Commentary: Community Conversation in Gloster with Mississippi Legislative Black Caucus

By Christopher Young,
Contributing Writer,

Gloster Mississippi is a town in Amite County, whose population has declined from 960 in 2010 to 897 in 2020, is 71 percent African American, and has a total land area of 1.82 square miles, per Census data. Like many small Mississippi towns, Gloster has seen better days. Residents travel to McComb or Jackson for specialty healthcare. Schools closed and children now attend the Amite County School District in Liberty, Mississippi. There are numerous businesses still on Main Street in Gloster, yet closed and vacant spaces far outnumber them.

 

Wednesday, March 25, 2026, the Greater Greener Gloster Project hosted a forum featuring nine of the fifty-eight members of the Mississippi Legislative Black Caucus. An opportunity for a Community Conversation between residents and legislators, which drew well over 100 people. The legislators took a quick tour of the DRAX Amite Biomass Plant and adjacent area by car just prior to the start of the forum. These dedicated legislators were from districts all over Mississippi yet wanted to see Gloster with their own eyes. Gloster’s mayor was introduced and offered a kind welcome to the visiting legislators.

While the core focus of the gathering was the negative environmental impacts caused by the round-the-clock operation of the DRAX Biomass facility, some questions from the audience went to economic development, education, voting, and crime. Representative Cheikh Taylor, who currently serves as Chairman of the Mississippi Democratic Party summed it up after the meeting. “This is an opportunity to hold corporations accountable and work with local leadership to prepare for the future. Having partners is needed. Without great partners and influence from local leaders and the community, the problems here will be exacerbated.” The Chairman’s comments reminded this writer of Congressman Thompson’s comments – when he came to a community forum on the impacts of DRAX’s pollution in Gloster August 23, 2023 – “…this country belongs to all of us…there is a difference between right and wrong…community-focused results require people to come together and develop a plan.”

Coming together, finding partners, and developing a plan is a special challenge in Gloster. This was highlighted during the forum and afterwards. Gloster’s Mayor Norwood stands with DRAX. During the forum he rose to push back on comments regarding community engagement saying, “These people don’t come to meetings.” A remarkable thing to say about his own constituents – the same people that pay his salary.

Representative Zakiya Summers responded as the master communicator that she is, sharing her own experience that true leadership requires reaching out to constituents as she has done in District 68, not always expecting them to come to you. Her very presence at the event, over two hours from her own district, proved her point further, and was well received by the audience.

After the forum, someone with the mayor said that transparency, honesty, and truth were needed, and this writer asked the mayor why he doesn’t respond to messages left for him. His response was that he doesn’t respond to phone calls from people he doesn’t know and that most of the time the media doesn’t tell the truth about things. When I asked if he was aware that some residents are convinced that he is in the pocket of Drax, he sternly told me to tell them they need to say it to his face so that he can sue them. Beyond Mayor Norwood, other elected officials are also pro-Drax. Ward 1 Alderwoman Betty Green was quite vocal, stating, “I was not even invited to this meeting. I was born and raised here. Other businesses, I’m not naming names, have been worse, much worse, horrible. The people writing grants (Greater Greener Gloster Project and their partners) are only doing it for personal gain. I don’t want people to be ill, but these health conditions that people have are post-Covid illnesses in people that have smoked their entire lives. I trust the decisions coming from MDEQ.”

Elected officials firmly advocating for a company that in over ten years of operation, has only created a walking path in town and gives away turkeys during the holidays. They claim to be boosting job growth, but only 15 percent of the workforce lives in Gloster, per one survey. Mississippi taxpayers provided grants and tax relief totaling $4.3 million to recruit Drax to Gloster.

It’s also hard to hear Gloster elected officials double-down on the decision-making of the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality. MDEQ has fined Drax Amite nearly $3 million for violations including exceeding hazardous emission levels, monitoring shortcomings, recordkeeping violations, etc. Drax responded by asking MDEQ to modify their permit to increase the hazardous air pollutant levels. In April 2025, MDEQ denied the request, but by October 2025, MDEQ’s all-white board unanimously approved the application to raise the pollution levels.

How can elected officials claim to be serving their constituents when nearly 80percent of residents of Gloster are being represented by Ben Crump or Singleton Schreiber in lawsuits against Drax Amite.

This issue is not going away. In addition to representatives from Dogwood Alliance and Southern Echo, Jacqueline Marsaw, a Field Representative from Congressman Thompson’s Natchez Office was present, as was Katherine T. Egland, a member of the NAACP National Executive Board and Chairwoman of the Board’s Environmental and Climate Justice Committee.

Representative Justin Crosby, a Democrat from Aberdeen, Mississippi, reminded the audience of an inescapable truth, “We’ve got to work together. If it was any other community, they (Drax) couldn’t even be here.”