To associate the City of Jackson with national reports of 215 people who were buried in a pauper’s field behind the Hinds County Penal Farm is “misinformation” and “dangerous,” said Jackson Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba.
Lumumba made the comments Saturday at the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum during a meeting of the Jackson People’s Assembly to discuss important city priorities for 2024. He said the reports, which have been covered by multiple national news outlets in recent days, are harmful to improvements the city is trying to make and the overall narrative of Jackson.
“There has been a national story that has been put out about the City of Jackson which is patently false and absolutely ridiculous. Some of you have seen it. It’s been put out on social media that there is a mass grave behind the Jackson jail that we’re throwing bodies into,” Lumumba said. “The first thing is if you live in Jackson, you know that we don’t have a jail! So, it’s kind of hard to have a mass grave when you don’t even have a jail.”
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The pauper’s field, which have been historically used for the burial of unknown or unclaimed people, is in Raymond, Mississippi, the mayor said, about 16 miles outside of downtown Jackson. All Jackson has is “a holding cell that can hold maybe 10 people.”
“Every county in the United States of America has a pauper’s field. Homeless people are often buried in pauper’s fields. People who died in local jails and their families were unable to be contacted or connected or simply they didn’t have any family. Or in some instances, when someone dies and they’re unable to make contact with the family in a certain period of time, then it is the Hinds County coroner and the Hinds County officials who have the authority, and they’re the ones who make the decisions,” Lumumba said.
“We don’t bury nobody in Jackson. We don’t unbury nobody in Jackson. We don’t make any decisions on that,” he continued. “So, it is dangerous when people develop a narrative for your community because what it creates is disharmony, it creates friction.”
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Lumumba is referring to a report put out by NBCNews.com about 215 people buried in unmarked graves in a pauper’s field in Hinds County — without their families behind notified — since 2016. National civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who is representing some of the families, has called on the U.S. Department of Justice to conduct an investigation.
The full list of bodies was released in December 2023 after Jackson resident, Dexter Wade, who was struck and killed by an off-duty Jackson police officer, was discovered buried in the field. His mother, Bettersten Wade, had been looking for her son for seven months after filing a missing police report with the Jackson Police Department days after he went missing. Though the police had custody of her son’s body, Bettersten was never notified.
Mississippi officials, as well as Lumumba, have blamed a lack of communication between multiple public safety agencies as the reason no one was notified about Wade’s death. The mayor revealed that an investigation found that Wade’s death was accidental and “there was no malicious intent.”
Though officials stated Wade had no identification on him when he was found, a wallet with his state ID was discovered in the jeans he had been buried in after he was exhumed in November. Crump said this indicated “a concerted effort to keep the truth and manner of his death from his family.”
Since then, two other families have joined Crump’s case, saying they were also never notified. More families could potentially join, Crump said. The Clarion Ledger asked the DOJ if an investigation is under way to which they responded “no comment.”
Jackson’s Chief of Police, Joseph Wade, has said the oversight happened before he was in-charge of JPD. In November, weeks after Crump took on the Dexter Wade case, he announced the implementation of a new death notification policy — something the department has never had.
