By Hart Jefferson
Within the 2024 cohort of the Mississippi Youth Media Project, one student stands out. This student is unique among his peers not only because he is the only white student among his Black peers, but also because he is the only student who does not live in the Jackson metro area.
A normal summer morning for Braden Overby, a native of Mendenhall, Miss., consists of waking up an hour earlier than other YMP students, getting dressed, enjoying an energy drink and making the 45-minute commute to Jackson for his work at the YMP. Overby says Simpson County, where Mendenhall is located south of Jackson, has “more pine trees than we have people.”
For many, such a unique fish-out-of-water situation could be discouraging.
Braden, who will be a senior at Simpson Academy in the 2024-2025 school year, is acutely motivated by his passion for learning about public policy, the subject in which he plans to major in college. His interests in law and government were ignited during the tumultuous year of 2020.
In fact, he is also familiar with elections—his own. He is the student-body president of Simpson Academy, and in summer 2024 he was elected governor of Mississippi Boys State. And he’s already been an active volunteer in political campaigns in the state.
As the oldest sibling in a large family, Braden witnessed firsthand the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic while learning about the ways in which policy decisions from elected officials can have an impact on human lives.
Although there are many social, economic and political concerns that Braden would like to work to alleviate, he is specifically passionate about providing rural areas with access to high-quality internet service. “That should be a priority we can all agree on,” Braden says, again citing his family’s experience in COVID lockdown as a motivating factor for this belief.
More than anything, however, Braden cites his Christian faith as one of the largest contributors to his moral code. “I want to strive to do the most amount of good for the most people,” he says.
As Braden concludes his participation with the Youth Media Project and his YMP colleagues, he said that this experience adds to the numerous factors that shape his worldview and his drive to make the world a better place.
Hart Jefferson, the co-lead of the Mississippi Free Press’ solutions circles and a freshman at Jackson State University, was a YMP mentor in summer 2023 and 2024.
