by Sharelle Burt
July 5, 2024
Is this Mississippi seeing the light?
A three-judge federal panel has ordered the Mississippi Legislature to create more Black-majority House and Senate Districts after a lawsuit accused the legislature of diluting Black voting power.
The judges ruled on July 2 in favor of a lawsuit filed by the Mississippi Conference of the NAACP and Black voters who claim the districts drawn in 2022 work toward censoring Black voters. As redistricting happens every 10 years following the federal census, the judging panel gave the legislature a chance to redraw the districts — but with a deadline to do so before the 2025 legislative session convenes. “It is the desire of this court to have new legislators elected before the 2025 legislative session convenes, but the parties can make whatever arguments about timing they conclude are valid,” the ruling said.
Voting advocates praised the court’s decision to move in the right direction. “The court rightly held that the Mississippi Legislature used the redistricting process to dilute the power of Black voters,” said ACLU of Mississippi Executive Director Jarvis Dortch.
“Those legislative districts denied Black Mississippians an equal voice in state government.”
One of the plaintiffs’ attorneys, Jennifer Nwachukwu, of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, released a statement calling the ruling a victory for Black voters in Mississippi. “This is an important victory for Black Mississippians to have an equal and fair opportunity to participate in the political process without their votes being diluted,” the statement read, according to NBC News.
“This ruling affirms that the voices of Black Mississippians matter and should be reflected in the state Legislature.”
While the new ruling won’t create additional districts, it will require legislators to adjust districts already in existence, affecting a number of districts. Lawmakers are ordered to draw majority-Black Senate districts close to DeSoto County, around Hattiesburg and a new majority-Black House district in Chickasaw and Monroe counties.
Mississippi State Conference of the NAACP Executive Director Charles Taylor said he is pleased with the outcome but wishes “the court had gone further.” The three judges — all appointed by former Republican President George W. Bush — did not accept all of the plaintiff’s arguments, including one argument that “packing” a large percentage of Black voters in one concentrated amount of districts deprives voters of having an impact on other districts.
However, those representing the plaintiffs think the ruling is a step toward addressing systemic racism within the voting system. “This ruling brings us much closer to the goal of ensuring that Mississippi has a fair number of majority-Black legislative districts to go along with the majority-white ones,” Rob McDuff, an attorney with the Mississippi Center for Justice, said.
Several lawsuits have been brewing in states challenging congressional or state legislative districts drawn after the 2020 census. In Louisiana, the Supreme Court finally granted Louisiana permission to use a congressional map, including two majority-Black districts, in the 2024 election. Louisiana’s congressional map has been immersed in intense litigation since 2022 when the first draft was met with accusations of racial gerrymandering.
Federal judges rejected Alabama’s congressional maps twice after failing to create a second district for Black voters to at least come close to composing a majority in September 2023. The three-judge panel said they were “deeply troubled” after learning that lawmakers went against their instructions to create another majority-Black district or something close to it.
Mississippi lawmakers’ next step would be for the state to appeal or present arguments to the panel on why new districts shouldn’t be drawn and filled before the 2025 legislative session. Lawmakers must set up a special legislative session if the arguments are rejected.
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