Community advocates embarked on a tour across Mississippi to highlight the stories of Black families and individuals impacted by police brutality and racial trauma in the state.
On April 10, they started in the capital of Jackson and stopped in Brandon, Miss., Brookhaven, Miss., and Liberty, Miss., before returning to Jackson.
The tour, titled “Bridging Mississippi: A Journey for Justice,” was organized by activist Marquell Bridges of Black Lives Matter Grassroots Mississippi and president and founder of Building Bridges for Community Unity and Progress.
He organized the tour “to give a voice to the voiceless, to show our people to not be afraid of the power that each one of us holds and just to stand with these impacted families,” he said to The Final Call. “If not us, then who?”
Participating organizations included the People’s Political Party, One Voice, the Southern Region New Black Panther Party, Louisiana Storm and other groups. Families who lost loved ones to police brutality also participated, including Mike Brown Sr., father of Mike Brown Jr., Andrew Joseph Sr. and Samaria Rice, mother of Tamir Rice.
The tour started at the attorney general’s office in Jackson to demand justice for Jalen Lewis, a 25-year-old Black man killed by Mississippi Capitol Police officers in 2022, and Dexter Wade, a 37-year-old Black man who was fatally struck by a police cruiser in 2023. A few days after the tour, two Mississippi Capitol Police officers were charged with manslaughter for the shooting death of Jalen Lewis.
“The march to the attorney general’s office was for all the families within Mississippi, because she has the power to prosecute all those cases. We marched them (the families) and took them inside and allowed them to get a meeting with her,”
Mr. Bridges said. “From there we went to Rankin County Sheriff’s Department to demand the resignation of Sheriff Brian Bailey, the leader of the ‘Goon Squad.’”
The Final Call published previous articles on the torture of two Black men, Michael Jenkins and Eddie Parker, by six former officers, part of the “Goon Squad.” All six were sentenced to prison in both federal and state courts.
“Leadership starts at the top. There’s no way six of his officers were beating, torturing and doing all this to the Black community and he had no knowledge of it.
Either he’s the most incompetent sheriff ever to live or he’s complicit,” Mr. Bridges said. “Either way, he doesn’t deserve to be over the sheriff’s department, so we demanded his resignation and demanded justice for Damien Cameron.”
Damien Cameron was allegedly beaten and killed in 2021 by two Rankin County Sheriff’s deputies.
After visiting the Rankin County Sheriff’s Office in Brandon, advocates traveled to Brookhaven, Miss., to amplify awareness on the denial of justice for D’Monterrio Gibson, a Black FedEX driver who was allegedly shot at by two White men.
They also highlighted what Mr. Bridges described as the incompetence of the Brookhaven Police Department. He pointed out the cold cases of Bridget London Hall and Julian Gayten, both fatally shot in 2015 during separate incidents.
A Mississippi grand jury criticized the Brookhaven Police Department in 2023, accusing officers of poorly investigating their cases and not completing investigations in a timely manner.
“The Mississippi grand jury has already deemed the Brookhaven Police Department as incompetent and unfair,” Mr. Bridges said. The families of Ms. Hall and Mr. Gayten went to the courthouse to meet with the district attorney and were told that the 10-year-old cases were still being investigated.
“From there, we went to Liberty, Mississippi, for Trumaine White, the Black man with no priors. The hard-working father came into town just to see his daughter and his mother. He was a truck driver.
Went to a local tire shop. Got his tire changed, paid,” Mr. Bridges said, recounting the 2024 incident when a shop employee accused Mr. White of throwing something out the window and called the police. Police arrested him while he was dining at a local restaurant.
“A day later, he’s dead in the Amite County jail. Still to this day, six months later, they haven’t released the word or said anything about it or what happened,” Mr. Bridges said.
The day after the tour, Mr. Bridges and others held a conference at the Hilton Hotel in Jackson, where different speakers educated listeners on how to fight back.
“I’m standing in solidarity with the families, especially the families of Mississippi and a lot of families that came across the country today to show unity and to show solidarity,” said Samaria Rice, whose 12-year-old son Tamir was fatally shot by police in Cleveland, Ohio, in 2014.
“We are asking for the resignation of (Sheriff) Brian Bailey …we’re also asking for the ‘Goon Squad’ to be closed down, right? Close the ‘Goon Squad’ down, they know they’re the biggest gang in America and we’re not going for it.
We want justice for our loved ones, the loved ones definitely of those who have been murdered in Mississippi. We know that Mississippi has been cursed with nothing but badness,” Ms. Rice said in remarks at a news conference on April 10.
“We want accountability and we want it now and if we don’t get accountability we’re going to keep coming back and making it uncomfortable because as you see we have a bunch of resilient families behind us … and it’s going to get stronger and it’s going to get bigger,” she said.