‘It’s Bigger Than Me’: A Gap Persists Between Mississippi Arts Organizations and Their Communities

Anquanizia Hall walked into the Meridian Little Theatre in her Mississippi hometown in August 2013 to audition for a role in its production of Legally Blonde. Hall quickly realized that she was the only Black person in the building in a city that, as of the 2010 U.S. Census, was only 30.7% white.

Although she believed she should be there, Hall still felt out of place. “Do you need people like me?” she asked the two women taking names for the auditions.

Surprised by the question, they reassured the young actor: “What do you mean? Yes! Come on, please audition. Write your name down.”

Hall was, indeed, in the right place; she landed the role and continued performing at Meridian Little Theatre while still attending Meridian High School.

---

As a nonprofit journalism organization, we depend on your support to fund journalism that addresses the crisis of institutionalized racism in America. Donate any amount today to become a Pulitzer Center Champion and receive exclusive benefits!

---

When the theater announced Dreamgirls, she jumped at the chance to audition for the role of Effie—a decision that became a turning point. “That show helped me discover that this is what I want to do for the rest of my life,” Hall says. She told herself: “I can do this. I can act. I can dance. I can sing. … I don’t want it to stop here.”

As a child, Hall didn’t want an audience. “Growing up, I was cripplingly shy. I did not like to be in the forefront,” she recalled. 

Driven to face her weaknesses on stage, high-school theater had changed Hall. “It opened a box of tools I didn’t know I had,” she told the Mississippi Free Press. Those tools provided the actor with a bravery for the stage and led to that audition for Legally Blonde.

A decade later, after film and TV cast credits, including the Mississippi feature Texas Red starring Grammy-nominated blues singer Cedric Burnside, as well as multiple writer and producer credits, Hall still reflects on that 2013 audition at Meridian Little Theatre. “Out of that entire cast, there were only three people of color,” Hall said. 

‘Inclusion of All Citizens’

Hall’s experience mirrors a larger issue across the state. 

The staff and boards of most Mississippi arts organizations are predominantly white and able-bodied, even after the Black Lives Matter movement of 2020. In response to two open-records requests, the Mississippi Arts Commission (MAC) provided data from grant applicants that contrasts the diversity of state and local demographics as well as legislative policy that emphasizes the importance of diversity. 

Roughly three-quarters of staff and board members for those organizations identify as white. Black and Latinx board membership for these organizations increased from 2020 to 2022 by less than 1%. Out of 86 grantees, the staff of 62 organizations identify as either white or Black, meaning that none of these organizations have staff who identify as Native American, Asian or other racial demographics. Yet, Mississippi’s population includes a broad range of diversity across factors like race and disability.

The 2020 U.S. Census lists Mississippi’s population as approximately 2.96 million. Of this total, 56% identify as white (not Hispanic or Latinx), and 36.6% identify as African American or Black. The remaining population identifies under several other race/origin demographics. Current census data estimates Meridian’s Black population at 65.1%.

People under 65 currently living with a disability account for 12.3% of the state’s total population. Communications Director of Disability Rights Mississippi Jane Walton Carroll said this number should grow, based on estimates that 1 in 4 Mississippians will have a disability at some point. She noted, too, that a reluctance to disclose disabilities creates a risk of underreporting. Dr. Kasee Straton, director of the T.K. Martin Center at Mississippi State University, added that temporary and “invisible” disabilities—those not visibly apparent—also contribute to underreporting.

Mississippi is not unique in the disparities between nonprofits and the communities served. BoardSource conducted a national survey of 1,200 nonprofits in June 2021, finding that 78% of board members identify as white and that only 5% disclosed a disability. These numbers contrast USA Today’s report on national 2020 Census data, citing that 57.8% of the U.S. identifies as white, 18.7% Hispanic, 12.4% Black and 6% Asian. National data overlook striking differences in states like Texas, where the Hispanic population now outnumbers the non-Hispanic white population. Roughly 13.4% of the noninstitutionalized civilian population live with a disability, data.census.gov reports.

As a result of this disparity, Hall sees a problem: “Young (Black) students don’t really know that theater is an option.” 

This disparity, at least in theater, may create a self-perpetuating problem. “Most people in Mississippi, when they see theater, they see white individuals,” Hall said. “It’s always the same students that come (to auditions), and there are no people of color in these programs.” 

Sharon Miles, a Black Mississippi theater artist from Starkville, Miss., sees the lack of representation in leadership contributing to a lack of information that in turn fuels a lack of access. 

“The Mississippi Arts Commission’s impact on the Black community is minimal at best, because art conversations are very Caucasian centered,” Miles told the Mississippi Free Press. “It feels like the Commission has a rotation and reaches the same group. Those who know about funding resources know, but for those who don’t, how do you learn about it?”

The Mississippi Arts Commission is the official state arts agency to receive funding from the National Endowment for the Arts. When Congress created the NEA in 1965, it emphasized the value of the arts to foster the “mutual respect for the diverse beliefs and values of all persons” and gave the NEA express power to fund projects with “particular regard” to traditionally underrepresented groups. Similarly, MAC’s current Strategic Plan reiterates a policy for “inclusion of all citizens,” and MAC offers a free diversity toolkit to encourage representation across factors like race, mental and physical ability, and more.

Consistent with these policies, organizations that applied for funding from MAC previously disclosed the race and disability status of board members and the race of their staff. Although the recent grant cycle no longer requested specific demographic information for race and disability, organizations are still evaluated on how well they represent the community and a plan for addressing any gaps in reflecting those demographics. 

Declinations are generally based on eligibility factors or because the application misses “vital pieces,” MAC Director of Grants Lauren Rhoades said. An organization can be deemed ineligible “if a red flag is brought to our attention,” she explained, acknowledging that site visits are uncommon and that misrepresentations are “few and far between.”

Myrna Colley-Lee, acclaimed costume designer and former long-serving member of MAC’s Board of Commissioners, sees historical challenges to overcome. “The country has a hard time getting past its past, and it shows up in the arts a bit,” she said. “There’s an atmosphere that pervades, that keeps a line somewhere.”

‘You’re a Gift Sent From God’

Mississippi creatives like Hall are bridging these gaps. 

Born and raised in Meridian in Lauderdale County, Hall received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in acting from the AMDA College of Performing Arts in Los Angeles, Calif. Although she works professionally in theater and film across the country, Hall continues to extend her roots in Mississippi. 

“I travel so much, and I’m thankful for it, but I’m able to come home and share it with my people in Mississippi,” she said. “It is possible to be in this field and define your own success.”

Hall has certainly succeeded in Mississippi, even directing an award-winning ensemble of mostly first-time actors at the Southeastern Theatre Conference in Kentucky last year.

In 2019, the Mississippi Theatre Association asked Hall and Randy Ferino, who teaches theater at Meridian High School and serves as a member of MTA’s board, to produce a staged reading of Prince Duren’s Drinks On Me at the MSU Riley Center. Duren’s play won MTA’s adult playwriting competition that year. 

During rehearsals, Hall and Ferino made a pact: “He wanted to do a short film of it, and I wanted to do a full (stage) production of it. So we made a deal to do both,” Hall said. 

“At the time we read the script, my first thought was, ‘I have to see this on film,’” Ferino told the Mississippi Free Press. “If I had to be born in any other time period, it would be the ’70s. That’s what mainly drew me to Drinks on Me, just being in the aura to kind of bring all of those characters to life.”

Duren’s play also appealed to Ferino for more significant reasons: It explored a side of African American culture that many theaters avoid. “You never get those gritty stage plays that you think could be on Broadway,” said Ferino, who was intensely drawn to the “smooth and slick” character Boogie Bradford.

Not long after that staged reading, the duo produced Drinks on Me at Meridian’s historic Temple Theatre to an enthusiastic response. “You guys should put this on and do something else with it,” one fan told Hall. 

The duo knew they had tapped into something the community wanted.

Ferino pitched an idea to Tiffany McGehee, artistic director for Meridian Little Theatre: “Would it be open to doing a one-act competition piece at MTA?” he asked. “We’ve got a director and a play that’s already been produced at the Temple Theatre.”

“You know what? You’re a gift sent from God, because I want MLT to participate in MTA again,” McGehee responded. 

Thanks to MLT and a GoFundMe campaign, Ferino and Hall took Drinks on Me to the state-wide MTA Community Theatre Festival in January 2023. Under Hall’s direction, the performance with a cast of mostly first-time thespians landed five awards including Best Ensemble. This success made them eligible to compete at the Southeastern Theatre Conference (SETC) in Lexington, Ky., where they won another four awards.

Unlike many of the other theaters in attendance at SETC, financial shortfalls forced hard sacrifices. “Our budget wouldn’t allow (us to attend the full conference),” Hall shared, so members of the cast missed workshops and auditions that could have been highly beneficial. 

“It was 11:50 p.m. when we met at Meridian Little Theatre and we left for Kentucky,” Hall recalled. “We stayed up, registered, got into our hotels. We did not go to sleep. We performed that (Thursday) night.”

Still, they shined. On the arduous Sunday drive home through an intense storm and car troubles, Hall glimpsed a Facebook post about an award. Excited, she managed to get a call through to someone at the festival, asking, “Can you clarify this for me?” That’s when they learned precisely how successful they were.

“We were first runner up, which meant if the show that won first place couldn’t attend national competition, we would go,” Hall said. The first-place winner? Another Mississippi cast: Starkville Community Theatre. Excited for their accomplishment, Hall noted that it felt bittersweet, as they realized their group journey had come to a close.

‘Art Changes Your Mood’

MAC Executive Director David Lewis acknowledged that the arts commission and Mississippi’s arts organizations could better reflect Mississippi’s demographics. “It’s something that takes time to change,” he said. Diversity strengthens organizations, he adds, “because we are stronger when we reflect our communities.”

Lewis, who began his role in January 2023, did not know how long MAC has required grant applicants to provide demographic data. Although the NEA has required MAC to provide this demographic data in previous Final Descriptive Reports, the current version of that Descriptive Report does not appear to require that data. The NEA did not respond to follow-up questions on that change.

The “Meet the MAC” series intends to reach underserved communities, Lewis said. “We really strive to have 20% of (this series) in underserved counties, defined as not having received a grant in five or six years,” he told the Mississippi Free Press. Although, at the time of press, MAC hadn’t specifically coordinated this series with one of Mississippi’s HBCUs or the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, to list a couple of examples, it does coordinate with schools and libraries in or near these geographic areas. MAC has, however, engaged in other outreach to HBCUs. 

This reporter contacted state House Appropriations Committee Chair John Read and Chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee Bill Hopson, as well as Senate Appropriations Committee members Senators Angela Turner-Ford and Bart Williams and House Appropriations Committee Representative Rob Roberson. Rep. Read is the principal author for the signed bill that approved funding for MAC in the 2023 Regular Session. Rep. Roberson, who was an author on the 2024 appropriations bill, responded.

Rep. Roberson, R-Starkville, who represents Mississippi House District 43, believes that public-arts funding builds community and slows Mississippi’s “net negative” loss of people. “Art changes your mood,” he said. “Art changes your community in such positive ways that if you wanted to have a way to measure it, I don’t know how you do. It changes something on the inside. You see it as a whole in your community and how proud people are of their community.”

Art also ties into education because “without art, some of these kids will never show up to school,” Roberson said. “Their whole being at school is tied to the fact that there’s an art class, or there’s a teacher there that helps them write, or there’s a band class that helps them create that music.” 

This creates a balance that Roberson believes “helps us become truly Mississippians.” This balance is also why Roberson believes that “sometimes you have to get on board and be a positive push toward something; something is better than nothing,” he said. “It takes one person to burn a barn down, but it takes a community to build it. And we’ve got to start sharing with each other.”

At a state level, Roberson wants funding to be fair, particularly for small communities. “Larger communities have a lot more likelihood of getting a lot of those dollars, partly because they’re so much well organized,” he said. “Smaller communities, in all honesty, some of them are just trying to survive.” 

He sees a similar obligation for local arts organizations to ensure fairness across their different communities. “We’ve got affluent people already involved. We’ve got university professors already involved,” the legislator said. “But I would bet you money that there is another part of our community … I guarantee you’d find a brilliant artist over there. I guarantee you they’ve never been talked to.” 

The Tangible Benefits of Representation

Opponents of policies that promote diversity and inclusion argue that these practices are illegal racial quotas. Recently, President Trump has called for an end to diversity and inclusion initiatives in the federal government, in an executive order signed Jan. 21, 2025. Still, the U.S. Supreme Court, in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, expressly maintained the continued relevance of a person’s lived experience even when it comes to race. Not only does a student have the ability to address race as part of their life experience, but “an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise” is also relevant to university admission decisions.

Prince Duren, who grew up in the deltas of Itta Bena, Miss., and the snows of Muskegon, Mich., tackles the expansiveness of the lived experience of race in his work. “A Black person that grew up in the suburbs has a different experience than the Black person who grew up in the inner city. We need to create stories that represent these different worlds,” the playwright said. “Theater is a reflection of the society in which it is created. If you’re only showing your audience a tunnel presentation, then they won’t see what else is out there.” 

By showing the audience a broader perspective of Black lived experiences, MLT’s production of Dreamgirls benefited both the community and the arts organization. “(Dreamgirls) sold out every single night. We had to add chairs,” Hall said. “It brought a whole ’nother demographic.” 

Lived experience is inherent to a nonprofit’s mission in the view of Ellen Collins, executive director of the Mississippi Alliance of Nonprofits. If an organization doesn’t include people who will benefit from programs when it makes decisions, it can’t know whether its strategies will work, she argued. “Go outside your circle. Step outside of your traditional recruitment areas,” Collins suggested. 

“There has to be a relationship built, and sometimes it comes down to just introducing yourself,” Rep. Roberson said. “If you’re not, you can’t really expect anything. You can’t expect anything to grow from something that you haven’t put time or energy into.”

“I question sometimes how much talent we have squandered because we didn’t help them,” he added.

Jane Walton Carroll from Disability Rights Mississippi wants nonprofits to admit a lack of knowledge and then conduct their own research and investigations into ways they can better reflect their communities. 

Solutions, however, still require action.

While MAC Executive Director David Lewis said change is “a process that takes time … because boards are a complicated thing,” believing that the “vast majority of (Mississippi arts) organizations are reevaluating themselves, trying new things, trying to reinvent and serve their communities well.”

Ellen Collins, however, argued that nothing changes “by not addressing the elephant in the room.”

“Philanthropy could become irrelevant if (it) doesn’t evolve,” Lita Pardi, programs and knowledge director for PEAK Grantmaking, warned.

Based in Washington, D.C., PEAK’s vision is to “transform philanthropy and instill equitable grant-making practices,” Pardi said. It focuses on equity in grant-making practices and relationships with communities rather than equity in a subject area, like health or the arts. Although PEAK hasn’t specifically addressed issues of board composition, it encourages funders “to center the communities they serve in their work.” 

Pardi acknowledged patterns where nonprofits invite board members for financial influence or guidance on a specific issue rather than their connections with their communities. Numbers may identify who is missing, but Pardi cautioned against tokenism. Nonprofits must “have the voice, the experience of the people” served, she said, noting that a client advisory council without decision-making authority isn’t enough. 

The National Committee on Responsive Philanthropy is another national nonprofit with a mission to promote philanthropy that is “responsive to people and communities with the least wealth and opportunity” and “accountable to the highest standards of integrity and openness,” its website reads. The organization did not respond to repeated interview requests before press time.

‘Imagining Different Alternatives’

C.T. Salazar, a Latinx poet in Cleveland, Miss., finds Audre Lorde’s 1985 essay “Poetry Is Not a Luxury” instructive. The arts can give “a space where we understand what could be, where we have the language to articulate what we need, where we imagine different alternatives,” Salazar said. “That’s where the arts come in, not just (to) give meaningful change, but (to) participate in ongoing change.”

Similarly, costume designer Myrna Colley-Lee sees hope in the power of arts. “That’s the way progress actually happens,” she told the Mississippi Free Press. “I think that’s how the arts work. The arts are in the foreground. The audience catches up. I think that’s happening.”

Meanwhile, the Drinks on Me journey continues as Ferino and Hall both share their optimism.

Ferino, who never anticipated living in Meridian, is submitting the short film version of Drinks on Me to festivals and has discovered that he can have a positive influence in Mississippi. “That’s what keeps me here,” the filmmaker said. 

Hall finds similar motivation. “People are coming up to me and telling me … ‘You really helped me figure out what I want to do,’” the actor said. “It’s bigger than me.”

Disclosure: The author for this article consults with arts organizations on nonprofit matters, including grants, and has drafted grant applications submitted to the Mississippi Arts Commission. No MAC staff interviewed for this article were contacted by the author regarding any pending grant applications.