Mississippi Election Commissioner Sheri McClatchy was caught on camera fighting with a Black woman named Pearlie Howell, who was campaigning for McClatchy’s opponent.
This apparently isn’t her first altercation, either. Viewers are now pointing to another incident in which she fought a different Black woman in 2019.
The video from 2020 starts with Howell and McClatchy yelling at one another as McClatchy starts to get closer to Howell. Howell tries to tell McClatchy to back away from her, but she refuses and instead smacks Howell’s hand down. Once that happens, the two start to physically fight.
The man recording then breaks up the altercations, repeatedly saying, “Come on, Pearlie.”
McClatchy then runs to her car before being confronted by the man recording. “You started that,” he says. “You walked up in her face.”
When you record this, you make sure you get the whole thing and don’t slice it,” she tells him before saying that she’s “pressing charges.”
The man reiterates that McClatchy was in Howell’s face.
“I don’t care. It’s always one way with y’all,” McClatchy says.
“With y’all? Who are y’all?” the man questions her.
That’s when she tries to redeem herself. “You and anybody else… You and anybody else with a phone,” she says.
People online didn’t let the comment go unnoticed. “She thought real hard before she finished that sentence. LOL,” one wrote.
“‘All y’all with a phone’ is a coded for the N word. She wanted to say but wanted to keep her teeth,” another said.
Viewers are now pointing to another altercation McClatchy was involved in. In that incident, from June of 2019, McClatchy was working at a laundromat and allegedly told a woman not to overload a washer. The two got into a physical fight, which was caught on camera. In an interview that McClatchy gave recounting the “attack,” McClatchy said that she’s “never had any trouble at all—never crossed words with anybody for two years,” implying that she was also involved in prior altercations.
“She has the victim act down,” one viewer said after watching the interview.
Following the 2020 incident, McClatchy and Howell were served citations and have to appear in court. A court date for the women has yet to be set, according to the Clarion-Ledger.
Mississippi Secretary of State Michael Watson said in a statement to the Clarion-Ledger, “Our office is aware of the video recorded at a precinct in Marshall County. County election officials monitor conduct at the precincts, and we’ve been told local law enforcement is looking into this incident.”
