Residents of Mayersville, Miss., have a secret plot of land snuggled between the Mississippi River and the levee to the town’s west side. It’s a natural area inoculated against development by the threat of flooding, and it sports picturesque views of the river as well as towering oak trees that possibly qualify as “old growth,” considering the massive size of their trunks. Oak trees tower over visitors, shivering in Mississippi’s rare October breeze and shading the town’s rowdy celebration of local high schoolers inching toward graduation.
“It’s kind of an annual thing we do,” says Mayor Linda Short. “The community comes together, and we all have a good time.”
The Lighthouse | Black Girl Projects employees and volunteers spent the celebration collecting vote pledges from participants as part of its get out the vote (GOTV) effort for the 2024 national election. For our work we got a nice little bonus of fried chicken and oysters prepared at the local Tony’s Grocery, and a chance to dance to the insane zydeco ricochet of SDOTT’s “Slow Wind.”
Because of its tiny rural population, Issaquena County and the town of Mayersville provide a digestible microcosm of an election year in Mississippi’s majority Black territories. Call it a micro-microcosm, if you will. The county population is 748 Black—much of that in tiny Mayersville—with 440 white residents spread over a petite map of corn fields, soybeans and cotton.
Race defines a person’s vote in Issaquena County and in the state of Mississippi. This is why districts gerrymandered to be majority white are assured a Republican representative while majority Black districts reliably go Democrat. It’s all done on purpose, of course.
“Legislators pick their voters, rather than the voters picking the legislator,” Hazlehurst attorney Carroll Rhodes once told BGX. “When it comes to creating districts, they want to draw people who they know will support them and remove folks who won’t. It’s really anti-democratic, but that’s the current system.”
We are so consistent at voting by race that legislators use that predictability to smash Democrat votes to pieces and spread them into several majority Republican counties—a tactic called “cracking.” This is not democracy, but the Republican majority on the U.S. Supreme Court appears fine with it. Issaquena County and the Delta counties surrounding it are all primarily Black, however, so there is only so much cracking available to white politicians looking to assure their re-election. For this reason, the town of Mayersville is one of the few Black districts Mississippi Republican leaders must allow to exist.
Census figures and voting estimates suggest Issaquena County likes to vote. A total of 663 people voted in the 2020 election between incumbent president Donald J. Trump and successful Democratic challenger Joe Biden. That’s almost half (49.5%) of the county’s total population of 1,338 people. Vote tallies show 355 votes for Biden in 2020 and 308 votes for Trump. There were only about 40 more votes for Hillary Clinton (395 votes) four years earlier, and roughly 10 fewer votes for Trump (298).
Fifty percent voter participation is already a surprising figure, which made us pull out a percentage calculator to make sure we had it right. But local officials say Mayersville residents appear even more excited this year than in the last presidential election and possibly more enthusiastic than they were in the race between Clinton and Trump four years before that. Mayersville County Justice Court Judge Gayle Bunton Coleman estimates turnout will be better than it has been since the Obama candidacy.
Young adults often have a more difficult time clearing their work or college schedules to vote in the middle of the week, but many Mississippi incumbents appear happy with this.
“They’re really excited this year,” Coleman told BGX. “I think folks are watching politics more closely this time around. I can’t tell you the political reasons I’m voting like I’m voting, but I can say other folks are turned up, and they feel strong about things.”
Coleman is the daughter of Willie Bunton, the first African American to serve on the Issaquena County Board of Supervisors since Reconstruction. Coleman has her own philosophical reasons for voting as she does, but her passion to pull a switch in November is also the result of how hard her father had to struggle for Democracy in the 1960s and 1970s.
When county Resident Willie Bunton ran for supervisor decades ago, the primarily white Mississippi Legislature had amended state law in 1966 to allow an "at large" county electorate to choose county supervisors. Voting “at large” means a majority-white county population picks leaders for individual districts, including those in majority-Black territories like the town of Mayersville. Bunton had no chance of winning his local election under such a scheme.
“(The first time I ran) I lost by 95 votes, so I went and got the chairman of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), and we took Issaquena County to court over that law,” Willie Bunton told BGX.
Bunton and other Black plaintiffs, including Mayersville resident and MFDP Chairman Clarence Hall, sued the Board of Election Commissioners and the county board of supervisors to end racist at-large election machinations. Other plaintiffs sued additional county boards over the same practice, and in 1971 a U.S. District Court ordered new elections to get compliant with the U.S. Constitution’s “one man, one vote” mandate. Additionally, the court nullified the positions of white supervisors elected through at-large schemes from “malapportioned districts” and barred all politicians with an illegally stacked seat to serve "only provisionally, and for the period of time needed to arrange" for a legal successor.
Echoes of this racism spur many older Black voters in the Delta region to the polling booth because they know genuine U.S. democracy is only a few decades old—since the advent of the Voting Rights Act of 1965—and it is still very vulnerable. The younger people, they say, are not so motivated.
“Folks under 30—some of them ain’t even registered to vote. I don’t know why,” says Coleman. “The old people, they’re registered. I’ve been voting since I was 18, but a lot of young folks don’t take it seriously.”
One young partygoer at the Mayersville rally called “bull***t” on that assessment, saying, “I vote every year. It’s just something I learned to do from school, and I’ve been voting all my life.”
Mississippi’s Republican leadership does all it can to keep voter registration and voting as complicated as constitutionally possible for youth, however. State leaders refuse to indulge early voting, despite the rising national convenience and popularity of early and mail-in voting. If voters are at a demanding job or are unavailable on Election Day, they will not get to vote in Mississippi except in special qualifying cases, which must be verified by a third-party public official. Young adults often have a more difficult time clearing their work or college schedules to vote in the middle of the week, but many Mississippi incumbents appear happy with this.
Mississippi’s own Secretary of State Michael Watson opposes vote-facilitating efforts like early voting, mail-in voting, automatic registration, because it encourages “‘woke’ college university students” to vote. Watson also vehemently defended the state’s anti-democratic Jim Crow law relic law from its racist 1890 state constitution in New Orleans district court this year.
There are probably good reasons for incumbents to fear a flood of new, younger voters. New voters might not approve of state attorney general Lynn Fitch’s responsibility in forcing a 13-year-old Black girl who was raped to carry said rapist’s child to term. Neither might they appreciate Fitch filing legal briefs arguing Mississippi’s right to deny emergency medical care to pregnant women if that care involves abortion. Young voters may also not approve of Mississippi being at the top or near the top of every list no state wants to head, including infant mortality, poverty or obesity, while also at the bottom of every list we’d like to avoid, such as economic growth, women’s health and state creditworthiness. (Fitch Ratings expects Mississippi leaders to again deliver sluggish growth over the long term, with high liabilities, which gives the state a mere “AA” rating, rather than AAA.
Despite Mississippi’s many voting barriers, Mayersville and other Democratic strongholds may see higher than average turn-out this year, if the trend matches similar patterns in the recent past. While this tiny county saw only 355 votes for Biden in 2020 and 308 votes for Trump in the last election, Issaquena delivered more than 579 votes for President Barack Obama in 2008, compared to 364 votes for Republican presidential candidate John McCain. The possibility of putting a more familiar face in the White House may stir up more votes than usual this year in places like Mayersville, and in largely Black-populated cities like Jackson, Mississippi and Atlanta, Georgia. Couple this with the very real and painful retaliation against Republicans for ending Roe v. Wade, as seen in the 2022 midterms, and votes could potentially impress even the most jaded poll watcher.
In a mere few weeks, we’ll see for ourselves.
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This story is part of our GOTV coverage in partnership with pro-voter nonprofit Faircount. Coverage will continue into November.
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