Revealed: Mississippi bill would carve out separate judicial district for 80% of white residents in majority-Black city
By: oliverlaughland (the Guardian)
Republican-proposed jurisdiction fuels allegations of 'apartheid in Jackson'
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
The measure would increase the geographic size of an improvement district in the downtown area of the city of Jackson from 7.8 sq miles to 25 sq miles. It would create a new unelected judicial district within the city, with two judges, two prosecutors and two public defenders.
The judges would be appointed by Mississippi's chief supreme court justice, Michael K Randolph, a conservative who is white. The prosecutors would be appointed by the state attorney general, Lynn Fitch, a white Republican. The district would be policed with an expansion of the Mississippi capitol police whose chief, Bo Luckey, is white, in a role appointed by the Mississippi commissioner of public safety, Sean Tindell, who is also white.
Mississippi Republicans pass bill to create separate, unelected court in majority-Black city Read more
"No serious person can look at this map and this data and claim the proposed CCID boundaries weren't drawn to make sure as many white Jacksonians as possible get the 'benefit' of a special police force and court filled with hand-picked judges and prosecutors," said Cliff Johnson, director of the Roderick and Solange MacArthur Justice Center.
Eighty-two per cent of Jackson's residents are Black, but the new district would incorporate all of the city's significantly populated white-majority neighborhoods. It would only leave about 5,000 white residents of Jackson living within the city's remaining law enforcement boundaries. About a quarter of Jackson's Black residents would be included in the district.
"This bill, and many others that have accompanied it in this legislative session, are all an attack on Black leadership," said Jackson's mayor, Chokwe Lumumba. "This is a racist act."
Guardian graphic. Sources: District boundaries from Ben Collins, Reapportionment Office, Mississippi Legislature. Demographic data from the 2020 Census via Redistricting Data Hub. Note: The Guardian calculated the number of Black and white people living in the proposed district using 2020 census block demographic data.
Jackson, Mississippi is 82% Black. In this map, purple dots represent the Black population and yellow dots are the white population.
A new proposal would create a new judicial district that would carve out 80% of the city's white population.
In this new district judges and prosecutors would not be elected. They would be appointed by the state's white, conservative chief supreme court justice and the white, Republican attorney general.
If enacted this proposal would weaken the ability of Black voters to choose their own prosecutors and judges.
The Guardian mapped the proposed district using boundaries supplied by the Mississippi legislature's reapportionment office and data from the US census. The analysis also reveals that the new district would encompass 36% of the city's entire population, limiting city and county law enforcement power over a third of Jackson.
The bill's Republican proponents in the Mississippi legislature have argued it is designed to assist the city in dealing with rising crime and criminal court backlogs. But Lumumba insisted the area within the district had some of the city's lowest crime rates, and pointed out that the courts would also hear civil and chancery matters as well as criminal cases.
"Your data proves what this is really about," Lumumba said. "These numbers prove there is no merit to their [Republican] claim. And so it is apartheid in Jackson, Mississippi."
Trey Lamar, the Republican representative who introduced the legislation, did not respond to interview requests.
The bill, which passed the Mississippi house of representatives in a 76-38 vote last week, largely on party lines, will travel to the Republican-dominated senate. If it is signed into law, civil rights advocates expect a number of legal challenges to follow in state and federal court due to alleged violations of the Voting Rights Act and the Mississippi state constitution.
Mississippi's Republican governor, Tate Reeves, and the attorney general's office did not respond to requests for comment. A spokesman for the state supreme court justice declined to comment.
Mayor Chokwe Lumumba called the bill 'a racist act'.
Michael M Santiago/Getty Images
The proposal echoes laws that Mississippi enacted in the 1960s that did away with some local elected positions and replaced them with appointed officials, said Peyton McCrary, a former historian in the US justice department's civil rights division.
"Back in 1966, right after the adoption of the Voting Rights Act, several different offices were switched from election to appointment," he said. "And in other instances, the election was switched from single-member districts to at-large elections. All reflecting the concern of the Mississippi legislature that Black people now were going to be voting in significant numbers."
Until 2013, when the US supreme court struck down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act, Mississippi had to get election changes approved by the federal government before they went into effect. Had the state submitted the proposal for the new district, McCrary said, he was certain it would not have been approved.
"It would have been rejected soundly. I have no doubt that it would have been rejected. It would pretty much have been an open-and-shut case," he said.
Amir Badat, a voting rights lawyer with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, said: "It very clearly eliminates the voting power on the part of Black voters in Jackson and in Hinds county." He added: "There is a strong case to be made that the legislature has clearly been put on notice of the disparate impact that this would have on Black people."
The proposed district covers more than 20% of the city geographically. Badat said the comparisons to apartheid "really resonate".
"It essentially tells Black residents of Jackson who might come to this district for shopping or eating - it has a lot of some of the big businesses in Jackson that people all across the city come to to patronize or to work at - I think it tells Jackson's majority-Black population: 'You're not welcome here.'"
Badat added that the bill was part of a nationwide trend in which increasingly Republican state legislatures are moving to exert more control over jurisdictions where there are large Black populations. For example, he said, there was a proposal in Missouri that would appoint a special prosecutor to handle crime in St Louis.
In Jackson, residents and advocacy groups have expressed concern about the proposed expansion of the capitol police force, a department created in 2021 and initially tasked with patrolling state government buildings in the city.
The force, which has expanded significantly in the past year, has been involved in a number of controversial use-of-force incidents in recent months. In September 2022, 25-year-old Jaylen Lewis was shot dead during an incident following a traffic stop. The department, which patrols an area less than eight square miles, has been involved in at least four officer-involved shootings since its creation, according to the Mississippi Free Press.
A separate bill in the Mississippi senate seeks to expand the department's authority over the entire city.
The force did not respond to a request for comment.
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[Deleted]
Nice thing here, you can say whatever you wish and it doesn't even have to be true, as illustrated!
This article manages to attack both the premise of minority districts (wrong to give minority groups gerrymandered representation) so beloved by Democrats, and simultaneously argues black people can't be represented by white people, but white people can apparently by represented by blacks.
Bravo.
IT IS MY OPINION that [Deleted]
You have every right to be wrong as often as you choose.
[Further meta regarding your insistence on posting inflammatory sweeping generalizations then objecting when the rules are applied to your comments the same as everyone else's will result in points toward suspension.]
I hate to burst your bubble, but post #4 is still there in all it's "glory".
And #2 ....?
If you have a problem with how your remarks are moderated, I suggest you take it up with the person or persons responsible for moderating and stop whining about it to me, thank you very much.
No, not a bit powerful, just willfully ignorant and erroneous. But you do seem to have a talent for spouting inflammatory nonsense.
Delusions of grandeur!
So why do my opinions get deleted?
It is a world-wide conspiracy to target ONLY you.
No one else ever has had comments deleted here, Bob, just you.
Usually, if your post is deleted, the mods will tell you why.
If they don't you should ask!
Your comments are like deja vu all over again.
Yup
Elections have consequences.
- Barack Obama
They are doing that just about everywhere with the goalpost now extreme gerrymandering because Republicans are failures that lose the popular vote and are desperate to win by any corrupt means.
You should be embarrassed for posting that nonsense.
Here are some facts if anyone else is interested in the TRUTH:
Republicans won the popular vote in the midterm elections, but they're not used to this feeling | CNN Politics