumbling block, with Kemper included.
SUMMARY: Last month, a Mississippi judge ordered the state's public schools to desegregate, illuminating the ongoing struggle to comply with the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling. Special correspondent Charlayne Hunter-Gault talks to Maureen Costello of the Southern Poverty Law Center for insight into how Southern schools can move race relations forward.
GWEN IFILL (NewsHour): The Justice Department recently hailed a federal court ruling affirming plans to desegregate schools in Cleveland, Mississippi. Desegregation, the court ruled, allows students to learn, play and thrive together.
As part of her year-long look at solutions to racism, special correspondent Charlayne Hunter-Gault talks with a teacher on how to successfully teach in integrated settings.
CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT (NewsHour): The percentage of black and Latino students in what's being called apartheid schools is on the increase, and yet most schools seem ill-prepared to help those students be the best they can be, while reducing prejudice and teaching them to learn to live with each other.
But Maureen Costello of the Southern Poverty Law Center says there are ways to achieve all three.
Maureen Costello, thank you for joining us.
MAUREEN COSTELLO, Southern Poverty Law Center: Thank you.
CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: The Southern Poverty Law Center has a curriculum that looks at teaching tolerance in schools. What caused that to happen?
MAUREEN COSTELLO: Well, before we started this program, we were fighting hate crimes, basically.
Morris Dees, our founder, was bringing civil suits against groups like the Klan, and often the young men who had committed some terrible acts against others were motivated by terrible, terrible hatred, and just complete misunderstanding of what other people were like.
CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: It was mostly race at that point.
MAUREEN COSTELLO: It was usually race, although, sometimes, it was also ethnicity.
But he was seeing 19- and 20-year-old perpetrators who were going to spend the rest of their lives in prison. And he said, you know, we have to do something to stop this before it starts. And he said, we need a school program.
And that really was the beginning of teaching tolerance. Let's find the best research we can find about how we can reduce prejudice starting at early ages, and let's get it out there to teachers.
One of the issues in American education is that 80 percent of our teachers are white women.
Mississippi lawmakers are once again tackling the big issues in the state. The highest poverty rate of any state in the country? Hahahaha ... no. The second-highest high school dropout rate in the country? No, no. The second-highest teen pregnancy rate in the country? Awww, hell no.
What is more pressing than extreme poverty? Well, the Mississippi House did pass a bill (HB 132), nicknamed the "Jesus Take the Wheel Act", that would exempt churches from commercial driver's license requirements:
"This just allows small churches, some don't have people with commercial licenses at all, and they can pick a person to drive the bus," said state Rep. Robert Johnson III, D-Natchez, who chairs the Transportation Committee which had passed the bill earlier in the session.
Current law requires CDL-certified drivers for any vehicle transporting more than 16 passengers, including the driver. The bill would amend that law to exempt church buses designed to carry 30 passengers or less.
To be clear, we aren't talking about extended passenger vans. Thirty-passenger buses, like the one pictured below, are much larger than vans and all other business and schools would still have to have a CDL license to operate such a vehicle.
Since the exemption would also include buses and large transport vehicles carry children to and from events, not everyone is happy about the exemption:
When contacted by The Clarion-Ledger, longtime CDL-certified driver Troy Coll of Hattiesburg called the measure potentially dangerous.
"I think this bill is trading the safety of everyone on the road for the convenience of those operating church vehicles," Coll said. "Since the bill covers vehicles up to 30 passengers, we're not just talking vans with extra rows of seats – these are buses, with long frames and much larger blind spots than passenger vehicles."
SUMMARY: The recovering U.S. economy has made its strongest showing yet. Employers created a million jobs since November -- the best three-month average in 17 years. And January also boasted the biggest wage rise in six years. But not all sectors saw the same level of growth. To discuss the data, Jeffrey Brown speaks with Diane Swonk of Mesirow Financial.
JEFFREY BROWN (NewsHour): Not only did today’s labor report show that more people found work in January; it also revised the numbers upward for November and December, making 2014 the strongest year for job gains since 1999. And more good news, the increase in wages last month was the largest in six years.
Diane Swonk is a senior managing director and chief economist for Mesirow Financial and joins me from Chicago.
And, Diane, it looks as though the upswing is bringing more people back into the job market. Can you tell us who, what age groups, for example?
DIANE SWONK, Mesirow Financial: Yes.
One of the biggest encouraging points about the job participation rate, where more people threw their hat in the ring, was that younger people were rejoining the labor force. Many of these people had been sidelined for many years; 25-to-34-year-old men, in fact, had the highest labor force participation rate in two years, a big jump there.
We also saw an increase in the 35-to-44-year-old age group. This is a group that the Federal Reserve had been watching carefully because they had been sidelined by the recession, but clearly they’re too young to retire and they had to come back at some point in time. So the fact that they were reengaged is quite encouraging.
SUMMARY: In Mississippi, where the unemployment rate peaks at 15 percent in some areas, pockets of new manufacturing have ignited hopes for an economic rebirth. And while signs of growth give some people hope for a new era, how much will the area's poor actually benefit? NewsHour's John Larson reports as part of our continuing series, "Main Street America."
SUMMARY: Washington Post columnists Ruth Marcus and Michael Gerson join Judy Woodruff to discuss the week’s top news, including the legacy of mistrust that laid the groundwork for unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, as well as the shifting U.S. stance on pursuing the Islamic State group after the murder of American journalist James Foley.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): Two weeks after the House majority leader, Eric Cantor, Republican in Virginia, went down to a stunning primary defeat, the establishment struck back Tuesday night.
From Mississippi to New York to Colorado, there were plenty of close races for incumbents, but they all survived.
The NewsHour’s political editor, Domenico Montanaro, is back with us to decipher what happened.
So, Domenico, what did happen? This was supposed to be comeback night for the Tea Party, Mississippi.
DOMENICO MONTANARO, Political Editor: Maybe, right?
I mean, we were wondering whether or not the Eric Cantor race would be an aberration or whether or not it would be the start of some kind of anti-incumbent trend. And what it certainly looked like last night is that it really was just an aberration for Cantor, because there were some other issues at play where he ignored his district.
There were plenty, like we said in the intro, of very close races, Mississippi being one of them, but Thad Cochran, the incumbent senator there, longtime senator, eked out a win by just less than 2 percentage points over his Tea Party opponent. And he did it in a very unique way.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Well, talk about that, because there’s a lot of discussion — and you have been looking into this today — about what happened in some of these heavily Democratic parts of the state.
DOMENICO MONTANARO: Well, if you told me three weeks ago that a Republican would wind up winning a Republican primary by appealing to Democrats and black voters, I would have said he’s done.
And I think that’s why a lot of the political community was fairly skeptical that Thad Cochran and his team, with the Haley Barbour machine really in Mississippi, being able to pull that off. And that’s exactly what they wound up doing.
RAY SUAREZ (Newshour): Researchers confirmed a two-year-old girl born with HIV has been functionally cured and remains virus-free even after treatment months ago.
It marks the first time HIV has been essentially eradicated in a child, making her just the second person ever said to be cured of HIV. Doctors at a Mississippi hospital say they gave the girl an especially intensive three-drug regimen within 30 hours of birth, before tests confirmed she was infected and wasn't merely at higher risk from her mother.
The findings were announced at a major AIDS conference in Atlanta and are stirring much discussion about what it could mean for more than 300,000 babies born with HIV each year, mostly in Africa.
We talk to two experts now watching this closely, Dr. Anthony Fauci of the National Institutes of Health, and Rowena Johnston, vice president and director of research at the American Foundation for AIDS Research, amfAR.
