MERIDIAN, Miss.—An attorney with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund who grew up here stood before the state’s redistricting committee on Sept. 10, 2026, and told the members he expected them to redraw Mississippi’s maps no matter what they heard, then listed in advance the three defenses he said they would offer and called each one a lie.
“I think y’all hosting these public hearings is a little bit of a dog and pony show,” said Amir Badat, voting special counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, who said he was born and raised in Meridian. He argued that the first claim would be that the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais compelled the state to act. “The decision doesn’t require Mississippi to do anything. Doesn’t talk about Mississippi. Doesn’t talk about our maps,” Badat said. The second, he said, would be fear of a lawsuit. He noted the state enacted a map in 2022 that Black voters warned would discriminate, was sued, and lost. “When white voters might sue you, you have to redistrict to take away Black political power. But when Black voters might sue you, who cares?” The third would be that the committee is weighing partisanship and not race. “You know full well that race and party are intertwined in Mississippi.”
Badat addressed the chair and vice chair by name. “Senator Kirby, Representative Sanford, if and when y’all get onto the floor of the House to defend new maps,” he said, “we want you to know that we know that you are lying to our faces.” He closed with local history, saying his parents came to Meridian almost 50 years ago and were taken in by Charles Young Sr., among the first Black Mississippians elected to the state legislature since Reconstruction, and elected from a Black-majority district a federal court had ordered the state to draw. “If the thinking that is motivating this redistricting process today were allowed to prevail back then, Charles Young would have never been elected.”
The hearing at Meridian Community College’s McCain Theater was the fifth of eight the Joint Committee on Reapportionment and Redistricting is holding before the Mississippi Legislature takes up new maps. Sen. Dean Kirby of Rankin County, the chair, opened as he has at every stop, saying the panel had come to listen and would not answer questions. He added a request he had not made before, asking speakers to avoid federal issues and healthcare after earlier hearings drifted into them.
Meridian produced something the first four hearings had not, a substantial bloc of speakers asking the state to redraw its lines. Rosemary Robinson of Neshoba County said the Supreme Court had rejected the assumption that citizens of a race vote alike and said that new maps should establish race-neutral boundaries. Tamara Ward, an anesthesia provider from Neshoba County, argued that the current alignment erases individual voters, and asked whether the state might as well draw districts by height or by gender. “Don’t define us by our color,” she said. Beverly Maxwell Cotton, a citizen of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians speaking in her personal capacity, said tribal citizens hold a political relationship with the United States that should not be reduced to a racial category, and asked the committee to apply compactness, contiguity and respect for county lines consistently statewide.
Lucy Hurst Gordon, a retired Mississippi Department of Transportation engineer who said she was among the first women to work at the agency, told the committee the congressional map has been built around a racial target for decades and that Callais had removed the legal reason for it. She asked the committee to consider partisanship in place of race, and to show its work. “Don’t fold the map out there and say, this is it,” she said. “Show the people why you’re dividing it the way you’re dividing it.”
Speakers opposing a redraw returned to the 2025 maps. Carolyn Rash Hampton of Winston County, an NAACP member and interim president of her local voters’ league, listed a series of recent changes she considered needless and placed the maps among them. “Replacing the 2025 map is unnecessary and will have consequences,” she said, noting that her high school class will mark its 60th graduation anniversary this weekend, one year after the Voting Rights Act became law. “Please don’t take us back to that era.” Ramona Sanders of Lauderdale County called the effort a power grab and said the state has never corrected itself without federal pressure.
State Rep. Cheikh Taylor, who chairs the Mississippi Democratic Party and whose District 38 covers Starkville, West Point and Columbus, posed an argument about the record of the majority that drew the maps. He said federal courts had to intervene in Mississippi’s congressional redistricting after both the 2000 and 2010 census cycles, that a federal court ordered a Senate district redrawn in 2019, and that a federal panel in 2024 found Section 2 violations in the 2022 maps and ordered additional Black-majority districts. When those districts went before voters, he said, Democrats flipped two Senate seats and a House seat and broke the Republican supermajority in the Senate. He then ran through the state’s poverty rate, median household income and rural hospital closures. “Mississippi doesn’t need safer districts,” he said. “We need safer hospitals.”
State Rep. Gregory Elliott of Lauderdale County, who officially welcomed the committee, told the audience the night belonged to them. “Tonight is the people’s night, because they will not have a chance to speak to the legislature after tonight,” he said, and yielded his time. Michael Roberts, a veteran from Lauderdale County, said the effort amounted to a war on Black political power. Johnny Henry of Laurel, who said he had run for office twice in a district that split the Black community, asked why the state would redraw before a census.
The committee took no questions and adjourned. Three hearings remain, in Hattiesburg on Sept. 17, 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: State Rep. Cheikh Taylor at the mic in Meridian (credit Derrion Arrington)
