Why Are States So Important? Focus On: Voting (or Not) in Mississippi

“It is the manifest intention of this convention to secure to the state of Mississippi ‘white supremacy’.” — MS State Constitutional Convention, 1890
Well, that’s… honest.
In our current era of obfuscation and Orwell-speak (“I’m the least racist person you’ll find anywhere in the world!” — President Trump, 2019), the explicitness of such moral depravation is almost a relief. White supremacist ideology, after all, is an American fact. It was written into the very founding of our country. It’s just that now we lie about it.
Given the upcoming Mississippi general election in three days, it’s a good time to ask the question: when it comes to this “manifest intention,” where is the state now?
1890: A Tumultuous Time
At the time of the Constitutional Convention, Mississippi and other Confederate state were still reeling from recent events: Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, Lee’s surrender in 1865, and the momentous amendments to the national constitution ratified over the next five years: the Thirteenth, abolishing slavery in the US; the Fourteenth, granting citizenship to all persons “born or naturalized” in the US, including former slaves, and providing all citizens “equal protection under the laws”; and the Fifteenth, barring states from disenfranchising voters [i.e. men] “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”
But the second state to secede wasn’t going down without a fight. Determined to actualize their “manifest intention,” canny state legislators swooped in on a loophole in the Fifteenth Amendment that allowed states still to implement voter qualifications as long as they did so equally to all races.
Voter Suppression
So in 1890, Mississippi became the first state to implement poll taxes and literacy tests as voter qualifications, knowing full well that these would disproportionately affect the recently freed African-American population. The grotesquely named “Redemption” initiative achieved its ends: according to the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, fewer than 9,000 of the 147,000 voting-age African-Americans in Mississippi were registered after 1890. Many other former Confederate states adopted similarly suppressive measures, cementing the era of Jim Crow law and ensuring white-gerrymandered districts in the South for years to come.
Mississippi lawmakers at the 1890 Convention also enshrined a diabolical provision within the state constitution itself: to win election, a candidate for statewide office (e.g. Governor or Attorney General) had to win an outright majority of the popular vote as well as a majority of the state’s House districts. If no candidate did both, the state House of Representatives would get to select the next official, regardless of who got the most votes. Given that only six percent of black voters were registered at the time, it’s clear that lawmakers weren’t interested in even the pretense of fairness.
129 Years Later
… this Constitutional provision still stands, and not a single African-American candidate has been elected to statewide office since 1890. Mississippi has the highest percentage of African-Americans of any state in the country, yet thanks to gerrymandering, only 42 of the state’s 122 House districts are majority black. African-American voters in the state tend to vote Democratic, but Republicans currently hold about 60 percent of Mississippi’s 122 state house seats. The years of unfairly consolidated white legislative power have truly crippled fair representation.
In May 2019, four African-Americans filed a federal civil-rights lawsuit charging the two-step election process with violating the Voting Rights Act, the Fourteenth Amendment, and the “one-person, one-vote” principle.
“Because of the way Mississippi’s House of Representative districts are drawn,” says the plaintiffs’ lawyer Rob McDuff, it “makes it more difficult for the candidate of choice of black voters to win a majority of the electoral districts than the candidate of choice of white voters.”
State Elections Matter
A federal judge recently refused to immediately block this two-step voting process. However, he did register “grave concern” about constitutionality, and left open the possibility of further consideration. The door is not yet closed; stay tuned.
Failing federal judicial intervention, MS voters can amend their state constitution via one of two mechanisms: one, a legislatively referred constitutional amendment (two-thirds of each chamber of the state legislature vote to put a constitutional amendment on the ballot, whereafter proposed amendments approved by a simple majority become part of the constitution); or two, an initiated constitutional amendment (citizens may initiate an amendment, but the process is so burdensome, it’s “virtually impossible,” per Ballotpedia, to qualify).
Change, in other words, depends on electing enough fair and honorable lawmakers to the state legislature. And surely, the majority of citizens want fairness, want to excise the racist relic rotting their state constitution from within. If so, they need to VOTE. On November 5, Mississippians will go to the polls to do just that. May their collective voice begin, finally, to smash the state’s “manifest intention” once and for all.
- Juliet Eastland
