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Our Boy Trent

Is Lott an anachronism, or does he represent a stereotypical, but true, Mississippi that still denies its racist past?

Blythe Daigle

Blythe Daigle doesn't look like your stereotypical activist. Dressed conservatively in a gray turtleneck, blue jeans and black clunky shoes, she resembles the other inhabitants of her Belhaven apartment complex. But, unlike most people who are only three years out of college, Daigle, a Louisiana native, has already completed a two-year stint in Paraguay as a Peace Corps volunteer.

Bill Minor

Bill Minor is proof that the best way to keep a muscle fit is to exercise it. Rigorously. When I arrived at his Broadmoor home the Friday after Thanksgiving, the brain of this 80-year-old journalist and columnist immediately started churning, and for the next two hours, he exploded with facts, details and opinions and quirkobilia. I didn't need to ask a single question of the man who has made a career out of asking questions in the state of Mississippi.

Carolyn Renee Morris

Carolyn Morris—the storyteller, singer, songwriter, connector—is the product of the two strong women who raised her. The 40-year-old South Jacksonian was born in the University Medical Center in 1962 and then bounced back and forth between her feminist mother, Tahira'h Abubakr, and her more traditional grandmother, Gussie Seals. Abubakr raised Morris in New York City and Indianapolis to be politically aware and determined and independent. She visited Miss Gussie, a former sharecropper, back here in Pocahontas and learned the feminine arts. "Otherwise, I'd never have put on a dress," Morris says, laughing softly as she nibbles at a tofu burrito outside High Noon Café.

Rob McDuff

Robert B. McDuff, 46, looks too rumpled and carefree to be about to argue the Democrats' congressional redistricting case before the U.S. Supreme Court in December. But, a cursory look around the Jackson attorney's office—in a slightly crumbling North Congress house with crooked steps and peeling gray paint—reveals that he's about more than power. He wants to make a difference.

Keke Lowe

Marquise "Keke" Lowe has lived in Jackson his whole 19-year-old life. Lowe, a slim teenager with amused chestnut eyes and a small, sculpted face, grew up in Shady Oaks, attended Bailey Magnet High School and now lives Downtown. He's studying computer science and business at Tougaloo College so he can own his own computer-programming company. "Technology is trying to run things right now," he says.

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