Robert “Black Eagle” Costa speaks softly but with conviction starting at 11:11 a.m. each Sunday at No. 3 Railroad St.
The founder and principal elder of Seventh Generation Native American Church doesn’t shout his sermons. Instead, he encourages members to engage in dialogue and spiritual connection during the services, which started on Sept. 7.
The Sanders family, which has been running Oglethorpe Feed and Hardware Supply since 1998, introduced a towering addition to their business this summer: a 125-foot-tall grain elevator.
The system, which became operational in mid-July, cost an estimated $400,000-$500,000 to complete, but has since delivered promising results.
“It’s done everything we wanted it to do,” Stewart Sanders said.
Over 475 people were detained in a raid on the Hyundai electric vehicle plant in Georgia, part of a lengthy investigation into the unlawful hiring of illegal aliens at the site.
The Current is an inclusive nonprofit, non-partisan news organization providing in-depth watchdog journalism for Savannah and Coastal Georgia’s communities.
CLARKSDALE, Mississippi — On a summer Saturday in the Mississippi Delta, Australia “Honey Bee” Jones sat calm and reserved in a chair on the MLK Park Stage in downtown Clarksdale.
The weather was mild. A light wind blew, but the sun shone brightly, making it feel hotter than the actual temperature of 90 degrees.
It was a perfect day to watch Honey Bee sing, tap her feet, and electrify an audience with her guitar. A crowd gathered to watch her and other elders at the Red’s Old Timers Blues Festival, which honors blues musicians 60 years and older. The festival began in 2018, founded by the late Cornelius “Red” Paden, who opened several businesses, including his internationally known juke house: Red’s Juke Joint.
He converted a music store into Red’s in the New World District, the historic Black downtown in Clarksdale. It is one of the most revered and internationally known juke joints left in the country — and one of few that is still Black-owned.
It’s this history that led attendees to the park on Aug. 31 to participate in the old timer’s festival, which is free to the public. Since his father’s death in 2023, Orlando Paden — the former state representative who now serves as Clarksdale’s mayor — has taken over his dad’s business.
“He always said, ‘I’m the originator,’” Orlando chuckled as he remembered his father. “We’re here to pause and remember him as well.”
Orlando sat under a tent with Honey Bee adorned with lounge chairs, coolers, and volunteers manning the merchandise table displaying items emblazoned with his father’s name and legacy: Red’s Juke Joint.
Across the street from the park is the juke joint. In 2018, Red sat in a chair inside the club, sharing his vision for his first festival. He was candid about the divisions in the town, the commercialization of the blues, and how white people were attempting to take over his business.
He wanted to do more for Black folks and pay homage to the older blues musicians.
“Black people havin’ a hard enough time as it is. I wanted to put something on our side of town,” he said then. “Even at one point, I’d taken it for granted, you know. History is something else. You’re supposed to learn from history, and if you ain’t got no history, then how in the hell you gone learn what not to do?” he said.
The vision Red had for the festival is still alive and well, giving folks like Honey Bee, the longtime Mississippi blues guitarist who’s in her 80s and “done got old and retired and ain’t got nothin’ to do all day,” a chance to perform.
After her performance, she told Capital B she’s currently working on a new book, CD, and “I’m not trying to stop anything.”
Today, this event holds greater significance, as aging musicians pass on and juke joints continue to close their doors. At a time when society too often overlooks the wisdom of its elders, this event becomes a powerful reminder of their enduring talent — offering others the rare gift to learn at their feet and see them shine, said Clarksdale native Edna Luckett, also known by her stage name Edna Nicole.
This year, the 35-year-old musician served as one of the emcees for the event. It’s one of the few gatherings where youth can slow down and study, or experience, where the blues originates.
“I think it’s important for us to remember how rooted we are. I use this analogy all the time, if your great-grandmother is a Brown, I don’t care how many people get married … or who changed their name, in essence you’re a Brown,” she told Capital B. “People don’t come to juke [or dance] anymore. They come to learn. If we study, then we can appreciate it a little bit more.”
The event is also an opportunity to give back to the community and bridge the gap between younger and older blues artists, he said.
“It’s critical because it’s a part of our identity. When people sometimes think about the Delta, it’s just this looming, gloomy place, but it’s not, it’s where the birth of music is and people get a chance to really see the great part of Mississippi, a great part of the world. It’s right here,” Orlando said.
The festival, held at the MLK Park across from the Red’s Juke Joint, attracted a mix of older and younger attendees, including first-timers and familiar faces from both within and outside the Delta region. People came from Texas, North Carolina, and beyond to enjoy authentic blues music.
Caroline Gaston lived in Killeen, Texas, for the past 33 years, but recently moved back to her hometown Greenville, Mississippi. As a frequent patron of Red’s Juke Joint, she and her friend wanted to get the same feel of the juke house, but on a larger scale.
“We knew it was going on, and we were not gonna miss it,” she told Capital B. “I’ve enjoyed every minute of it, and I’m sorry it’s getting ready to end, but we’re heading on over to Red’s to keep this party going.”
Clarksdale native Monica Thomas, 38, had never attended the festival before. She travels throughout the Mississippi Delta promoting her organization, Enlightened to Heighten, and wanted to support her hometown.
“The weather was beautiful, the music was smooth, and the people were peaceful,” she said.
Orlando Paden is proud to carry the torch and continue the legacy, he said. He wants to add more musicians to the festival’s lineup and add more activities like the finger-licking BBQ competition.
“I have that vision of what my dad had, and I added my own spin to it and everything, and let it continue to be family oriented,” he said, sitting inside of his juke joint. “Just like this place is any given night — mom, dad, children are here — and just enjoying the music, enjoying each other and making memories and that’s so important. They feel like they’re in their living room.”
The post Mississippi Blues Elders Are Still Here. This Festival Is Making Sure You Hear Them. appeared first on Capital B News.
HARRIS NECK NATIONAL WILDLIFE REFUGE, Ga. — Over the course of what was a scorching, yet typical May day across Coastal Georgia, Willie Moran made it a point to stop and take a deep breath at every sight of water.
Looking out across the estuaries and salt marshes teeming with wildlife, he repeatedly reminded his tour group of Black environmentalists, “The only thing between us and West Africa, where they took us from, is this: the Atlantic Ocean.”
The Transatlantic Slave Trade wouldn’t be the last time his family line was severed from their home.
For generations, Black communities across the United States have watched their land vanish under the banner of the “public good.” Perhaps there is no stronger example of this than in Harris Neck.
In 1942, the federal government seized Moran’s family’s land and dozens of others in the community for a national security project and promised one day to return it. Yet, still today, it remains in the hands of the government.
For decades, Moran and other descendants have written formal letters to presidents, including Barack Obama and Joe Biden, for an executive order to return just a portion of the land to its past owners, and they’ve lobbied Georgia legislators for support.
Nothing has shifted, Moran said.
“We need to let everybody know our history, because the more of us understand our story, this will continue and spread,” the 82-year-old said. “They tried to erase the whole thing, but we’re still here, and if we don’t get more support, I guess they’ll be glad when I’m dead because they think it will die with our generation.”
Now, in a political climate where such a move seems even more unlikely because of the gutting of civil rights offices and environmental protections, descendants have also looked for support from power brokers in the American conservation movement, a historically white movement often known for its support of ecology and wildlife over humans, particularly people of color.
That May day, he took a group of Black environmentalists, including representatives from the federal government, across the land where his mother, Mary, was born and raised.
Today, Harris Neck is a 2,824-acre peninsula preserved by the federal government in rural McIntosh County, Georgia, about 30 miles south of Savannah. But for generations it was a land maintained by the Gullah Geechee, a community descended from West Africans brought to the region as enslaved laborers who, after emancipation following the Civil War, became landowning farmers when the plantation owner deeded them the land.
Drawing on skills passed down from rice-growing ancestors in places like Sierra Leone, Black families in Harris Neck built a thriving, self-reliant settlement by the early 20th century. They sustained themselves through fishing, crabbing, gardening, and operating oyster and crab processing houses, all while preserving the Gullah language, African-rooted spiritual traditions, and a way of life deeply tied to the land and waterways.
At the peak of World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration seized the land for an airfield. The government gave residents, including Mary, who was pregnant with Moran at the time, just days’ notice to leave and little compensation before demolishing and burning homes and scattering the community.
The airstrip was never used. The marshland they tried to build on top of would not cooperate.
Despite federal promises following the war to return to their land, the pledge was never honored. Instead, in 1948, the federal government transferred the property into the hands of power brokers in majority-white McIntosh County. The county was supposed to maintain the site, but for more than a decade, officials ignored the land. It quickly became overrun with illegal activity, including drug smuggling, according to the Harris Neck Land Trust and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
After years of local mismanagement, the federal government reclaimed the land in 1961 and, in 1962, established what is now the Harris Neck National Wildlife Refuge without ever restoring the families’ ancestral home or addressing the historic injustices that uprooted this once-thriving Black community.
Today, the wildlife refuge still holds the overgrown cemetery, brick foundations, and living memory of the displaced families, whose descendants continue to fight for the recognition and return of their ancestral lands.
Harris Neck’s ecological importance lies in its diversity of habitats feeding into the ocean, a mix of marshes and ponds that support nearly 350 bird species. It is a critical nesting, foraging, and wintering ground for rare and threatened migratory birds like wood storks and painted buntings, as well as many species of waterfowl and wading birds. It is also integral in maintaining Georgia’s wetlands that protect the area from flooding and storms as climate change intensifies sea level rise and hurricanes.
Moran, who has been advocating for the return of the land since 1971, and others argue that they have the tools to protect the area themselves.
“If the descendants got that land back, we’d be able to take care of it properly, we did for generations,” said Moran, a member of the Harris Neck Land Trust. “But the bottom line here is racism still prevails.”
In a statement, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said the agency is “dedicated to working with the entire Harris Neck community to identify opportunities that honor the area’s rich history and cultural traditions, with particular attention to its environmental significance and the community’s longstanding connection to the land and waters.”
But last year, the agency said returning parts of the land to descendants carried a “primary risk” in which “the American public [would] lose equitable access to their public lands and the conservation and public use benefits” of a national wildlife refuge.
The agency noted that it has been part of congressional hearings in 1979 and 2011, and federal court decisions that have reaffirmed the current ownership. Additionally, in 1985, a federal government audit of the situation found no legal concerns.
“I know what segregation is, I know what Jim Crow is — I’ve lived it,” Moran said. “This feels the same way, but I have to keep that trauma down so I can tell the story without the anger because I’m charged to do this for my ancestors.”
The battle over Harris Neck lays bare a broader history of Black land loss in America, where “public good” projects, from parks to conservation areas, often came at the expense of communities of color. For generations, the practice of federal projects erasing Black land also eroded wealth, culture, and stewardship traditions that had nurtured the land for generations.
In some cases, it was for sprawling parks like Central Park, where Manhattan’s Seneca Village, a thriving 19th-century Black landowning community, was razed through eminent domain. In others, it was for beaches, flood-control projects, or even conservation areas, where promises of environmental protection masked forced removals and undervalued payouts. While such displacement is often linked to the creation of national parks at the expense of Indigenous peoples, Black landowners also saw their property absorbed into public lands or tourism zones, erasing family wealth and community roots.
Read More: The Struggle for Land, Reparations, and Belonging in California
As climate change underscores the value of local, traditional land care, the fight for Harris Neck is about more than property, descendants said. It is a demand for justice, historical recognition, and a new vision of conservation rooted in equity.
Today, across the South, partnerships between legal aid groups, environmental nonprofits, and Black landowners are working to reform heirs’ property laws and secure access to conservation programs. In North Carolina, the National Audubon Society has teamed up with the Center for Heirs’ Property Preservation to keep Black-owned land from being sold off or divided. As Jennie Stephens, CEO at the Center for Heirs’ Property Preservation, puts it: “Once this land is lost, everything –– be it human or bird –– that uses this land, they’re in jeopardy.”
McIntosh S.E.E.D., a Black-led conservation organization founded in the same county as Harris Neck, owns a 1,148-acre forest 40 miles north of the community. It is the first Black-owned community forest in the U.S. Its work, inspired by the converging ways that extreme weather and discriminatory land deals have erased Black ownership around Harris Neck, has focused on using traditional land practices to address climate change impacts, from heat destroying crops to the stronger, frequent storms and hurricanes displacing communities.
“There are dollars there to manage and maintain land across the South,” said Moran, who is a former board member of S.E.E.D. and who grew up growing food and fishing for oysters and crabs near Harris Neck. “We just need the funds needed to properly manage [to] make it to us.”
Black landowners have historically maintained high ecological value on their land by drawing on generational knowledge and sustainable practices, such as crop diversification, soil conservation, and ecosystem stewardship, rooted in both African and Indigenous traditions. As noted in a National Wildlife Federation report, “Black farmers and landowners have always known that when you give to the land, the land gives back.”
Descendants are fighting to make sure the story does not die with them. Young people like Mya Timmons, 25, are deeply engaged in preserving the history of Harris Neck in ways that might better connect with a new generation. Timmons, whose great-grandfather William Timmons was one of the largest Black landowners in Coastal Georgia, has created plant guides and coloring books that highlight the cultural significance of their community. Last year, she visited her old elementary school, sharing her coloring book and some of the real plants from Harris Neck with students to connect them to Gullah Geechee traditions.
“Before I started the initial project, I had no interest in plants,” she said. “It was really through this project that I became more connected to my cultural heritage, and everything Gullah Geechee. I feel a true connection to the land and water now.”
When her uncle, Edgar Timmons Jr., was around her age in 1979, he was jailed for a month along with three other descendants for attempting to regain access to the land. His lifelong struggle, he said, is driven by watching the devastation his grandfather William carried in the years after his land was seized.
“It was promised to some of the residents during the time of the takeover by the federal government that the land would be returned after the war,” he said, “and even though we don’t have it yet, we still all have a deep, deep connection to it.
Despite little legal precedent for his family and loved ones to recoup their land, Moran, too, has no desire to give up the fight. In his eyes, there is always room for change and restitution.
“I was born only a few months after this happened,” he said from his front yard just a few miles from the wildlife refuge. “I can trace my family back to Africa, I still have stories of songs from before we were brought here. It puts into perspective that this didn’t happen too long ago.”
“We can always do the right thing,” he said.
The post The Army Took Their Land. Decades Later, This Black Community Still Wants It Back. appeared first on Capital B News.
In the last decade, the U.S. electric power sector turned away from coal to embrace wind turbines and solar panels, two energy generating sources that require little water for operations and cooling.
Together with the installation of more water-efficient natural gas-fired power plants, the energy shift has been a net benefit for the country’s water resources – a “reduction in the relative risk that our power sector is facing due to water temperatures and water scarcity,” as Jordan Macknick of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory put it.
New considerations are now in the mix. Due to political changes and rising electricity demand to power the AI frenzy, the durability and continuation of that risk-reduction path is less certain for the electric power sector than it was a few years ago.
Energy-hungry data centers are being proposed and constructed at breakneck speed, kickstarting growth in U.S. electricity demand for the first time in nearly two decades.
Today, data centers account for 4 percent of the nation’s electricity use. By 2028, according to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, data center demand could soar, to between 6.7 and 12 percent of all the electrons consumed nationally.
At the same time, the difficulty in building new transmission lines and the Trump administration’s open hostility to wind and solar – going so far as to cancel the Revolution Wind project off the Massachusetts and Rhode Island coast that was 80 percent complete – is casting a pall over electricity-generating sources that consume little water yet are still seeing vigorous growth in the face of gathering political headwinds.
Data center energy demand, said Dan Reicher, a former assistant secretary of energy in the Clinton administration, is at a junction, one that points not only at the computing industry’s carbon intensity but also its energy-related water use.
Will water-intensive thermal generation like coal and nuclear be revived? The Trump administration ordered the J.H. Campbell coal plant in Michigan, slated for closure, to remain open. Will hydropower and geothermal – two renewable energy sources the Trump administration favors – see their fortunes rise? Will the data center buildout proceed as rapidly as some forecasts suggest?
These changes have the potential to rewrite the twinned narratives of energy and water.
“I think we’re at a very important inflection point right now with the composition of our electricity grid,” Macknick said. “If we do see a resurrection of coal plants or a push for more thermal technologies that utilize recirculating or once-through cooling technologies, we could see a reversal in that trend of water usage and see increases in the water intensity of our electricity sector, which could in turn potentially lead to more risks for our reliable electricity supply.”
Electric Growth
From Arizona and Georgia to New Jersey and Minnesota, data centers have been the target of public pushback due to the water used directly in their operations to cool racks of data-crunching, heat-producing servers. Supplying cooling water to these facilities has taxed water supply infrastructure and strained local water sources. Berkeley Lab estimated direct water consumption for data centers to be 66 billion liters nationally in 2023.
A second form of data center water use has received less attention – the water consumed to generate the electricity that powers these facilities. In aggregate, this indirect use is a much higher number – some 800 billion liters, according to Berkeley Lab.
For data centers, water and energy are two sides of a coin. As servers undertake more intensive computing processes to power generative AI, they produce more heat. In a circular system, that waste heat could be repurposed. But most data centers operating in the U.S. today do not reuse their heat. They instead dissipate it through cooling systems. This is where operators encounter trade-offs between water and energy.
The most energy-efficient means of evacuating waste heat from the server racks is through water. Where water is constrained, data centers can use recirculating systems or huge fans to cool their equipment. Conditioning the air, however, gobbles electricity. Along with the energy that powers the servers, how that energy for cooling is produced determines a data center’s indirect water footprint.
The U.S. electricity mix is not what it was a decade ago. During that transitional period, power generated by burning coal has dropped by more than half, now accounting for only 15 percent of the nation’s electricity. Coal, which needs water for cooling, has been supplanted by natural gas and renewables, particularly solar and wind.
Forecasts for data center energy growth vary, but the direction is the same: up and up. Western Resources Advocates, a research and advocacy group, says that the largest electric utilities in five Colorado River basin states are collectively forecasting annual demand growth of 4.5 percent through 2035.
Efficiency improvements have helped to lighten the load. The Big Tech hyperscalers – Google, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon – that operate the largest data centers tout their efforts to wring more performance out of less power. Google claims better processors allow the company to generate six times more computing power per unit of electricity compared to five years ago.
“Data centers are more efficient and getting more efficient by the day,” said Reicher, who was the director of climate and energy at Google from 2007 to 2011.
Despite the efficiency gains, the data center expansion, in aggregate, is so massive that total energy demands continue to climb. Berkeley Lab noted that data center electricity demand more than doubled between 2017 and 2023.
How to accommodate this buildout without stressing water supplies is a matter of serious inquiry. Macknick and his colleagues at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory are working to identify the best locations for data centers taking into account land, proximity to end users, and energy and water availability.
Reicher said the energy mix in the U.S. is changing because of new priorities in the Trump White House and the Republican-led Congress. How the political turn affects the energy market is an open question, Reicher said. But the administration’s actions – canceling offshore wind, limiting access to equipment, cutting federal funding, and imposing tariffs – are substantial barriers.
“There’s a whole circle of issues that are cutting into the deployment of solar and wind, not just the generating facilities themselves, but adjunct storage capacity, adjunct transmission capacity,” Reicher said. “So we’re really messing things up in a pretty serious way when it comes to this and therefore with all those implications upstream or downstream for water use.”
Macknick mentioned three strategies that data center operators are considering. One is rebooting shuttered fossil fuel and nuclear power stations. Microsoft signed a deal with Constellation Energy in 2024 to reopen Unit 1 at Three Mile Island nuclear plant, in Pennsylvania. Another is to build new natural gas plants. A third is to sign power purchase agreements for renewables. Last year Google signed contracts for 8,000 megawatts of clean energy.
“It’s hard to really parse out what are the trends that will in time be successful,” Macknick said. “I think right now all those options are simultaneously being considered and people are wanting to see what will work, what will be possible, given the large amount of uncertainty that all energy companies are currently facing right now.”
The post Data Center Energy Demand Is Putting Pressure on U.S. Water Supplies appeared first on Circle of Blue.
According to a press release on its website, International Paper is cutting 1,100 jobs at the Savannah containerboard mill and packaging facility, and at the Riceboro containerboard mill and Riceboro Timber and Lumber.
The Current is an inclusive nonprofit, non-partisan news organization providing in-depth watchdog journalism for Savannah and Coastal Georgia’s communities.
Over the past few months, Marcia Dinkins’ eldest child has been hospitalized frequently. A serious infection swept through her daughter’s body, affecting her pancreas, spleen, and gallbladder.
Fortunately, Dinkins’ daughter, Marshale Malone, was able to afford and receive life-saving surgery, thanks to Medicaid.
But without it, Dinkins said, the health emergency could have meant either “life or death” for Malone, who is 40.
The same can be said for her two other daughters, who also suffer from health-related issues, including seizures and blood clots in their lungs and legs, Dinkins told Capital B. In their cases, too, insurance, including Medicaid, has been vital in receiving the care they desperately need.
But because of the significant Medicaid cuts and provisions in the budget and reconciliation package, also known as the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” Dinkins now worries that these changes will impact the critical care her daughters and others could receive in the future.
“That’s what made me so angry,” said Dinkins, founder of Black Appalachian Coalition, “because this one bad bill that they want to call beautiful is only going to make it harder for individuals like her and seniors and countless others in the region to be able to get access to health care, especially when the hospitals are already closing down.”
Read More: Trump’s ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ Targets Medicaid, SNAP, and Student Loans
It’s been a month since President Donald Trump signed the act into law. The legislation requires able-bodied individuals on Medicaid to participate in a work program or community engagement for at least 80 hours a week. It also eliminates a 5% increase in federal matching funds for states, which means state governments must find a way to shoulder the costs. That additional expenditure, experts say, limits their ability to pay for Medicaid.
This year marks the 60th anniversary of Medicaid, and currently 71 million people are enrolled, with children and women making up the majority. While Black people account for 20% of enrollees, white people represent the highest percentage at 40%, Pew Research Center reports. Children, adults and individuals with disabilities living in rural areas are most at risk, as they are more likely to rely on Medicaid.
The Congressional Budget Office estimates the provisions in the new law will reduce federal Medicaid spending by $1 trillion over the next decade and increase the number of uninsured people by 10 million. Some estimates say $150 million of that funding will be removed from rural areas.
Health care advocates, medical professionals, and doctors are concerned that nursing homes and rural hospitals may close, since the facilities already operate on low margins and rely heavily on Medicaid. An analysis by the Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research found that more than 300 rural hospitals could face closure or service reductions.
But, health care professionals, along with advocates, say their biggest fear is that Black communities will be the hardest hit, and the lack of access could lead to death and chronic illnesses, and worsen economic disparities.
Dr. Kristopher Stepps, a traveling physician in Arkansas and Texas, said, “Basic necessities are not so basic” for people in rural areas who are trying to decide whether to pay for extra medication or to travel to their specialist appointments, which Medicaid helps cover.
“There is a fear that if those services are taken away, what happens to the members of this community?” Stepps said. “Regardless if you’re a Democrat [or] Republican, at the end of the day, we’re here to take care of people.
“My biggest fear is that we start losing more lives due to preventable illnesses because of economic crises and folks couldn’t get access to health care.”
In many rural areas, health care access has become a choice between “slow care or no care,” Dinkins said.
Urgent care centers are no longer providing rapid services, and emergency rooms are becoming overcrowded with patients who are not experiencing a crisis, but need primary care. This often causes longer wait times, as many are unable to see a doctor due to shortages or lack of transportation, she added. Others already can’t afford the co-pay, which forces them to forgo care.
Cassandra Welchlin lives in Mississippi, where there are already high rates of maternal mortality, obesity, cancer, heart disease, and other illnesses. It is also one of the poorest places in the country. Although the state has not expanded Medicaid, the legislation will still affect those who are enrolled as well as those who make too much money to qualify for it, but don’t make enough to purchase their own insurance, she added.
This isn’t just a health care issue, but an economic and workforce development problem, said Welchlin, who is the executive director of the Mississippi Black Women’s Roundtable. Welchlin’s organization focuses on economic security for women and girls.
“This is going to not just devastate Black folks, but because we know there’s a disproportionate amount of Black folks that will be harmed, it’s going to be devastating to our communities,” Welchlin told Capital B.
“It’s not just about health care, it’s about jobs,” she added. “And when you talk about the cuts to jobs, you talk about people now not having a paycheck to pay the basic necessities, such as rent, such as food, such as utilities. So it’s going to be devastating because it’s going to impact people’s kitchen tables like they haven’t seen it before.”
In neighboring Louisiana, the state expanded Medicaid in 2016. Alma Stewart, the founder of the Louisiana Center for Health Equity, helped secure that expansion. As a result, it broadened access to primary care, and by 2020, the rate of uninsured adults dropped from 22.7% to 8.9%. Now, this new legislation threatens to undo that progress, Stewart said.
Approximately 1 in 5 Americans are enrolled in Medicaid. In certain districts represented by Republican congressional leaders — including Speaker of the House Mike Johnson and Reps. Julia Letlow, and Clay Higgins of Louisiana — more than 30% of residents are on Medicaid, according to The New York Times. Stewart said there’s no doubt it will devastate hospitals and the people they serve.
Stewart expressed disappointment, but also concern for the youth and how the decisions made now will affect their future.
“I know that based on the data, based on the science of facts, they’re not faring well, anxiety, depression, suicide, suicidal ideation, it’s on the increase. What does that say about us as a society?” she said.
“Those who have the responsibility on their backs should be concerned about what kind of world you are creating … and a society that is not conducive to the overall well-being of its own people to allow them the opportunity to live, to grow, to thrive.”
Shelton Anthony is an administrator at a critical access hospital in Louisiana, where he said about 37% of the revenue the institution receives is from Medicaid payments. He projects the facility may experience up to $700,000 cuts in Medicaid over the next three years and says hospital officials refuse to cut services or lay people off.
Anthony is finding alternative ways, and options like grants, to help the majority Black community of Donaldsonville. In the city, nestled along the west bank of the Mississippi, many people suffer from limited wages and health care disparities.
He said some of the hospital’s patients make $20,000 a year.
“Can you just stop and even imagine living on $20,000 a year? That’s what we’re faced with, so we have to bring clinics like this to the community so that we can continue to be healthy,” he said.
Anthony, who leads West Ascension Parish Hospital as the CEO, is partnering with community organizations like the health nonprofit Love Impact Coalition to host a free clinic in September. At the event, residents — regardless of insurance — can receive free dental, vision, and health care services.
And many advocates, doctors, and patients are still uncertain on how Louisiana will respond to the cuts. Despite that, Stewart’s organization is preparing to educate communities. It will continue its mission to improve health outcomes over the next decade through its initiative, LA40by30. In September, she’s hosting the organization’s annual Health Summit, which includes a town hall to hear directly from residents who may be affected, while explaining to others what this law means.
In Mississippi, Welchlin and her organization will push for improving health care outcomes, including Medicaid expansion and paid leave. They are also continuing their Strong Moms Healthy Babies campaign, which advocates for moms to have 12 months of postpartum under Medicaid.
Back in Ohio, Dinkins is working on education and training initiatives where she works with people in her state as well as in Pennsylvania, Kentucky, West Virginia, and Michigan. She is going to offer a virtual class on the implications of Medicaid cuts, and she’s building a Black doula network. She’s also calling on organizations in other states to work together to build coalitions.
“When we can come together for that, then we can get back to the place we used to be. Organized people became the organized power that we need,” she said. “Let’s learn about the impact that this is going to have on our communities.”
Dinkins added: “We have to really have a strong vision in the reality of where we are, and being clear on what is our future vision, and how do we get to that point to save our own souls?”
The post Medicaid Cuts Endanger Life-Saving Care for Black Families in Rural America appeared first on Capital B News.