After 'Callais' Supreme Court ruling, state poised to hold on to district maps previously ruled discriminatory

When a federal judge ruled in late 2025 that the map of the Central District of the Mississippi Supreme Court, which had been drawn in 1987 and never altered, diluted the voting strength of Black Mississippians in the Delta and the Jackson metro area, in violation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the state showed no intention of changing it.

In White v. Mississippi Board of Election Commissioners, U.S. District Judge Sharion Aycock, a President George W. Bush appointee, ordered the legislature to redraw the lines. The legislature refused. The state appealed. The Fifth Circuit paused the appeal pending a Supreme Court decision in a Louisiana case that was decided today. That decision, on April 29, 2026, took the enforcement mechanism behind Aycock’s order with it.

The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in Louisiana v. Callais that race-conscious redistricting under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act violates the Constitution. Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the majority, struck down Louisiana’s second majority-Black congressional district as a racial gerrymander and held that compliance with Section 2 cannot, on its own, justify drawing district lines with race in mind. Justice Elena Kagan, in dissent, wrote that the new requirements leave Section 2 “all but a dead letter.” The statute remains on the books. Its principal application in redistricting does not.

The ruling was not altogether surprising, given the court’s conservative majority and Chief Justice John Roberts’s longstanding focus on undoing it. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, “Roberts’s animus toward the act, and toward the broader struggle to address centuries of racial discrimination in America, has been in plain sight since he served as a young lawyer in the Reagan administration, drafting memos attacking the law and devising legal arguments to undermine it.”

Gov. Tate Reeves announced last Friday that he would convene the legislature in special session 21 days after a Callais ruling to redraw the state’s three Supreme Court districts. The clock began today. Lawmakers return to Jackson on or about May 20 under what Reeves called “the new rules of the game.”

Those rules are not the rules under which Aycock found the current map unlawful. The Central District elects three of the nine justices on the Mississippi Supreme Court. Two are white. One—Justice Leslie King—is Black, and reached the bench through gubernatorial appointment before standing for election. No Black candidate has ever won a Mississippi Supreme Court seat without first being appointed by a sitting governor, in a state with the highest percentage of Black residents in the nation. Aycock’s order rested on those facts. Callais does not disturb them. It removes the federal remedy.

The litigation began in 2022, when the American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of Mississippi, the Southern Poverty Law Center and private counsel sued on behalf of a group of Black Mississippians, including state Senate Minority Leader Derrick Simmons of Greenville. Aycock convened a remedial hearing in Aberdeen on April 28, 2026. Civil rights plaintiffs have submitted three proposed maps. The state had until this coming Saturday to submit its own.

Simmons issued a statement Wednesday afternoon describing the ruling as a shift that “raises serious concerns about whether those protections will continue to be fully realized, particularly in states across the South where representation has long been contested.” He warned that the decision “may open the door for states to redraw congressional districts in ways that may dilute minority voting strength and reshape political power ahead of future elections.” He did not address the special session or the case in which he is a named plaintiff. “The fight for equal representation did not end today,” his statement closed, “and it will not end tomorrow.”

Gov. Reeves, Attorney General Lynn Fitch, House Speaker Jason White, and Lieutenant Governor Delbert Hosemann did not respond Wednesday to requests for comment.

The ACLU of Mississippi, lead counsel for the plaintiffs in White v. MS BEC, argued in a statement Wednesday that the Mississippi judicial map fails Section 2 even under the new framework, because the state’s judicial elections are non-partisan, the racial polarization evidence in the trial record was driven by race rather than party affiliation, and the plaintiffs’ illustrative maps were drawn without race as a factor. “In Callais, the Court is giving the Mississippi legislature a greenlight to go back and use those same discriminatory schemes to limit the ability of Black voters to elect legislative or congressional candidates of their choice,” the organization’s executive director, Jarvis Dortch, told the Mississippi Independent. “Before today’s opinion, Mississippi’s Supreme Court districts diluted Black voting strength. That has not changed.”

The 1987 lines that govern the Supreme Court also govern the Public Service Commission and the Transportation Commission, where Commissioner De’Keither Stamps and Commissioner Willie Simmons hold the Central District seats. Reeves’s special session call addresses only the judicial map.

Republican legislative leadership chose during the regular session that ended this month not to redraw the Supreme Court districts. Senate Bill 2138 and House Bill 1749 died in conference. House Judiciary B Vice Chairman Jansen Owen, a Republican from Poplarville, said leadership believed Aycock’s decision was incorrect and did not want to concede the point by complying with it. The Mississippi Legislature now returns to draw maps under a Supreme Court ruling that vindicates that position.

Mississippi will arrive at the special session arguing, in effect, that the map a federal judge struck down is the map the state is entitled to keep.

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Image: Now-Chief Justice John Roberts shakes hands with President Ronald Reagan in the Oval Office, Jan. 6, 1983 (via Wikimedia)