Legislature looks primarily to white-majority counties for redistricting feedback
Five of eight public hearings to be held in counties with smaller minority populations
The legislative committee redrawing Mississippi’s voting maps will take public comment at eight hearings in August and September, and the locations it chose fall mostly outside the state’s majority-Black areas. Five of the eight are in counties that are majority white. Three are in majority-Black counties.
The committee will gather comment on the state’s legislative, congressional and Supreme Court maps, which Republicans moved to redraw after the U.S. Supreme Court weakened the Voting Rights Act this spring in Louisiana v. Callais. The districts most likely to change are the majority-Black ones, including the Second Congressional District held by U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson and the three Supreme Court districts a federal court has found dilute Black voting strength.
The five hearings in majority-Black counties will be in Cleveland, Natchez and Jackson. Those in majority-white counties will be in Tupelo, Senatobia, Meridian, Hattiesburg and Gulfport. The Delta hearing, at Delta State University in Cleveland, is the only one in that region. Cleveland sits in Bolivar County, which is about 63 percent Black, though the city itself has a smaller Black demographic than the county. No hearing is scheduled in Greenville, Clarksdale, Greenwood or Indianola, the majority-Black Delta towns within the districts under review.
The interior Delta that the schedule skips was a center of Mississippi’s voting-rights movement. During the 1964 Freedom Summer, organizers registered Black voters in Delta towns including Greenwood and Indianola, and many were arrested and beaten. Fewer than 7 percent of the state’s eligible Black residents were registered to vote that year. Congress passed the Voting Rights Act in 1965 and federal courts later used it to require Mississippi to draw districts in which Black voters could elect candidates of their choice. The Callais decision narrowed that law.
State Sen. Jeremy England (R-Ocean Springs), who co-chairs the committee, said the panel is looking statewide. “We’re really hitting all the corners of the state,” he said. Each hearing begins at 6 p.m. and will be broadcast on the Mississippi Legislature’s YouTube channel, and residents may speak at any of them. The first is Aug. 18 in Tupelo and the last is Sept. 24 at the Capitol in Jackson.
The committee will begin drawing maps after the hearings.
Image: Legislative redistricting committee members (composite via Mississippi Legislature’s lawmaker profile pages)
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