Eliminating Rep. Thompson’s district could also threaten safe GOP districts. Is that why Republicans halted their redistricting plans?
Part 3 in a series on voting rights: Why Mississippi lawmakers aren't hurrying to join other southern states in eliminating a majority-Black district
Mississippi has one of the South’s few remaining majority-Black congressional districts, and state Republicans—from Gov. Tate Reeves and State Auditor Shad White to the state party itself—have spent months saying they want it redrawn.
As Republican-led legislatures in Tennessee, Louisiana, Alabama and South Carolina move to eliminate their majority-Back districts after the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais, Mississippi has not acted.
Why not?
One clue could lie in the fact that making U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson’s 2nd Congressional District less Black requires making the three currently safe Republican districts around it more Black, and Mississippi’s three Republican incumbents do not have the margins to absorb the voters and stay safe.
Reeves has called Thompson’s tenure a “reign of terror” and said its end is not a question of if but when. After Callais was decided on April 29, narrowing Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, Reeves canceled the special session that had been scheduled to redraw the state’s districts. He has said the work will wait until before the 2027 elections. The state held its 2026 primaries in March. The candidates who won them are running in the districts as they exist.
Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee signed a new congressional map on May 7 that carves the state’s only majority-Black district, in Memphis, into three districts. Louisiana, Alabama and South Carolina have taken steps toward redrawing their own maps.
Mississippi has four seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. Three are held by Republicans—Rep. Trent Kelly in the 1st District, Rep. Michael Guest in the 3rd District and Rep. Mike Ezell in the 4th District—and have been drawn with Black populations low enough that Democrats cannot win them.
The 2nd District, Thompson’s, was drawn after the 2020 Census with a Black voting-age population of 61.05 percent. Lowering it below 50 percent to give a Republican a winning chance would require moving the registrations of roughly 75,000 to 80,000 Black voting-age residents out of the district. The only places to put them are in the districts now held by Kelly, Guest and Ezell, whose Republican margins were built by minimizing their Black populations. Adding voters from the 2nd District is the move that would lower those margins.
Mississippi Democrats drew the 2nd District’s majority-Black configuration in the early 1990s, after the 1990 Census and under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which required states to draw districts in which Black voters could elect the candidates they preferred. Mike Espy of Yazoo City won the Delta-anchored seat in 1986 under court-ordered boundaries. Bennie Thompson, then a Hinds County supervisor, won the 1993 special election after Espy was named U.S. agriculture secretary and has held the seat in every election since.
Byron D’Andra Orey, a political science professor at Jackson State University and current president of the Southern Political Science Association, said the framing that the 2nd District is the racial construction in the state’s congressional map leaves the other three districts unexamined.
“You can have three super majority white districts but not one majority black district in a state that’s 40 percent Black?” Orey told The Mississippi Independent. “For those white politicians seeking to dismantle District 2: If an all-white congressional delegation is the likely outcome, how is that not about race?”
When Mississippi Democrats controlled the legislature into the 2010s, lawmakers drew state House and Senate districts using the same approach: majority-Black districts packed with as many Black voters as possible, with surrounding districts kept safely white. Republican mapmakers, after gaining control of the redistricting process following the 2010 Census, kept the framework. The lines produced safe seats for incumbents in both parties for three decades, and federal courts permitted them.
The 2025 special elections, held to comply with a federal court order under Section 2, ended the Republican supermajority in the state Senate by flipping seats in districts the court had redrawn. The U.S. Supreme Court has since vacated the order behind those elections.
In Tennessee, eliminating the Memphis-area majority-Black district moves Black voters into adjacent districts that carry Republican margins large enough to absorb them. Louisiana’s redraw will scatter the voters of the second majority-Black district the court struck down across districts that were drawn with that absorption in mind. Alabama and Florida are working with maps that include incumbents whose districts have room to add Black voters without flipping. Mississippi’s three Republican-held districts were drawn for the opposite purpose. Their Black populations were minimized to make them safe. Adding the 2nd District’s voters to them is the move that puts them in play.
Reeves has said he is working with the Trump White House on a map that would oust Thompson. Neither he, White nor the Mississippi Republican Party has described how a redraw would resolve the arithmetic. The session Reeves canceled would have been the first attempt to find out.
The deadline he has set, before the 2027 elections, gives the legislature roughly 18 months to draw lines that move Black voters out of the 2nd District without moving them into seats his party would lose. No Southern state has yet demonstrated how that is done in a four-district delegation with three already-maxed Republican seats.
Image: Photo montage of Mississippi’s current U.S. House delegation (L-R, clockwise): Bennie Thompson; Trent Kelly; Michael Guest; and Mike Ezell.
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