Adult Movie Theatres in Jackson

What is open right now

The state that taxed what it had banned

Every page on this site describes a place that officially disapproves of something and quietly permits it anyway. Distance rules that leave exactly enough land. Licences issued to businesses the council says it wants gone. Ordinances passed and then never enforced, as in Tampa. It is always implicit and nobody writes it down.

Mississippi wrote it down.

Liquor had been illegal statewide since 1908. From 1944 the state collected a penalty tax on it under a section of the 1942 code drafted to cover the sale of all illegal goods, and in practice used on nothing else. Once the tax was paid, officials left the trade alone.

The result was a state with two maps. Vicksburg, Natchez and the Gulf Coast sold liquor openly. Other counties were bone dry. Nothing in the statute book had changed to account for either, and the difference between them was enforcement rather than law.

It ended because they raided the wrong party

On the night of 4 February 1966, Hinds County chief deputy sheriff Tom Shelton and three of his deputies walked into the Jackson Country Club. The club was hosting the king’s reception after the Junior League’s annual Carnival Ball. They seized about ten thousand dollars of liquor and arrested the assistant bar manager.

Among the guests watching this happen were Governor Paul Johnson and a good number of state legislators.

Prohibition did not survive the year. The wets and the drys settled on a compromise in which the state government itself became the sole wholesaler of liquor in Mississippi, Governor Johnson signed it in May 1966, and the Office of Alcoholic Beverage Control was created to run it. Having spent twenty-two years taxing a trade it called criminal, the state took the trade over.

The lesson is not that the raid was unusual. Raids were how the arrangement was maintained, and everyone understood the terms. The lesson is that an unwritten arrangement survives exactly as long as nobody important is standing in the room when it is enforced.

Which is worth holding on to

Forty-four cities in and the pattern has not varied much. The venues that survive are the ones somebody decided not to look at. Birmingham has two shops trading on the same downtown streets they have been on since 1948 and 1973, under a state that made their merchandise a crime. Houston settled with its clubs for a million dollars a year.

Mississippi is the version with the paperwork showing. One shop on South West Street, open nine to seven, in a state that once had a line in its tax code for exactly this sort of thing.