Dateline Mississippi: Jim Crow-era Laws Have Returned with Vigor & Court-Approved

Back from the dead or really never died

Jim Crow laws have returned with vigor in Mississippi as reported on in this story from The Guardian with this headline:

“Mississippi’s Jim Crow-era felony voting law is constitutional, Federal court rules”

A Jim Crow-era provision of the Mississippi constitution designed to intentionally disenfranchise Black voters has been ruled constitutional buy a Federal appellate court.

The case deals with a provision of the Mississippi constitution in Section 241 that lays out specific crimes that cause its citizens to permanently lose the right to vote.

Mississippi officials initially adopted the provision at a constitutional convention in 1890, choosing crimes such as theft, arson, bigamy, and embezzlement that they at the time believed African Americans were more likely to commit.

The convention’s president at the time said: “We came here to exclude the Negro. Nothing short of this will answer.”

A majority of judges on the Fifth Circuit did not dispute that the original provision was racist and unconstitutional, but wrote that Mississippi had since “cleansed the provision of its discriminatory taint” by tweaking the provision twice in the 20th century. Voters removed burglary from the list of disenfranchising crimes in 1950, and added murder and rape to the list in 1968.

The Fifth Circuit is one of the most conservative in the country and further wrote: “Plaintiffs failed to meet their burden of showing that the current version of Section 241 was motivated by discriminatory intent. In addition, Mississippi has conclusively shown that any taint associated with Section 241 has been cured.”

Plaintiffs in the case said they will appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.

In the meantime, this decision will allow Mississippi to continue to enforce an extremely harsh policy when it comes to voting rights for people with certain felony convictions. Noteworthy, 10% of the state’s voting age population – the highest rate in the country – cannot vote because of a felony conviction, according to an estimate by the Sentencing Project, a criminal justice non-profit.

That number includes 16% of the Black voting age population. Also, noteworthy is that a vast majority of people disenfranchised in the state have completed their criminal sentence.

It is technically possible for someone with a disenfranchising crime to get their voting rights back, but the state makes it nearly impossible. To do so, a person with a felony must get both houses of the state legislature to approve an individualized bill on their behalf by at least a two-thirds majority. The bill must then be approved by the governor. Hardly anyone has succeeded.

It’s a policy that prevents people like Roy Harness, one of the lead plaintiffs in the case, from voting. Mr. Harness is a Black army veteran in his late 60s, cashed a series of bad checks in the 1980s, and was convicted of forgery. He spent two years in prison and in recent years has focused on his education.

He told the Guardian last year that he got a bachelor’s degree at 63 and got a master’s degree in 2019, saying: “It makes me feel bad. I’ve served my country, nation, served my jail time, got two degrees, and I still can’t vote, no matter what you do to prove yourself.” 

In a dissenting opinion, black circuit Judge James Graves, said the tweaks in the 20th century did not cure the discrimination of the original provision, writing: “The 1968 vote reflects the voters’ views only on the addition or subtraction of three crimes in the original §241 list. Those votes did not touch, in any way, the eight original crimes from 1890 that remain in §241 to this day.”

He added that the majority had glossed over the blatant racial discrimination that continued to exist in Mississippi when the amendments were adopted, and discussed that history in unusually personal terms for a judicial opinion, further writing: “Recounting Mississippi’s history forces me to relive my experiences growing up in the Jim Crow era. While I do not rely on those experiences in deciding this case, I would be less than candid if I did not admit that I recall them. Vividly.”

He said he remembers seeing a cross burned on his grandmother’s lawn in Mississippi in 1963, and seeing the best Black teachers transferred away from his school after courts ordered desegregation. He said the lasting presence of the Confederate emblem on the Mississippi flag, which sat beside him on the bench in the courts where he has served.

He concluded his writing: “No matter where I went, the 1894 flag was already there – a haunting reminder that a wrong never righted that touches us all.”

My 2 cents: A sad day in Mississippi but more so in the country to see this bygone type of discrimination so bold, open, and now worse approved. 

Any former felon who has served their time, gone straight for years and actually improved themselves like Roy Harness mentioned above deserve has the right to rejoin society and further show that he or she is now a better citizen and on the straight and narrow. Everyone deserves a second chance.

In my opinion this Federal Court got this all wrong. I hope it reaches the USSC and they reverse the ruling… that would show good faith now especially with the High Court’s tattered reputation following their awful Roe v. Wade decision recently. We shall see.

Thanks for stopping by.