Donna Ladd is the editor-in-chief of the Mississippi Free Press, which exemplifies the importance of brave, independent journalism. In this story, she relates her own journey from Mississippi to graduate school in New York City and back to Mississippi, where she leads a crucial news outlet whose staff and board is a model of racial integration. I am honored to be a member of the advisory board of the Mississippi Free Press.

She writes:

You may know that I grew up in Mississippi, but left the day after I got my political science degree from Mississippi State University, hightailing it north, vowing never to live in my racist, misogynistic state that tried to kill the spirit of smart young people like me ever again. I thought, naively, that I’d left all that ugly behind. The lessons about bigotry and sexism being a 50-state strategy were still ahead of me. Good Lord, there was so much I didn’t know.What I did know is that a bunch of political science profs believed in this child of an illiterate mother from Philadelphia, Miss.—Howard Ball, Ed Clynch, David Mason and Stephen Shaffer among them—and treated me like I was smart enough to learn what I didn’t know. My career path, I thought, was law school, even though I was always attracted to writing and truth-telling through journalism. Still, I didn’t exactly leave State with a lot of immediately marketable skills. I enrolled in George Washington University in Washington, D.C.—helped along by Dr. Ball’s reference; he compared me to an unsophisticated but promising Norma Rae—but the school and I didn’t match well. Truth be known, I wasn’t ready to succeed there.

So, I dropped out and became a club DJ. That ended up funding my teaching myself to be a writer and a journalist, first with dalliances with small newspapers in Colorado and New York City. I learned on the job.But it wasn’t until I was nearly 40 that I got more schooling—and remarkable for the daughter of Miss Katie, it was at Columbia Graduate School of Journalism where I honed my journalism skills and learned both what to do and what not to do as an editor and trainer. As any honest success story will tell you, I internalized that who you know and how they’ll help you get into a job to learn and grow inside is a major key to anybody’s success, regardless of your college major.We begin or 22nd year of Free Press Journalism in Mississippi on Sept. 22. Help us celebrate with a gift of $22, $222, $2,200 or $22,000 on #MFPGiving22Day!

Put simply: I didn’t need a fancy j-school degree to become a journalist, but it helped me improve my skills and meet people so that my work would be read—and, these days, funded. But it was other Columbia studies as part of my mid-career master’s, with more diverse instructors and thinkers than in the j-school then, that turned me into the writer, thinker, entrepreneur and mentor I am now—and taught me never to prop up false narratives wherever they spring from.Bottom line: I cared about racism deeply, and I came to understand that it was my job as a white journalist to expose the perils of “whiteness” (not the same as light-colored skin) to us all, that it was my work to do especially as a child of Neshoba County who knew some famous lynch mobsters. I already knew white folks all around me in Mississippi (and the whole U.S., so don’t get cocky) were either actively working to extend race inequity to keep the reins of power—I mean, nothing has ever been more obvious so stop the act, people—but also that my early censored Mississippi education kept me from understanding the connections and pathways out of this sick mess.My real grad-school education came after I crept shyly into the Institute for Research in African-American Studies and asked Dr. Manning Marable to allow me into his Black Intellectuals graduate seminar. And I read, listened, thought. A lot. I had no idea that I would soon return to Mississippi—but I know now that my studies with Dr. Marable and my white adviser Andie Tucker (a former PBS producer) urging me to come home to Mississippi and report about race, or “whiteness,” rewrote my future.Help grow Free Press journalism in Mississippi with your donation today.

Not to mention the future of others. I brought home everything I learned in that imperfect Ivy League institution among many people who loved to spit at the South without checking their own postage stamps. It was there that I first really understood just how bad de facto northern racism was, thanks to Dr. Marable. I first learned about so many Black American heroes who should, damn it, also be my heroes and all of yours. But they can’t be if I didn’t know they existed, or what motivated them, or the sheer bravery they mustered to face likely death for trying to make this country live up to its own constitutional and patriotic hype.Without the thinking and probing I did in my “soft” studies about humanity at Mississippi State and Columbia, Free Press journalism would not exist in Mississippi. I would not have influenced, trained, cheer-led, mentored, and recommended so many young Mississippians over the years, trying to help them believe that we can change the trajectory and inclusion of our state and, thus, the nation. And I sure as hell wouldn’t have so many white people of all ages walking up to me in the grocery store to tell me “I just didn’t know” about so many things they were lied to about in school and our textbooks.Not to mention, I wouldn’t be running the second and third publications I co-founded here, choosing truth and accuracy over blind partisanship, giving raises, recruiting, training teenagers in marketable skills and brainstorming with the most amazing team of journalists I would ever hope to share a newsroom with. And I wouldn’t be pinching myself because several of my profs from both my colleges donate to my newsrooms in Mississippi, even Sam Freedman, who challenged me the most. That’s full circle, baby.

Thank you, Mississippi State, Columbia, Andie, Sam and Dr. Marable (please rest in peace) for helping bring me to this place right now where I can sit on my porch and tell my Mississippians not to believe the political hype, to reject censorship, and to stop fearing education and the other. We sink or swim together, and heroes come in so, so many forms. Don’t deprive yourself.

Oh, and study whatever you need to to find your purpose and path. There is more to life, growth and prosperity than learning to code if that’s not your jam.

Donna Ladd, Editor and CEO

From the website of the Mississippi Free Press:

Founding Editor and CEO Donna Ladd is an award-winning journalist, editor and social entrepreneur from Philadelphia, Miss. After leaving the state the day after she graduated from Mississippi State, vowing to never live here again, she returned 18 years later with a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia. She co-founded the impactful Jackson Free Press in 2002 in order to bring an in-depth news source to the state that would not shy away from historic effects of structural, institutional and systemic racism—how the past connects to the present—in a way no other media outlet had done in Mississippi.

Donna, the daughter of illiterate parents, has won many awards for columns, political columns, editorials, feature writing and investigative work, and has shared in a number of public-service journalism awards for her work in Mississippi, from helping put an old Klansman, James Ford Seale, in prison for the kidnapping and murder of two black teenagers in 1964, to deep systemic work on the causes and solutions of crime and violence now in the capital city and the embedded racism in the criminal-justice system since the time of slavery.

In 2001, Donna received a Packard Future of Children fellowship to study the discriminatory application of school discipline on children of color and the cradle-to-jail pipeline. More recently, she was a three-year W.K. Kellogg Foundation leadership fellow, deep diving into systemic inequity and pathways to “truth, racial healing and transformation” in her home state. The fellowship led to her efforts to change the narrative about race through the Mississippi Youth Media Project, which she started to train young people to challenge the media narrative about them and their communities. She has trained many award-winning journalists over the years.

She also had two fellowships to study racism in the criminal-justice system, through John Jay College of Criminal Justice and Penn Law School’s Quattrone Center, and two grants from the Solutions Journalism Network for the same work, which brought several of her dozens of journalism awards. In 2019, she had a Logan non-fiction fellowship at the Carey Institute for Global Good, where she did a five-week writing residency in upstate New York.

Ladd publishes long-form features in The Guardian related to racism, whiteness and criminal justice. She and her journalism have been covered in Glamour and Reason magazines, Next Tribe, CNN, NPR, CBC, CBS Radio, the BBC, al Jazeera, among other outlets. In 2017, Southern Living magazine named her as one of the “Innovators Changing the South.”

In 2011, Ladd was honored with a Fannie Lou Hamer Humanitarian Award, a Dress for Success Women of Strength Award in 2009 and the 2009 Angel Award from the Center for Violence Prevention for her work against domestic abuse. After surviving breast cancer, Ladd is the 2020 Survivor of the Year for the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure in Jackson on April 25, 2020. She also was a 2020 alumni award winner from the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism in 2020. In 2005, Ladd was named one of Mississippi’s 50 Leading Businesswomen by the Mississippi Business Journal, and she is the recipient of the 2006 Friendship Award, along with Mississippi (and now national) NAACP President Derrick Johnson, from Jackson 2000/Dialogue, a racial-reconciliation organization.