Nearly every member of my family has ties to Mississippi. During school breaks, we would load up the Aerostar and head out from Detroit, down I-75 south to our grandparents' home in Cruger, a small town nestled somewhere between where Emmett Till's body was found and where Medgar Evers was assassinated. As a child, I didn't like staying too long because there was never anything to do. As an adult, I wish I would have treasured those days a lot more.
As one would imagine in a town with fewer than 500 people, good-paying jobs in Cruger are not plentiful. The current median household income is less than $25,000, leaving roughly 35% of the population living in poverty. There are a lot of towns like Cruger in Mississippi, our nation's poorest state.
Crawford, where Hall of Famer Jerry Rice grew up, has a 26% poverty rate. Archie Manning's birthplace of Drew has a poverty rate of more than 40%. Rams great Jackie Slater was born in the state capital of Jackson, where 180,000 residents recently went weeks without clean drinking water and where 1 in 4 live in poverty.
These are the communities in most need of financial assistance.
And these are the communities Brett Favre, a Mississippi native himself, was told he was taking money from — and he did not care.
At least $77 million in welfare funds was misspent in what officials believe is the largest public fraud in state history. Favre was sued by the state in May to recoup $1.1 million in welfare funds that he received, and recent court filings have exposed details of his involvement.
Text exchanges between Favre and officials, including then-Gov. Phil Bryant, show discussions about diverting at least $5 million to help build a volleyball stadium at the University of Southern Mississippi. That's where Favre played football and his daughter was playing volleyball at the time. Mississippi Today reported messages as far back as 2017, one year after Favre was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
Imagine that: He got the famed gold jacket, and that was one of the first things he used his burnished reputation to achieve.