John Polk, a Hattiesburg businessman who spent fourteen years representing Mississippi's Senate District 44, died on July 20, 2026. He was 77. Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann announced the news, calling Polk "a close friend, confidant, and outstanding person" in a tribute reported by Magnolia Tribune.

Polk grew up in Columbia, Mississippi, and graduated from Prentiss High School before earning his degree from the University of Southern Mississippi in 1974. The university's College of Business later named him its Alumni of the Year in 2011. He spent his working life as an executive at Polk Meat Products, his family's business, and served in the Mississippi National Guard, where his support for soldiers and their families as a state senator earned him the Guard's Mississippi Meritorious Civilian Service Medal.

Voters elected Polk to the Mississippi Senate in 2012, and he represented the Hattiesburg area's District 44 for the next fourteen years. He rose to chair the Senate Business and Financial Institutions Committee and serve as vice chairman of the Appropriations Committee, posts that put him at the center of the state's banking policy and budget writing. In 2015 he backed Senate Bill 2519, which stripped away Mississippi's decades old requirement that every vehicle carry an annual safety inspection sticker. "I think vehicles now have become so reliable and all the things on it work so well now that it's a lot different than it was in 1960 when this law was passed," he told WLBT that February. The inspection requirement was off Mississippi's books by year's end.

A federal panel's 2025 order to redraw Mississippi's legislative maps for greater Black voting power folded Polk's district into a new Senate District 45, one that would have forced him into a Republican primary against a fellow incumbent. Rather than run, Polk told the Senate that April he would not seek reelection. Senate President Pro Tempore Dean Kirby, who had long teased him as "Dr. No" for his skepticism of bills that reached the floor, told colleagues, "I can't say enough about 'Dr. No.' Sen. Polk is a friend to all of us," according to the Mississippi Free Press. Polk answered that he was going home to be, in his words, "a regular old citizen," and told the chamber that his fourteen years there had been "the best 14 of my life."

Word of his death drew tributes from across the Capitol he had left only months before. Hosemann said Polk had been known for "his unwavering dedication to Mississippi, his strong convictions, and his willingness to say what needed to be said even when it was difficult," and offered prayers for his wife, Jan. Sen. Josh Harkins remembered him as "a man of humility, integrity, and quiet strength throughout his service," according to SuperTalk Mississippi, and Public Safety Commissioner Sean Tindell called him "a distinguished businessman, statesman, devoted family man, and man of God," according to DeSoto County News.

Polk's name stays attached to the concrete things he changed in Mississippi: the meat counter his family built in the Pine Belt, the banking and appropriations committees he steered from the vice chairman's and chairman's chairs, and the inspection sticker Mississippi drivers no longer have to buy each year because he pushed to end it. In Hattiesburg, where he made his home for decades, and in the Senate chamber where colleagues called him Dr. No, he is remembered as a man who said plainly what he thought and meant it.