In the year and a half since he left the office of Hattiesburg’s 34th mayor, Johnny DuPree has had a lot of time to spend with family and other endeavors – and to think about what comes next after his 16-year stint as mayor.
DuPree made his next step official Tuesday by qualifying for the upcoming election for Mississippi Secretary of State, an office that will be vacated with current Secretary Delbert Hosemann’s run for Lieutenant Governor.
“I’ve been teaching at USM these last three semesters, and after interacting with these young students, I realized that we still have work to do,” said DuPree, who is running as a Democrat. “And I realized that the foundation of our democracy is not only the right to vote, but access to the ballot.
“We’ve done a disservice, I think, to this generation about (not) emphasizing how important is to vote. I hear people talk about voter suppression, and I don’t want to talk about voter suppression – that’s the negative. What I want to talk about is having greater access to the ballot and finding a way that Mississippi can get in front of all the other states in the nation by supporting access to the ballot. If Mississippi can do that, I think that we’ll be a leader in acknowledging the importance of voting.”
DuPree, who earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Southern Mississippi and his PhD in urban higher education from Jackson State University, was appointed to the Hattiesburg Public School District Board of Trustees in 1987. He was elected to the Forrest County Board of Supervisors in 1991 and served on that board for 10 years until being elected mayor in 2001. He was the first African-American to be elected for nominee for governor for a major party since Reconstruction.
He won the Democratic bid for Governor in 2011, but was defeated in the general election by Republican Gov. Phil Bryant.
Two Republican candidates also have qualified for the Secretary of State position in the primary election: Sen. Michael Watson and Public Service Comm. Sam Britton.
“I think we need to be looking at election reform, and how we can make access to ballots as important as it should be,” DuPree said. “I don’t think we’ve put enough of our emphasis on access to the ballots – we’ve been more focused on what suppression looks like.”
