A Jackson Police Department officer stares into the face of a woman working as a prostitute; his only option was to arrest her. He had no evidence or proof to arrest the man who was likely her trafficker. But where would the officer take her? Years later, this same officer would write a check to the Scarlet Rope Project, a home for survivors of sex trafficking.
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In the 1940s my grandmother’s boss proposed to her, which she promptly refused. It must have made her daily life incredibly awkward, particularly since she didn’t have a car and her boss frequently picked her up to take her to work. She lived near the neighborhood now known as LANA in midtown. It’s a part of Jackson that many remember as Hicksville. The proposal most likely happened only a few yards from where I get my prescriptions filled.
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Noah was five years old when we found out that he had cancer. He was in my Sunday School class and would come walking down the hallways at church with this skipping kind of swagger and the biggest grin on his face, like he knew something—or maybe had just done something. He was always smiling. So one day I asked him why he smiled so much. He grinned even bigger and said, “I don't know.”
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Each generation has a particular vantage point to view our city’s history and the path tread down by our collective stories. Lost in our own days, we sometimes forget that we are a part of a city and one community. Whether it’s a road away from racial hatred or a road that celebrates creatives, a community adopts a certain path tread by the people before them. The community saunters along until the moment when individuals and organizations rise up and insist on change, for better or worse.
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The pine trees towered over us, swaying precariously in the winds high above, but down on the pine needle-laden ground my boys and I hardly felt the gusts. Besides, we were hard at work and couldn’t be bothered with the weather. We had gathered pieces of mostly rotting wood with plans to erect a grand establishment: a place that would say, “We were here, and we did something great.”
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