This article was updated February 10, 2025
Surviving bills from Mississippi’s 2025 legislative session suggest some state leaders are still fighting on the side of public-funded segregation 60 years after courts outlawed it.
A House committee passed HB 1433 this week, potentially diverting up to $5 million in taxpayer money to Mississippi private academies, many created for the sole purpose of shielding white students from Black students entering “white” public schools throughout the 1960s.
If the bill survives votes in the Senate, the state will appropriate $5 million in public money to private academies in its first year. The legislature would then appropriate additional cash every following year based on the state Department of Education’s estimate of public beneficiaries attending private schools under the new law.
Public funding of private schools is a controversial issue that’s still playing out in courts, but bill author Rep. Rob Roberson, R-Starkville, hopes to circumvent legal challenges by creating a go-between fund (the Mississippi Quality Desert Educational Enrollment and Transfer Scholarship Account, or QDESA) to hold the money before forwarding it to academies.
The bill purports to help students from families making less than 138% of the federal poverty level by giving them first access to the money then hands it out on a first-come basis after these initial disbursements. The legislation only targets districts rated “D” or “F” and spares wealthier districts with the benefit of more middle-class households to support local sales and property tax revenue.
Students in poorer districts, who are often plagued with learning problems arising from concentrated poverty, may find their poverty further concentrated as parents with resources pull students and money from their school.
The Parents’ Campaign Executive Director Nancy Loome said legislators’ plan to publicly subsidize private academies goes all the way back to racists’ first response to the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision.
“Segregationists made no bones about the fact that ‘tuition grants’ (private school vouchers) would provide a way for white parents to evade the public-school integration newly mandated by the U.S. Supreme Court,” Loome wrote. “Since then, elite billionaires still pushing to fund private schools with public dollars have attempted to bury that ugly history, promoting an ever-changing narrative as they’ve struggled to find a storyline less offensive to the broader public.”
Roberson’s scheme could potentially fund the Mississippi Delta’s legion of segregation academies established to duck 60 years of integration. The vast majority of white Humphreys County students attend Humphreys Academy, which organizers opened in 1968 specifically to circumvent federal desegration laws. Today the private school maintains an 86% white student population and a Black population of less than 10%, despite the county being 76% Black. While segregation is no longer legal, “seg schools” like HA maintain de-facto segregation through monthly tuition that is out of reach for many Black parents. Humphreys Academy charges $560 per month, plus a $200 registration fee, to maintain sports teams called the Rebels.
While the private-school-funding bill is on its way to the Senate, other bills making life easier for democracy died in their respective committees. Mississippi has a history of doing everything it can to discourage voting among certain groups, and it remains one of the more difficult states in which to vote today. Early voting does not exist in Mississippi. The closest thing the state has to early voting is “absentee voting,” and only a small percentage of the population qualifies for it. “Mail-in” voting is merely another form of absentee voting, and it requires the participation of a third-party notary public to complete.
Several bills looking to finally update Mississippi’s 1960s-era voting norm died in House committee, including HB 24, HB 347, HB 586 and HB 946. Several similar bills died over in the Senate, including SB 2629 and SB 2645; however, SB 2654 managed to survive a committee vote and could potentially survive another few weeks, despite white state leaders’ longstanding disapproval of voter convenience. That bill, should it survive the House and governor, would allow early voting up to 15 days before the election and continue it until noon on the Saturday before the vote.
Most bills looking to defang the longstanding embarrassment of Mississippi’s last, lingering Jim Crow law also died in House committees this week, including HB 664. House Bill 940, however, which would finally restore voting rights to people convicted of nonviolent felonies who have served their debt to society, survived committee votes.
Puzzlingly, an additional bill that could muddy the water for democracy survived in the House. Rep. “Trey” Lamar, R-Senatobia, submitted HB 917, which exempts records containing client information connected to government development projects for four years, presumably long after taxpayers have paid the client. Lamar submitted his bill despite wealthy state contractors recently outing Mississippi as a nest of corruptioncapable of blowing more than $70 million in TANF (welfare) dollars on sports stadiums, horse ranches and pharmaceutical quackery.
Another useful bill that died this week would have sought to reverse the incessant money drain from the state’s majority Black city to wealthy white suburbs. Rep. Zakiya Summer’s House Bill 715 would have created a Downtown Jackson Revitalization Coalition with national, state and local stakeholders.
Business occupancy in downtown real estate has dropped thanks to suburban legislators doing all they can to coax businesses into new suburban development. Bedroom community politicians like former Clinton Rep. Phillip Gunn were one of the reasons the Department of Revenue now occupies the WorldCom building in Clinton, leaving Jackson restaurants to struggle in the resulting vacuum.
Summers' zero-cost bill, which would have created a board to reverse the vacuum, died without comment in a committee supervised by a Rep. Hank Zuber, R- Ocean Springs.
Summers told BGX she hoped language from the bill could find new life in the text of another bill that survives the session.
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