By John Howell Sr.

Northwest Mississippi is gaining an identity as a distinct economic region, Batesville attorney Richard “Flip” Phillips said Tuesday in remarks at the Clarksdale Rotary Club’s meeting.

“No longer is North Mississippi a region, there are two regions, a Northeast Mississippi region; there’s also a Northwest Mississippi region,” Phillips said.

Phillips cited the explosive growth of DeSoto County down the Interstate 55 corridor, Tunica casinos and Clarksdale’s showcasing of its blues heritage as Interstate 69 nears reality as factors contributing the Northwest Mississippi identity.

The Batesville attorney traced the area’s recent history, starting with Tupelo’s emergence in the 1950s as a city of the “New South” and with the Jackson metro and Gulf Coast areas as the state’s population centers. Between 1980 and 2000, “a whole different world arose,” Phillips continued, “post communism and multinational.”

By 2008, Southaven and Tupelo were among the state’s top ten population centers. Horn Lake, Olive Branch and Southaven are now listed as three of the top 12 population centers in the state.

The shift to a separate identity for northwest Mississippi was reflected in the 2008 First Congressional District election when a former Tupelo mayor was pitted against the Southaven mayor in the Republican primary, Phillips said.

When the former Tupelo mayor was defeated for the Republican nomination, voters in the traditionally Republican First Congressional District shifted from party allegiance to regional allegiance and voted for Booneville Democrat Travis Childers.

Phillips said that Batesville’s Bob Dunlap of Dunlap and Kyle Co. once told him, “’Batesville and Oxford are going to grow together.’” Recently, Phillips said, Dunlap corrected his forecast: “Oxford and Clarksdale are going to grow together.’”

“People going from Canada to Mexico [on Interstate 69], they’re not coming to the Mississippi Delta without stopping in Clarksdale,” the Batesville attorney said.

Several community organizations — the Northwest Mississippi Community Foundation, the M3 Alliance, Mississippi Seventeenth Judicial District and the Northwest Mississippi Community College area among them — are already organized along northwest Mississippi lines, Phillips said.

In 1993 Phillips’ law firm expanded to DeSoto County to expand its presence in the region. Eventually, northwest Mississippi became the “hometown” for his firm which had adopted the slogan, “Hometown Lawyers, Nationwide Success.”

Clarksdale Rotarian John Cocke introduced Phillips as the person “responsible for our new sheriff.”

The Smith Phillips firm was approached by Coahoma citizens who felt that the 2007 sheriff’s election had been compromised by voting fraud and abuses, Phillips said. The people cited crime as the factor most negatively impacting Coahoma County’s quality of life.

“We just tried to do a little bit to keep from driving people out,” Phillips said.

The law firm reviewed the background of candidate Charles Jones who was initially determined to have been defeated in the 2007 Democratic Primary Election.

The review led to the firm representing Jones in a two-year court battle which finally led to the Supreme Court overturning the 2007 results. In a special election last month, Jones handily defeated long-term incumbent Andrew Thompson.

With Phillips was attorney Parker Still, the Smith Phillips partner who had been most actively involved in the Coahoma sheriff’s case.