HATTIESBURG — Clarence Magee told the Joint Legislative Committee on Reapportionment and Redistricting that he came to Hattiesburg in 1956, after the Korean War, wanting to be a full citizen of the country he had served.
Magee said he took the literacy test then required for voter registration five times and failed it all five times. He finally got his voter registration card in 1963. Written across it, he said, were the words “by order of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.”
Magee said his ability to vote was ensured by judicial design, and the state’s current district maps are in keeping with that.
“Keep the 2025 lines,” Magee told the committee. “That was progress.”
Roughly three dozen people spoke on Thursday night at the Mannoni Performing Arts Center at the University of Southern Mississippi, the sixth stop on the committee’s eight-hearing tour. The majority of them asked the committee to leave the state’s existing district maps alone.
State Rep. Noah Sanford of Covington County, the committee’s vice chair, opened the hearing by telling participants that the maps displayed at the front were for review only. “They are not proposals,” he said. “No maps have been drawn or considered at this point.”
Speakers were required to limit their comments to three minutes, with Ben Collins, the legislature’s GIS and redistricting bureau chief, ringing a bell at 30 seconds and again when the speaker’s time was up.
Forrest County has a specific stake in the outcome. The legislative maps adopted in 2025 under federal court order created additional Black-majority districts, Senate District 45 among them. Johnny DuPree, who was mayor of Hattiesburg from 2001 to 2017, won the seat in a November special election with about 71 percent of the vote over Republican Anna Rush. Republican Sen. Chris Johnson, who had held District 45, ran in neighboring District 44 instead and won. Several speakers at Thursday’s hearing identified themselves as District 45 residents.
“I live in District 45, and I am grateful that we finally have someone who represents the concerns of the people who live in my community,” said Deborah Delgado, who represented Ward 2 on the Hattiesburg City Council for 24 years before retiring in 2025. “What we wanted was someone who did more than drove down Main Street. We wanted someone who turned off into the communities to see how we actually live.”
Speaker after speaker made the same three arguments. The Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais does not require Mississippi to redraw its maps. The 2025 maps are legal. The next census is in 2030.
Kenan Walker, a Forrest County voter, put a price on it. Eight hearings means eight sets of per diem reimbursements, eight venue rentals, security and insurance, he pointed out, and a special legislative session runs $100,000 a day. “I think that myself and anyone else in this room can find other ways to spend that money,” he said.
Deborah Gambrel Chambers said she and Percy Watson were the first African Americans elected in Forrest County, in 1979. She served 30 years as a justice court judge and 12 as a chancery court judge.
“It was difficult to see my campaign materials run over by my opponent,” Chambers said. “It was difficult to see the trials and tribulations that we went through, the preclearance, Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which allowed districts to be established so people like me could run and be elected.”
Chambers said the money would be better spent elsewhere. “Do you know how heartbreaking it is to stand behind somebody in a grocery store picking up a package of ground beef and agonizing as to whether or not they can buy it?” she asked.
Kathy McNair reminded the committee that it was sitting on the campus where Clyde Kennard began trying to enroll in 1955, and was denied, imprisoned on a false charge and died in 1963. She noted that Vernon Dahmer Sr. was killed in January 1966 after Klansmen firebombed his home, and that his voter registration card arrived in the mail 15 days later.
McNair referenced biblical David slaying Goliath with a slingshot, and described voter suppression as a modern-day version of the same type of contest, with “Jim Crow, poll taxes, literacy tests, redlining, voter suppression, and redistricting” representing Goliath. He added: “But if Goliath has cousins, David has cousins too. You’ve got giant slayers in this room, and we are not going down without a fight.”
Not everyone came to argue about race or whether to redraw district lines. Two speakers from Petal asked only that the city be kept in one district. Drew Brickson, the town’s Ward 5 alderman, said Petal has about 12,000 residents and was split between Senate districts 42 and 45 under earlier plans. He said Ward 3 Alderman Blake Nobles joined him in the request.
“When you divide a 12,000-person municipality, nobody wins,” Brickson said. “Keep the city of Petal whole in District 42.”
Kay Clay, a retired educator from the Petal area, made the same request without naming a district. “We want Petal area to speak with one voice, with one senator,” she said.
A speaker from Jones County asked that his county be kept as intact as possible.
Several people spoke in favor of the committee’s work, including one who alluded to political ideology. A Purvis resident addressed himself to the Republican members and said he supports “any redistricting that most supports and allows to prosper the conservative ideals of our state.” Elizabeth Alford of Walthall County said the objections had “little to do with race” and everything to do with “the Democratic Party needing help getting more representation.”
Ron Swindle, of Jones County, criticized the committee from a different direction, faulting the Senate leadership for how it drew former state Sen. Chris McDaniel out of his district. “You’ve disenfranchised a white man,” he said, adding that “what the white man did to the Black man in Mississippi is also equally ungodly.”
Vince Thorpe brought printed congressional maps going back to 1973 and argued that the Second District was redrawn repeatedly in the 1980s to raise its Black voting-age population. Thorpe ran as an independent against U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson in 1994, in a three-way race that also included Republican Bill Jordan.
“I knew I didn’t have a prayer of winning because they racially gerrymandered that district against me,” Thorpe said. He told the room he was not with the rest of the crowd and that the committee was doing the right thing. “Callais was right.”
Alex Pickle, a Hattiesburg resident who said he is a seventh-generation Mississippian descended from Confederate soldiers and enslavers, cited math: Republicans held 115 of the legislature’s 174 seats before the 2025 special elections and 112 afterward, he said, a drop from 66.1 percent to 64.4 percent.
Pickle then asked how many Republicans on the committee faced a Democratic challenger in 2023. “It was zero, none,” he said. “In fact, in 2023, 99 Republicans ran for House or Senate seats in Mississippi without a Democratic challenger.”
Paul James Blackman, a Gulfport resident, 20-year Navy veteran and 2026 Democratic candidate in the Fourth Congressional District, asked whether the hearings were authentic. “Is this a true public hearing or kabuki theater meant to dress up an outcome set beforehand as public consent?” he asked.
Raylawni Branch, who gave her age as 85, told the committee this was the third time she had sat through such a hearing. Branch and Elaine Armstrong became the first Black students to enroll at what was then Mississippi Southern College in September 1965. She later made lieutenant colonel in the Air Force Reserve and taught nursing at the university until 2004. She ran for the state Senate as a Republican in 2003 and said her district was split just before the election.
“I never thought I would have to go through this again,” Branch said.
The committee took no questions and adjourned. Two hearings remain, in Gulfport on Sept. 22 and Jackson on Sept. 24. Written comments may be sent to the committee’s counsel, Ted Booth, at ted.booth@peer.ms.gov.
Image: Redistricting committee on stage in Hattiesburg (credit Derrion Arrington)
