Avoiding the tap water in Jackson, Miss., has been a way of life for decades

https://www.npr.org/2022/09/04/ [login to see] /jackson-mississippi-race-water-divide-politics
The same day that 600 National Guard members deployed around Jackson, Miss., to distribute water to tens of thousands of people, one steady line of cars flowed instead through a quiet residential neighborhood, as they've been doing for months.

The Sykes Park Community Center got a large filter six months ago to purify water for local residents to pick up.

"We just don't do it periodically. We do it every single day," says Jason Page, a youth mentor with the group Strong Arms, who speaks as he directs traffic in and out of the parking lot. "The Jackson water has been messed up for a while now."

A week after more than 160,000 residents lost their water, it's still not clear when the city's primary water treatment plant, O.B. Curtis, will be back up. But even when that happens, people here say the larger crisis will not be over. Jackson's water has been unreliable and unsafe for decades. Many residents accuse the state government of neglecting the needs of a city that's 82% Black. And those tensions, along with Jackson's shrunken tax base, pose a challenge to any lasting solution.