Mississippi Today

How Mississippi’s Jim Crow Laws Still Haunt Black Voters Today

Published

3 weeks ago

April 12, 2024

mississippitoday.org – Daja E. Henry, The Marshall Project – 2024-04-12 13:00:00

This article was published in partnership with The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization covering the U.S. criminal justice system, and Mississippi Today. Sign up for The Marshall Project's Jackson newsletter, and follow them on Instagram, TikTok, Reddit and Facebook.

Charles Caldwell was never meant to have a voice. Mississippi's White ruling class made sure of it.

He was part of Mississippi's silenced majority in 1860 — 436,600 enslaved people to 354,000 White people, according to the Census — who would be granted full citizenship after the Civil War.

By 1868, Caldwell was one of 16 Black delegates at the state's post-war constitutional convention, which extended the right to vote to all men and created a framework for public education.

Described in a White politician's historical account of the Clinton Riot as “one of the most daring and desperate negroes of his day,” Caldwell was “the dominant factor in local Republican politics.”

In December 1875, Caldwell was lured to a cellar for a celebratory Christmas drink. He was ambushed — shot once from behind — and then carried into the street, where a White mob riddled him with bullets. Caldwell, who rose from servitude to become a state senator, was once again silenced.

Charles Caldwell, one of 16 Black delegates at the state's post-war constitutional convention in 1868, pictured within a montage of the Mississippi Legislature in 1875. Caldwell was assassinated in 1875 part of “the Mississippi Plan” to maintain White political control.
CREDIT: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

His murder was a calculated part of white supremacists' post-war efforts, collectively known as the Mississippi Plan, to maintain political control by White men, whom freedmen outnumbered. In the post-war South, white supremacists used lynchings, massacres and intimidation to silence the Black people they once owned, then cemented racism into the state's 1890 constitution to further restrict the Black vote.

Although most other racist sections of Mississippi's 1890 constitution were erased by the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, one part of the plan continues to stalk Black voters today. Called felony disenfranchisement, the constitution takes away — for life — the right to vote upon conviction for several low-level crimes, like theft and bribery, that the 1890 drafters felt would be mostly committed by Black people.

A bill that would reinstate voting rights for thousands convicted of nonviolent offenses was passed by the Mississippi House of Representatives in March but died this week in the state Senate. Republicans control both chambers.

Section 241, the disenfranchisement clause of the constitution, has since been expanded and interpreted to cover 102 crimes.

Why was voter disenfranchisement created? In 1890, state Rep. James K. Vardaman, who would later be elected governor, said, “There is no use to equivocate or lie about the matter. … Mississippi's constitutional convention of 1890 was held for no other purpose than to eliminate the [n-word] from politics.”

Over the past 30 years, approximately 55,000 Mississippians have lost their rights to vote due to felony disenfranchisement. About six out of 10 are Black, according to state conviction records reviewed by The Marshall Project – Jackson.

An effort to overturn the state's disenfranchisement law has gone before the U.S. Supreme Court twice, and the case was twice rejected by the majority. In her 2023 dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson rebuked the law's racist intent, saying it contained “the most toxic of substances” that needed to be removed.

In addition to disenfranchisement, the 1890 delegates crafted legal language around racism and conditions perpetuated by slavery. Poll taxes and literacy tests attacked the lack of wealth and education. Left out of Section 241 were violent crimes — murder, rape and assault — that were often part of white supremacists' terroristic strategy.

In an 1896 case, the Mississippi Supreme Court noted the choice of disenfranchising crimes was racist. “Restrained by the federal constitution from discriminating against the negro race, the convention discriminated against its characteristics and the offenses to which its weaker members were prone,” the court wrote. It describes Black people as “patient, docile people,” more inclined to “furtive offenses than to the robust crimes of the whites.”

Yet as 20th-century civil rights laws stripped away most voting restrictions, voter disenfranchisement remained because civil rights have never come easy to Mississippi, voting advocates say.

“There's never been a time period in Mississippi history where we have done what the federal government has wanted us to do without the federal government having to directly step in and make us do it,” said Hannah Williams, policy and research director of voting rights advocacy group Mississippi Votes. “Even now.”

“Movements change, but commitments don't,” said Flonzie Brown Wright, the first Black woman in the state elected to public office in a racially mixed town. “Call it whatever you want to call it,” Brown Wright told The Marshall Project – Jackson. “But the common denominator is: Let's [not] give these minorities any power.”

Civil rights gains — and new ways to stop them

Mississippi is one of 13 states that imposes a lifetime voting ban, even after the end of a felony sentence. In most of those states, lifetime disenfranchisement is for violent crimes or government corruption. In Mississippi, a single felony conviction for writing a bad check or shoplifting takes away the right to vote.

Across the nation, courts and state legislatures have restored voting rights for people convicted of felonies. Since 1997, 26 states and the District of Columbia have expanded voting rights for people with felony convictions, according to The Sentencing Project.

Mississippians last amended Section 241 in 1968 — to add murder and rape to the list of disenfranchising crimes, after burglary was removed in 1950. (See the full list of offenses here.)

Though they once outnumbered White people in the state, Black people have never held a majority of representation in the state's government. Robert Luckett, a civil rights historian and professor at Jackson State University, said the modern conservatism that rules Mississippi can be traced back to the insidious Mississippi Plan to eliminate Black political power.

“Conservatives today, especially in the South, didn't just pop up out of nowhere,” Luckett said. In his view, “they are directly descended from segregationists, from white supremacy.”

The plan effectively suppressed the Black vote in the 19th and 20th centuries. Luckett and other historians said White political control continues to evolve in the 21st century.

Between 1875 and 1892, the number of Black voters plummeted. Though about 67% had been registered in 1867, fewer than 6% of eligible Black men were registered to vote by 1892, according to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

Starting early in the 20th century, hundreds of thousands of Black Mississippians left the state during the Great Migration caused by economic and social hardships. By 1940, Black people were no longer a majority in the state. And in many rural places, the order established by slavery remained. Black sharecroppers farmed land owned by White people.

Except for a few pockets of Black political power, such as the all-Black town of Mound Bayou in Bolivar County, the Black vote in Mississippi remained largely dormant until the 1960s.

Black people who remained in Mississippi faced much of the same oppression as their ancestors: lynchings, beatings, intimidation and imprisonment.

George W. Lee, a preacher in Belzoni, Mississippi, was murdered for his efforts to register Black voters in 1955. Fannie Lou Hamer, who rose to become a national civil rights champion, sharecropped in rural Ruleville, Mississippi, and had no idea she could vote until she was 44 years old. Hamer was arrested, sexually assaulted and beaten so brutally that it left her with kidney damage and a permanent limp, she testified at the 1964 Democratic National Convention.

Brown Wright said her father was fired from his job because of her activism. Before her barrier-breaking election in 1968, more than 1,000 civil rights protesters in Jackson were arrested and held in livestock pens in 1965, in one of the largest mass arrests of the Civil Rights Movement.

The passage of the federal Voting Rights Act in 1965 protected the right of Black citizens to vote and outlawed discriminatory barriers like literacy tests. By 1968, 60% of eligible Black residents had registered to vote, and Mississippians elected their first Black state legislator since Reconstruction, according to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

Brown Wright won her race for the elections commission in Canton, despite a rule change that required her to win votes across all parts of Madison County, instead of just the votes from the single district she would represent.

“It was a clear case of voter suppression,” she said.

After she took office at age 26, she said the board routinely denied her lists of poll workers who had been community activists and disqualified Black candidates. She sued to overturn the discriminatory actions and won.

White people “never intended for Blacks to supersede or give the perception that we were in the process of gaining some semblance of equality. It was never intended to be,” Brown Wright, now 81, told The Marshall Project – Jackson.

Carroll Rhodes, a civil rights attorney who has challenged the state on voting rights for more than 40 years, said that following the 1965 Voting Rights Act, local circuit clerks would come up with devious ways to make it difficult for Black people to register and vote. Some examples he listed were splitting majority-Black areas across different districts to dilute Black voting power and requiring voters to re-register multiple times.

“The only difference is, after Reconstruction, all the way through Jim Crow, it was easy to tell that race was the motivating factor, because they explicitly say it,” Rhodes said. “But the court and the federal government cracked down on those White officials because they were saying they were doing it because of race. So the White official got smart. They no longer say they're doing it because of race. They come up with other excuses.”

Mass incarceration as modern voter suppression

At the same time that Mississippi's civil rights activism gripped the nation, a conservative movement laid the foundation for tough-on-crime rhetoric that eventually took hold among both major political parties and fueled the escalation of arrests and mass incarceration.

The key to the new rhetoric was erasing any mention of race. Instead, disciples of this new movement used crime and welfare as coded language to target Black people, attorney and civil rights scholar Michelle Alexander wrote in “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.”

“Barry Goldwater, in his 1964 presidential campaign, aggressively exploited the [civil rights] riots and fears of black crime, laying the foundation for the ‘get tough on crime' movement that would emerge years later,” Alexander wrote.

Goldwater's narrative resonated with White Mississippi voters who rejected Democratic incumbent Lyndon B. Johnson's civil rights reforms. A majority of Mississippians voted for a Republican presidential candidate — Goldwater — for the first time since Reconstruction.

White Mississippians then continued to vote for Republican presidential candidates in almost every election after 1964, while the state government maintained a status quo of White men, mostly Democrats, who dominated the state legislature and governor's office. Despite splitting the vote across party lines, the common denominator in White Mississippians' voting practices was their singular goal of maintaining power.

After the Voting Rights Act, tough-on-crime rhetoric fueled initiatives like GOP President Richard Nixon's war on drugs and Democratic President Bill Clinton's 1994 crime bill that increased mandatory prison sentences. Mississippi now incarcerates more people per capita than any other state. About 60% of all incarcerated people in the state were Black in 2022, according to the Mississippi Department of Corrections,

Though not all incarcerated people have lost their right to vote, a lack of information about who can and can't vote makes it difficult for many affected by the legal system to access ballots.

However, some in Mississippi's government have tried to change the state's disenfranchisement laws.

In 2008, the Mississippi House passed a bill to restore voting rights to the disenfranchised, excluding rape and murder convictions, but the bill died in the state Senate.

A 2023 lawsuit challenge to felony disenfranchisement was successful when a three-judge U.S. Fifth Circuit Court panel ruled that the lifelong voting ban violated the Eighth Amendment's cruel and unusual punishment clause. However, the state appealed to the full appeals court, and the disenfranchisement law remains in place. In its defense, the state said disenfranchisement is not punishment and that the Legislature, not the courts, should decide on any modifications.

In March, the Mississippi House voted across party lines to approve a bill that would restore the right to vote for people convicted of some nonviolent offenses. However, the bill died in the state Senate without a committee hearing.

Rhodes, the civil rights attorney, is co-counsel for the Mississippi State Conference of the NAACP in a lawsuit that challenges the state's congressional redistricting plan, saying it dilutes Black voting power. The case is pending in federal court.

“There will always be a constant struggle. I learned that early on,” Rhodes said. “The forces that want to undo the progress that's been made will always be there.”

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

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Mississippi Today

On this day in 1937

Published

9 hours ago

May 1, 2024

Staff Editor

May 1, 1937

Liz Montague's Google Doodle honoring pioneering African American cartoonist Jackie Ormes. Credit: Courtesy of Google

Jackie Ormes became the first known Black cartoonist whose work was read coast to coast through the major black publication, the Pittsburgh Courier.

Her cartoon told the story of Torchy Brown, a Mississippi teenager who sang and danced her way from Mississippi to New York City, mirroring the Great Migration, when millions of African Americans trekked from the South to the North, Midwest and West.

In 1945, her cartoon, “Patty-Jo ‘n' Ginger,” started. The strip proved so popular that department stores sold Patty-Jo as a doll. Five years later, Torchy returned, this time as a confident and courageous woman who dared to tackle such issues as race, sex and the environment. Readers applauded this strong model of what young Black women could be.

In 2014, she was inducted into the Black Journalists Hall of Fame and was later featured by Google on its search page.

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

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Mississippi Today

Work requirement will likely delay or invalidate Medicaid expansion in Mississippi

Published

21 hours ago

April 30, 2024

Staff Editor

mississippitoday.org – Sophia Paffenroth – 2024-04-30 19:12:46

The final version of Medicaid expansion in the Legislature could leave tens of thousands of uninsured, working Mississippians waiting indefinitely for Medicaid coverage – unless the federal government makes an unprecedented move.

The compromise lawmakers reached minutes before a legislative deadline on Monday night makes expansion contingent on a work requirement. That means even if both chambers pass the bill, the estimated 200,000 Mississippians who would qualify for coverage would need to wait until the federal government, under either a Biden or Trump administration, approved the waiver necessary to implement a work requirement – which could take years, if ever.

Lawmakers in favor of the work requirement have not been open to allowing expansion to move forward while the work requirement is in flux. The House bill proposed expansion be implemented immediately but included a “trigger law” similar to North Carolina's. The “trigger law” mandated that if the federal government ever changed its policy on allowing states to implement a work requirement, Mississippi would move to implement one immediately.

Senator Brice Wiggins, R-Pascagoula, one of the Medicaid expansion conferees, posted on social media “if CMMS wants people covered then it will approve (the work requirement). Nothing prevents them from approving it other than POTUS/CMMS philosophy.”

But even in states where a work requirement was approved, litigation ensued, with the courts finding the approval of the work requirement unlawful for a number of reasons, according to a KFF report.

Senate Medicaid Chairman Kevin Blackwell, R-Southaven, did not respond to Mississippi Today by the time the story published.

Will a Biden – or Trump – administration approve the work requirement?

The Biden administration has never approved the waiver necessary for a work requirement and has rescinded ones previously granted under the Trump administration. Waivers granted under the Trump administration were not granted under the current circumstances as Mississippi.

Mississippi Today reached out to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services for comment but did not hear back by the time of publication.

Joan Alker, Medicaid expert and executive director of Georgetown University's Center for Children and Families, explained that the Trump administration has never approved a work requirement up front for a traditional expansion plan like Mississippi's.

In states like Kentucky and Arkansas, Alker explained, the Trump administration approved work requirements as a means of limiting already-existing expansion plans. In Georgia, an outlier state that remains in litigation with the Biden administration for rescinding the state's work requirement waiver, the Trump administration approved a work requirement for a plan that isn't considered full “expansion” under the Affordable Care Act and doesn't draw down the increased federal match rate.

“If the Legislature passed a bill with both of those requirements being non-negotiable, (the work requirement and the enhanced match) they need to know that there is no precedent for that kind of approval from either a Biden or a Trump CMS,” she said.

What happens if a work requirement is approved?

In the best case scenario – that a work requirement is approved by some administration in the near future – its implementation could mean an increase in administrative costs and a decrease in eligible enrollees getting the coverage for which they qualify. Georgia's plan, for example, requires people document they're in school, working or participating in other activities. The requirement has cost taxpayers at least $26 million, and more than 90% of that has gone toward administrative and consulting costs, according to KFF Health News.

“Even if CMS does approve (it), actually implementing and administering work requirements is costly and complex,” explained Morgan Henderson, the principal data scientist on a study commissioned by the Center for Mississippi Health Policy and conducted by the Hilltop Institute at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. “This would almost certainly significantly dampen enrollment relative to a scenario with no work requirements, and cost the state millions to implement.”

Many of the cases where work requirements were approved but then deemed unlawful were due to court rulings that found that the work requirement resulted in lower enrollment, counterproductive to the primary goal of Medicaid.

In addition to lowering enrollment, the work requirements have not led to increased employment, the primary goal of the work requirement, explained Alice Middleton, deputy director of the Hilltop Institute and a former deputy director of the Division of Eligibility and Enrollment at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

“Recent guidance has been clear that work requirements would jeopardize health coverage and access without increasing employment,” Middleton said. “While a future Trump Administration may revisit these decisions and approve work requirements again, legal challenges are likely to follow …”

Senate leaders compromised with the House on a number of fine points regarding the work requirement: reducing the mandatory employment from 120 to 100 hours a month; reducing the number of employment verification renewals from four times to once a year; and removing the clause that would require the state to enter into litigation with the federal government, as Georgia did, if the federal government turns down the work requirement.

“It was encouraging to see both sides compromising, but, ultimately, the inclusion of work requirements presents multiple sets of challenges to successful expansion,” Henderson said.

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

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Mississippi Today

Why many House Democrats say they’ll vote against a bill that is ‘Medicaid expansion in name only’

Published

22 hours ago

April 30, 2024

Staff Editor

mississippitoday.org – Bobby Harrison – 2024-04-30 18:55:44

For a decade, House Democrats have been beating the drum — often when it seemed no one else was listening — to expand Medicaid to provide health care for working poor Mississippians.

It looks as though a large majority of those House Democrats as early as Wednesday will vote against and possibly kill a bill that purports to expand Medicaid.

They say the agreement reached late Monday between House and Senate Republicans may be called Medicaid expansion, but it is not written to actually go into effect or help the hundreds of thousands of Mississippians who need health care coverage.

“It is just like an eggshell with no egg in the middle,” said Rep. Timaka James-Jones, a Democratic from Belzoni in her first term. “It does not make sense.”

Republicans, who have have supermajorities in both the House and Senate and do not need a single Democratic vote to pass any bill, have for years relished their power over legislative Democrats. But when a three-fifths vote is needed and Republicans aren't in unanimous agreement like on this current bill, Democrats have real power to flex.

Earlier on Tuesday, after a closed-door luncheon meeting of House Democrats, Rep. Robert Johnson of Natchez, the minority leader, informed Speaker Jason White that 32 of the 41 House Democrats planned to vote no. That news sent shockwaves through the Capitol.

With several House Republicans also expected to vote no, that number of dissenting Democrats would likely prevent the legislation from getting the three-fifths majority needed to pass. And no votes by 32 Democrats would surely mean the proposal would fall short of the two-thirds majority that would be needed later to override an expected veto from Gov. Tate Reeves, who is opposed to accepting more than a $1 billion a year in federal funds to provide health care for an estimated 200,000 Mississippians.

At issue for the House Democrats is a work requirement that Senate Republicans insisted be placed in the bill and that House negotiators agreed to minutes before the Monday night deadline to reach an agreement between the two chambers.

Federal officials have made it clear in the past that they would not approve a work requirement as part of Medicaid expansion. But in the proposal that House and Senate leaders agreed to, Medicaid expansion would not go into effect until federal officials approve a work requirement.

Senate leaders have expressed optimism that the Biden administration would be so pleased with longtime Medicaid expansion holdout Mississippi making an effort that it would approve a work requirement, or that the conservative federal 5th Circuit Court would approve it if litigated.

“It is tough. For the 11 years I have served in the House, I have supported the state expanding Medicaid,” said Rep. John Faulkner, D-Holly Springs. “But the truth is this conference report really doesn't do anything to help poor people who need it.”

The comments made by Faulkner were echoed by multiple House Democrats at the luncheon meeting, according to numerous sources inside the meeting.

After that meeting, Democratic leader Johnson relayed those sentiments and the Democrats' plans to vote against the proposal to White.

So White called a Tuesday afternoon meeting with Johnson. After the Republican speaker and Democratic leader met behind closed doors, Johnson announced on the House floor that House Democrats would hold another caucus meeting. It did not last long.

After that meeting, several Democrats said their plans to vote against the bill had not changed, though some acknowledged privately that voting against the bill would be difficult. One member, when asked if the Democrats still planned to vote against the proposal in large numbers, replied, “It is fluid. I don't know. We will see.”

Many of the Democrats praised White, a first-term speaker, for finally tackling Medicaid expansion. And they praised the original House bill that that allowed Medicaid expansion to go into effect in Mississippi like it had in 40 other states even if a work requirement was struck down by federal officials. They also praised Republican Medicaid Chairwoman Missy McGee for her work to pass “a clean” Medicaid expansion bill.

But they expressed disappointment with the final agreement worked out between House and Senate leaders with the non-negotiable work requirement. They said they had informed House leaders all along that they would oppose a compromise that included a work requirement.

“We know all eyes are on us right now because the Republican supermajority couldn't reach an agreement among themselves,” said Rep. Daryl Porter, D-Summit. “Republican infighting on Medicaid expansion becoming our responsibility to referee feels unfair when they're the ones who couldn't get the support for their own bill. They're waiting to see if we'll bail them out.”

Several House Democrats said it would be difficult to go back home and explain to their constituents that they voted against Medicaid expansion.

But Rep. Rickey Thompson, D-Tupelo, said people should not view them as voting against Medicaid expansion simply because the bill would not expand Medicaid.

“It just puts something on paper, but it does not do anything,” said Thompson.

“It is not Medicaid expansion,” said Zakiya Summers, D-Jackson, who said she campaigned on Medicaid expansion when she first ran and was first elected in 2019. She spoke as a surrogate for Democratic gubernatorial candidate Brandon Presley last year in support of Medicaid expansion.

Rep. Bryant Clark, D-Pickens, said it would be more difficult to explain to constituents that they could not get health care through Medicaid even after the Legislature approved it than to vote against it and explain the reason for that vote.

Numerous members said Rep. Percy Watson, D-Hattiesburg, made the most salient point at the Democrats' first caucus meeting on Tuesday.

Watson, the longest serving member of the House, told the story of a vote in the 1982 session on a bill that would have allowed local school districts to enact kindergarten and require mandatory school attendance. Watson said he voted for the bill, but later was pleased that it died.

If that bill had passed, there would not have been the landmark special session later that year when statewide kindergarten was created and school attendance was mandated statewide.

“Sometimes it takes more than one session to pass something important,” Watson said.

Everyone at the Capitol is closely tracking what the House Democrats decide — including Senate Republicans, who are reportedly struggling to get a three-fifths vote of their own to pass the bill in that chamber.

After word spread Tuesday of the House Democrats' meeting and potential killing of the expansion bill, Senate Medicaid Chair Kevin Blackwell, R-Southaven, said he would not present the expansion proposal in his chamber until after the House acted.

The bill, which faces a Thursday evening deadline, could be sent back for additional negotiations where the work requirement could be removed. But the Senate has thus far not yielded on the work requirement — something that House Democrats, clearly, believe would result in the bill never going into effect.

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

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