Mississippi has made great progress when it comes to civil rights. White politicians in our state generally agree on this.
Oh, sure, there are instances here and there where ugly acts of overt racism pop up, but those are individual cases and not the byproduct of a racist culture and certainly not a natural result of a system established to ensure white supremacy at the expense of its Black citizens.
I mean, it’s not like racism is written into our state constitution or anything.
Only it is.
This week a three-judge panel from the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Mississippi’s Constitution, adopted in 1890 with the express purpose of eliminating Blacks from state politics, violates the U.S. Constitution, not that anyone should be surprised to learn this.
The original racist intent of the 1890 Constitution cannot be seriously questioned.
“There is no use to equivocate or lie about the matter,” said Mississippi Governor James K. Vardaman. “Mississippi’s constitutional convention of 1890 was held for no other purpose than to eliminate the n—r from politics. … Not the ‘ignorant and vicious’, as some of the apologists would have you believe, but the n—r. … Let the world know it just as it is.”
The state constitution sought to achieve that result in many ways, including establishing poll taxes and literacy tests. It also created a lifetime ban for those convicted of certain felony crimes with a special emphasis on crimes thought to be most often committed by Blacks. That’s why crimes including forgery, larceny and bigamy carried lifetime disenfranchisement but murder and rape did not. Both offenses were added to a list that ultimately grew to 22 crimes that carried lifetime bans.
While the literacy tests and poll taxes were stricken down in the 1950s and 1960s, the disenfranchisement part of the constitution remained.
This week, the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled by a 2-1 vote that the disenfranchisement statute contained in the Mississippi constitution is a violation of the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution prohibiting cruel and unusual punishment.
In an earlier suit, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals rejected a challenge to the disenfranchisement language in the Constitution as being a violation of equal protection found in the 14th Amendment. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to take up an appeal of that ruling.
In both suits, Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch has vigorously fought to retain the disenfranchisement laws, claiming that the racist “taint” of the original framers of the constitution had been removed over the years. A spokesperson for Fitch said the AG intends to appeal this week’s ruling to the full Fifth District panel.
If we have made so much progress, I wonder why our white AG so fiercely fights to keep in place a law that clearly dilutes Black voting strength.
As of now, some 215,000 Mississippians of voting age are permanently banned from voting because of felony convictions. That means 9.7 percent of all voting age residents cannot vote. Blacks represent 37.1% of voting age citizens in the state, but 15.3% of Black voting age citizens cannot vote under the current law. By contrast, the law prevents 6% percent of white voting age citizens convicted disqualifying felonies from voting. The law has a far greater impact on whites than Blacks, just as Vardaman suggested it would.
The “taint” may or may not be gone (the state’s reluctance to honestly confront racial inequality almost since its inception leaves ample room for suspicion) but the effect remains just as the white supremacist framers of the constitution intended.
Why Fitch would advocate for that is hard to understand.
It is the antithesis of the progress so many white politicians claim we have made.
It serves justice to let this last ruling stand and end disenfranchisement once and for all.
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
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