Episode 2 - Senator David Jordan

Civil Conversations with David Baria Podcast

“Mississippi is like a beautiful lady...but her undergarments are dirty. What we gotta do is bathe her and dress her up again.” Perhaps it’s not the most “woke” of analogies, but damned if it ain’t apt. Octogenarian state Senator David Jordan nails the dichotomy of this state famous for hospitality and ruthless racial oppression. This episode of Civil Conversations features a man who has seen a lot of different versions of America during his lifetime. Senator David Jordan is the son of a sharecropper, who talks about his early days picking cotton. He describes harrowing scenes of our country’s past: his five year old brother picking cotton into a pillowcase bc the big sacks were far too large, white men beating a black man in the streets for accidentally brushing against their vehicle, a plantation owner threatening his father’s life because his father insisted on sending David and his siblings to school. Not all the terror he has experienced was in the past. Sen. Jordan’s house was “shot up” in 2011 during a modern struggle over civil rights. David dives into the life and mind of this lifelong public servant who travelled an unlikely and often dangerous path from the cotton fields to the Capitol Building. This Civil Conversation is a reminder that Mississippi has come a long way, but that the state’s metamorphosis is as of yet “incomplete.” Join in this chat between men of different generations, backgrounds and experiences, bound by a desire to see their state emerge from the cocoon, fully transformed from a land of “blood and soil” into a place of beauty and opportunity for all her citizens.

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