This week, the Trump U.S. Supreme Court rejected an appeal from a group of majority-Black Mississippi voters who have been barred from voting. The voters’ disenfranchisement stems from a longstanding Mississippi Jim Crow law barring citizens convicted of certain felonies from voting.The law, section 241 of the Mississippi constitution, permanently blocks anyone convicted of specific felonies from voting. Moreover, 1890s lawmakers admitted to cherry picking which crimes to include. They added crimes more often committed by Black residents and removed crimes more often committed by white ones for the express purpose of tamping down the Black vote.
In a similar move last year, Trump’s court let stand a ruling that rejected plaintiffs’ claim that permanent loss of voting rights amounted to “cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Constitution.” Mississippi legislators, the conservative 5th Circuit ruled, must decide whether to change the laws, not the courts. However, the majority of Mississippi legislators are white and appear to have no desire to defang the racist 1890 law.
“Mississippi’s constitutional convention of 1890 was held for no other purpose than to eliminate the nigger from politics." Former Gov. James K. Vardaman
Circuit Court Judge James Graves, who is Black, vehemently disagreed with the majority at the time of the 5th Circuit decision. Graves said Section 241, installed by bigots, can hardly be cured of its racism by minor tweaks within the last century, particularly tweaks from a historically racist legislature like Mississippi’s. Graves began his argument by citing the infamous words of rabid segregationist state legislator James K. Vardaman at the time he helped pen Section 241:
“There is no use to equivocate or lie about the matter,” Vardaman admitted more than a century ago. “… Mississippi’s constitutional convention of 1890 was held for no other purpose than to eliminate the nigger from politics. […] In Mississippi we have in our constitution legislated against the racial peculiarities of the Negro. […] When that device fails, we will resort to something else.”
Graves cited Vardaman’s monstrous words and pointed out that Vardaman and his cohorts created the controversial felony disenfranchisement law specifically to block Black voters over white wrongdoers.
Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch, who is white, said she was "pleased" with the court’s decision to uphold Jim Crow in that 2022 decision.
Attorneys for the plaintiffs filed a cert petition with the U.S. Supreme Court last November, asking the court to review the question of whether the state’s felony disenfranchisement policy violates the 8th Amendment’s prohibition on “cruel and unusual punishments.” Attorneys argued the controversial law, “was carefully crafted to ‘obstruct the exercise of the franchise by’ Black individuals,” and effectively continues to do so today.
“The historical record unequivocally demonstrates that Section 241 was reconfigured in the 1890 (state) constitution to eliminate voter disenfranchisement for crimes thought to be ‘white crimes’ and by adding crimes thought to be [B]lack crimes,’” attorneys said. “More than a century later, the 1890 Mississippi Constitutional Convention’s “avowed goals” of selectively disenfranchising Black individuals “continue to be realized via its chosen mechanism: Today (just as in the Convention’s aftermath), thousands of Black Mississippians cannot vote due to [section] 241’s operation.”
Between 1994 and 2017, nearly 50,000 individuals were convicted of disenfranchising offenses in Mississippi state courts,” plaintiffs argue. Of the more than 29,000 of these individuals who have completed their sentences, 58% are Black.
Plaintiffs argue Mississippi’s lifetime felony disenfranchisement law constitutes an exceptionally harsh violation under the Eighth Amendment because voting is fundamental to life as an American citizen. The Trump court saw limited value in Black voters’ life fundamentals this week and rejected the request without statement.
Several bills sitting on the Mississippi legislative docket this session, including HB 664, could de-claw the worst of Section 241. Some of the bills, including HB 940, even have Republican authors like Rep. Price Wallace, R-Mendenhall. But there is no assurance white leadership will allow re-enfranchisement bills out of committee, considering their record. They have been historically loathe to jettison a Jim Crow law that primarily affects the Democrat-voting Black population.
In 2022, retired legislator Jim Beckett killed a re-enfranchisement bill in his committee that would have virtually eliminated Section 241. Beckett told BGX the white Republican supermajority in the House first needed “to decide” what elements of Jim Crow they want to use against voters.
“There have been measures that disallow everyone that’s incarcerated to vote, that after a certain period of time one can vote,” Beckett said. “And there are measures that can change who can vote, which felons should be on a list, which felons shouldn’t. There are measures that would address the issue in multiple ways, but there has not been a consensus on how to do that. That’s all I got to say on that."
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