Democracy | The Original MFP Editor Was Beaten With a Tire Iron. The Work Must Prevail.
Mississippi Free Press founding editor Donna Ladd, in an MFP Voices essay, retells how white Ohio student Charlie Butts led the first Mississippi Free Press from late 1961 to mid-1964 with Black leaders Medgar Evers and RLT Smith, surviving a tire-iron beating while hauling newspaper galleys north to Memphis, and how Aaron Henry and Bob Moses ran a 1963 mock election in which nearly 80,000 disenfranchised Black Mississippians voted. She says Butts, now 84, told her the U.S. Senate race stirs that same sense of possibility and predicts the election will spur future ones, and that younger Mississippians are why she keeps raising money so the work carries forward.
