When uttered, these four words have the power to instill fear in the hearts of spouses, children, and employees alike. They aptly describe the situation we face as a nation today.
The problem? Toxic polarization – the way we demonize each other across differences. Most of us have few or no friends who have different political preferences. We think “other people in America” pose the biggest threat to our way of life. We are finding it more and more difficult to say what we believe without the conversation devolving into utter chaos. Unsurprisingly, we shut down. We don’t talk. It’s a problem we can all hear, loud and clear.
The good news is that most of us want to talk. Most of us believe it is crucial for everyday Americans to be involved in finding solutions to the problems facing their communities. In a time marked by deep-seated divisions along ideological, political, and social lines, the need for constructive dialogue has never been more pressing.
Since last August, 19 graduate students seeking a degree in Integrated Marketing Communications at the University of Mississippi have been planning and preparing for the seventh annual National Week of Conversation (NWoC). They are helping provide real opportunities for people across the country to build bridges of understanding and empathy. Each of them committed to the course because they understand that beneath our differences lie shared humanity and common aspirations. They’ve been learning and applying concepts from Collective Impact and Reflective Structured Dialogue and are both inspiring and encouraging to work with.
At its core, NWoC embodies the principles of empathy, respect, and openness – values that are essential for a thriving democracy. When people take the time to really listen to others, they learn. They learn that we really aren’t that different, that we share many of the same values and aspirations, something reinforced by findings of several studies. They learn that others, like them, desire to make positive change in our communities. They learn, as Brene Brown has written, that “people are hard to hate close up.”
These students are being courageous enough to put aside their own agendas and listen to the experiences of others. They are finding that this desire to listen across our differences is shared by the majority of their peers. And they are standing up opportunities to work together despite forces working to tear us apart.
But don’t take their word for it. Experience it yourself. Find an event to attend, here, and be with the nearly 80% of Americans who believe in creating more opportunities for people to talk across their differences. And who knows, maybe you’ll learn its not as scary as it sounds after all.
Graham Bodie is Professor and Interim Chair of the Department of Media and Communication in the School of Journalism and New Media at the University of Mississippi. When asked what he does for a living he responds, “I teach people to listen.” More importantly, he has been able to work with a group of dedicated students for several years to plan and execute the National Week of Conversation, a yearly campaign launched by Listen First Project in 2018 that seeks to provide opportunities for people to #ListenFirst across their differences. This year, those students have put together an amazing set of promotional toolkits and events for the Better Together Film Festival that features film screenings across the country including Tupelo and Oxford. Several of them contributed to the writing of this piece.
Join the conversation.
Join us at Noon on Friday, April 18 for a VIRTUAL lunch and learn session exploring tools to make us better listeners, and in turn, better equipped to engage in meaningful conversations across differences.
The session will be led by Dr. Graham Bodie, professor and Interim Chair of the Department of Media and Communication in the School of Journalism and New Media at the University of Mississippi.
Note: This editorial anchored Mississippi Today’s weekly legislative newsletter. Subscribe to our free newsletter for exclusive access to legislative analysis and up-to-date information about what’s happening under the Capitol dome.
Happy Tax Day, when millions of us Mississippians will send our hard-earned money to 40 other states that are providing health care coverage to millions of poor, working people.
But here in Mississippi, hundreds of thousands of poor, working people are not afforded that same benefit of our taxes. This is the intentional result of political ideologues who have blocked the implementation of Medicaid expansion, the proven federal policy those 40 other states have passed.
Today, while all those other states reap the economic benefits of our money, so many of our fellow Mississippians are sick and cannot afford trips to the doctor; dozens of our state’s hospitals remain on the verge of financial collapse because they must cover emergency care to so many of those uninsured people; and our state is missing out on a pot of billions in federal dollars that we are paying into every single day.
If these facts surprise you, know that you’ve been duped. As Mississippi lawmakers seriously consider Medicaid expansion for the first time since it was implemented in 2013, opponents of the policy have worked to deliberately message an outright lie in order to rile you up. What they want you to hear and react to is that hardworking Mississippi taxpayers like you shouldn’t be on the hook for expansion.
But they don’t want you to consider the cold, hard truth of the matter: You already are on the hook for expansion — only the federal taxes you’re paying today are flowing to the 40 other states that have chosen to expand. Your own state, meanwhile, because of the cold shoulder of a few politicians, has left more than $10 billion on the table over the last decade.
Today, our neighbors across the Mississippi River in Arkansas and Louisiana are grateful for our money considering we’re helping save their residents’ lives and their hospitals. Across the nation, 20 Republican-controlled states and 20 Democrat-controlled states appreciate our red state’s contribution to their economies that are growing faster than ours.
But here in Mississippi, people are dying, our hospitals are cutting services or closing doors for good, and our economy is not keeping up with our neighbors.
Your tax dollars could benefit your own state — not just the many people who need health care, but the state as a whole and even your own personal bottom line. If lawmakers expanded Medicaid, the state would receive $1.5 billion in additional federal money in year one, which would free up hundreds of millions of dollars our leaders could spend on other major needs besides just health care. The Medicaid expansion dollars would provide a lifeline for the many rural hospitals that are the heart of so many of our struggling small towns. Expansion would create 11,000 jobs in five years, grow the state’s coffers as much as $44 million annually, increase the state’s gross domestic product and even modestly grow the state’s population.
Without Medicaid expansion in place, you’re paying more for health care even if you currently have your own private insurance. Your out-of-pocket health care and insurance premium costs today are higher, experts say, because your providers are charging you more to help offset their costs of having to pay for uninsured patients.
You don’t have to take my word for it.
Republican Speaker of the House Jason White, whose traditional expansion proposal is being considered at the Capitol: “We’re sending our dollars to the federal government. And it’s going to 40 other states to fund an expansion population of low-income workers.”
North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, the most recent state leader to usher through expansion: “We were in the same situation in North Carolina for a long time, but Mississippians should know they’re propping up North Carolina’s and other states’ programs.”
Dr. Joe Thompson, the Arkansas surgeon general under Republican Gov. Mike Huckabee and Democratic Gov. Mike Beebe: “It’s important to note that the residents of Mississippi and the other holdout states have not been spared from paying for Medicaid expansion. They have been helping to fund it for over a decade through their federal tax dollars, but the money has been flowing into states like Arkansas and Louisiana instead of benefiting the working poor, hospitals, and economies of their home states.”
Today could be the final Tax Day that Mississippians are forced to burn their own cash without getting the return that we need and deserve. All it takes is the will to be honest about the situation and a couple votes from the Legislature.
Jerry Mitchell, a senior investigative reporter with Mississippi Today, is the winner of the 2024 I.F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence in recognition of his body of work and lifelong commitment to investigative journalism.
The medal, administered by the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University, honors the life of investigative journalist I.F. Stone and is presented to a journalist or journalists whose work captures the spirit of journalistic independence, integrity and courage that characterized I.F. Stone’s Weekly, published from 1953 to 1971.
“I believe journalism is one of the world’s most noble professions, and I feel so honored and humbled to receive this award. God has truly blessed me, far beyond what I deserve,” Mitchell said.
In 2019, Mitchell co-founded the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting, which became part of Mississippi Today in 2023.
Over four decades, his stories have exposed injustices, corruption and abuse of power in the American South. His work has prompted prosecutions, important reforms of state agencies and firings of state board officials and helped lead to a woman being freed from Death Row.
His cold case investigations helped lead to convictions of Ku Klux Klansmen some of the nation’s notorious civil rights-era crimes. Those attacks include the 1963 assassination of Mississippi NAACP Field Secretary Medgar Evers, the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham that killed four girls and the 1964 slayings of civil rights workers James Chaney, Andy Goodman and Mickey Schwerner.
Despite death threats and the objections of readers opposed to his investigations, Mitchell has persevered in his reporting.
His work also led to the 2016 conviction of Felix Vail, the longest delayed conviction in a serial killer case in U.S. history. Vail, who authorities believe killed at least three women, was prosecuted nearly 54 years after he murdered his first wife.
In 2023, Mitchell and his colleagues produced “Unfettered Power: Mississippi Sheriffs,” a series co-reported by The New York Times and the MCIR at Mississippi Today. That reporting including the torture and sexual abuse of two Black men and a third white man by six now former Rankin County law enforcement officers, leading to their recent sentencings in state and federal court. A bill may soon arrive on the governor’s desk that would would expand oversight over the state’s law enforcement, allowing the state board that certifies officers to investigate and revoke the licenses of officers accused of misconduct, regardless of whether they are criminally charged.
In addition, MCIR’s prison project, produced in partnership with the ProPublica Local Reporting Network, led to a Justice Department investigation of serious problems inside Mississippi prisons, which is continuing.
“In every sense imaginable, Jerry has blazed a path for journalists to follow.,” said Mississippi Today Editor-in-Chief Adam Ganucheau. “He’s set the gold standard for society-changing, powerful local investigative journalism. I’m among the countless journalists who strive every day to have the impact he’s had on the world around him, and I’m fortunate to work with him and learn from him. This award is so very deserving.”
I.F. Stone Medal jury member Bernice Yeung said the work Mitchell and his colleagues produced on “Mississippi’s lawless and abusive law enforcement agencies is a powerful demonstration of how Jerry Mitchell’s hard-charging yet collaborative approach can help our industry find a way forward.”
Mitchell “has elevated and provided opportunities to the next generation of investigative reporters,” Yeung said.
Michael Riley, another selection committee juror, added, “I think the continued work coming from MCIR – and its collaboration with Mississippi Today – really does show the profound and ongoing influence Mitchell has had in Mississippi and nationally.”
Juror Jasimine Brown noted how MCIR has helped to “bolster local coverage and struggling newsrooms” by providing its work free to news outlets across the state, also a hallmark of Mississippi Today.
“They have also established the MCIR Immersion Program, which works to train and inspire the next generation of investigative reporters,” Brown said.
Mitchell began his career in 1983 at the Sentinel-Record in Hot Springs, Arkansas. In 1986, he joined The Clarion-Ledger in Jackson, Mississippi, and worked there as an investigative reporter for 32 years before co-founding the MCIR.
“Through his dogged and thoughtful reporting, Jerry Mitchell has not only brought accountability and change but inspired a new generation of reporters to pick up the mantle of investigative journalism, said Mitchell’s longtime editor Debbie Skipper, who has worked with him on his reporting projects since the 1990s and joined the Mississippi Today in October 2022 as the justice and special projects editor.
A Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2006 and longtime member of Investigative Reporters & Editors, Mitchell has won dozens of the nation’s top journalism awards and received a MacArthur “genius” grant in 2009. In 1998, he was among four journalists honored at the Kennedy Center in Washington.
Ralph Ellison wrote “Invisible Man” for Random House. Credit: Courtesy of Random House
Ralph Ellison’s only novel, “Invisible Man,” confronted many issues facing Black Americans and became the first by a Black author to win the National Book Award.
Ellison told The Paris Review that Black history “is the most intimate part of American history. Through the very process of slavery came the building of the United States.”
Born in Oklahoma City in 1914, Ellison’s father, who loved literature, died two years after he was born. Feeling they would have a better life in the North, the family moved to Gary, Indiana.
Ellison applied twice to the Tuskegee Institute and was finally admitted when the orchestra lacked a trumpet player. While he studied music there, he wound up spending free time in the library, where he read James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” and Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment.”
Before graduating, he moved to Harlem, hoping to study sculpture. Instead, he met author Richard Wright and wrote a book review for him. Wright encouraged him to write fiction, and he did, first with a story inspired by hopping trains to get to Tuskegee. He went on to write what Time magazine and others called one of the best English-language novels of the 20th century.
The book begins: “I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.”
A number of characters and dialogue in “Invisible Man” came from or were inspired by oral interviews he did for the Federal Writers’ Project during the Depression, including the line, “I’m in New York, but New York ain’t in me, understand what I mean?”
Before “Invisible Man,” many books by Black authors aimed at protest, but Ellison aimed at broader themes and ideas.
“Why is it,” he wrote in an essay, “that so many of those who would tell us the meaning of Negro life never bother to learn how varied it really is?” The novel inspired a memorial in Harlem
The Mississippi House’s proud proclamation earlier this session that they had voted to spend the most money in the history of the state on public education is no longer true.
Now the state Senate can make that boast — by a smidgen.
The Kindergarten through 12th grade appropriations bill approved last week by the Senate provides about $6 million more for local schools than the House proposed earlier this session. The Senate is proposing about $256 million more than the $3.08 billion being spent in state funds for the current year.
In the coming weeks, the House and Senate will have to reach an agreement on a budget for public education for the upcoming fiscal year that begins on July 1.
The escalation in spending on public education is being spurred, at least in part, by the ongoing dispute between the two chambers on whether to rewrite the long-standing Mississippi Adequate Education Program, which provides state funds for the basic operation of schools.
House leaders, some of whom historically have opposed MAEP because they said it provided too much money for public education, are trying desperately this session to replace it.
The Senate, on the other hand, has proposed tweaks to the MAEP and has agreed to study the issue of the funding formula after the 2024 session ends in May with the intent of replacing or making changes to MAEP in the 2025 session.
House Speaker Jason White, R-West, does not want to wait until next year. In an effort to entice support for his plan this session, the House proposed and touted record K-12 spending if legislators would agree to eliminate MAEP.
Instead, the Senate chose to place even more money into public education but place the money in the current MAEP funding formula. The Senate proposal also includes $50 million for a teacher pay raise ($1,000 per teacher) that is incorporated into MAEP.
On the surface, the oneupmanship on education spending is good for the schools, teachers and students. After all, it could lead to more funds for education.
But supporters of the House plan to rewrite the MAEP say the only way they will agree to that record spending is to replace the MAEP.
White seems to be saying education will not get any additional money unless MAEP is rewritten.
“I have clearly communicated with Senate leadership the House position that we have funded MAEP for the last time,” White said in a statement.
Of course, even though the House leadership does not like the MAEP funding formula, it is still the law of the land and the primary vehicle to send state funds to school districts. The bulk of funds local school districts receive and have received since at least 2003 comes through the MAEP funding formula.
Theoretically, the Legislature could send all the funds to the local school districts outside of the MAEP formula. The funds could be sent to the schools based on some version of their enrollment.
Of course, under that scenario, wealthy districts would benefit greatly. MAEP sends more state funds to poor districts that have less funds to contribute toward their schools.
The House has contended that the intent of their funding formulas is to provide even more funds than MAEP to poor school districts.
There is legitimate debate on whether the House plan accomplishes that goal. But assuming it does, it is still not the law.
So, if House leaders insisted on sending the funds to the local school districts outside of the MAEP formula, they would be doing what they say they oppose — providing even more money to wealthy school districts at the expense of poor districts.
And, of course, if they do not appropriate any funds for education, well, that can’t be very good for school children.
New Colfax Massacre memorial Credit: Courtesy of Heart of Louisiana
On Easter Sunday, after Reconstruction Republicans won the Louisiana governor’s race, a group of white Democrats vowed to “take back” the Grant Parish Courthouse from Republican leaders.
A group of more than 150 white men, including members of the Ku Klux Klan and the White League, attacked the courthouse with a cannon and rifles. The courthouse was defended by an all-Black state militia.
The death toll was staggering: Only three members of the White League died, but up to 150 Black men were killed. Of those, nearly half were killed in cold blood after they surrendered.
Historian Eric Foner called the Colfax Massacre “the bloodiest single instance of racial carnage in the Reconstruction era,” demonstrating “the lengths to which some opponents of Reconstruction would go to regain their accustomed authority.”
Congress castigated the violence as “deliberate, barbarous, cold-blooded murder.”
Although 97 members of the mob were accused, only nine went to trial. Federal prosecutors won convictions against three of the mob members, but the U.S. Supreme Court tossed out the convictions, helping to spell the end of Reconstruction in Louisiana.
A state historical marker said the event “marked the end of carpetbag misrule in the South,” and until recent years, the only local monument to the tragedy, a 12-foot tall obelisk, honored the three white men who died “fighting for white supremacy.”
In 2023, Colfax leaders unveiled a black granite memorial that listed the 57 men confirmed killed and the 35 confirmed wounded, with the actual death toll presumed much higher.
Charles Caldwell was never meant to have a voice. Mississippi’s White ruling class made sure of it.
He was part of Mississippi’s silenced majority in 1860 — 436,600 enslaved people to 354,000 White people, according to the Census — who would be granted full citizenship after the Civil War.
By 1868, Caldwell was one of 16 Black delegates at the state’s post-war constitutional convention, which extended the right to vote to all men and created a framework for public education.
Described in a White politician’s historical account of the Clinton Riot as “one of the most daring and desperate negroes of his day,” Caldwell was “the dominant factor in local Republican politics.”
In December 1875, Caldwell was lured to a cellar for a celebratory Christmas drink. He was ambushed — shot once from behind — and then carried into the street, where a White mob riddled him with bullets. Caldwell, who rose from servitude to become a state senator, was once again silenced.
Charles Caldwell, one of 16 Black delegates at the state’s post-war constitutional convention in 1868, pictured within a montage of the Mississippi Legislature in 1875. Caldwell was assassinated in 1875 part of “the Mississippi Plan” to maintain White political control.
CREDIT: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division
His murder was a calculated part of white supremacists’ post-war efforts, collectively known as the Mississippi Plan, to maintain political control by White men, whom freedmen outnumbered. In the post-war South, white supremacists used lynchings, massacres and intimidation to silence the Black people they once owned, then cemented racism into the state’s 1890 constitution to further restrict the Black vote.
Although most other racist sections of Mississippi’s 1890 constitution were erased by the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, one part of the plan continues to stalk Black voters today. Called felony disenfranchisement, the constitution takes away — for life — the right to vote upon conviction for several low-level crimes, like theft and bribery, that the 1890 drafters felt would be mostly committed by Black people.
A bill that would reinstate voting rights for thousands convicted of nonviolent offenses was passed by the Mississippi House of Representatives in March but died this week in the state Senate. Republicans control both chambers.
Section 241, the disenfranchisement clause of the constitution, has since been expanded and interpreted to cover 102 crimes.
Why was voter disenfranchisement created? In 1890, state Rep. James K. Vardaman, who would later be elected governor, said, “There is no use to equivocate or lie about the matter. … Mississippi’s constitutional convention of 1890 was held for no other purpose than to eliminate the [n-word] from politics.”
Over the past 30 years, approximately 55,000 Mississippians have lost their rights to vote due to felony disenfranchisement. About six out of 10 are Black, according to state conviction records reviewed by The Marshall Project – Jackson.
An effort to overturn the state’s disenfranchisement law has gone before the U.S. Supreme Court twice, and the case was twice rejected by the majority. In her 2023 dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson rebuked the law’s racist intent, saying it contained “the most toxic of substances” that needed to be removed.
In addition to disenfranchisement, the 1890 delegates crafted legal language around racism and conditions perpetuated by slavery. Poll taxes and literacy tests attacked the lack of wealth and education. Left out of Section 241 were violent crimes — murder, rape and assault — that were often part of white supremacists’ terroristic strategy.
In an 1896 case, the Mississippi Supreme Court noted the choice of disenfranchising crimes was racist. “Restrained by the federal constitution from discriminating against the negro race, the convention discriminated against its characteristics and the offenses to which its weaker members were prone,” the court wrote. It describes Black people as “patient, docile people,” more inclined to “furtive offenses than to the robust crimes of the whites.”
Yet as 20th-century civil rights laws stripped away most voting restrictions, voter disenfranchisement remained because civil rights have never come easy to Mississippi, voting advocates say.
“There’s never been a time period in Mississippi history where we have done what the federal government has wanted us to do without the federal government having to directly step in and make us do it,” said Hannah Williams, policy and research director of voting rights advocacy group Mississippi Votes. “Even now.”
“Movements change, but commitments don’t,” said Flonzie Brown Wright, the first Black woman in the state elected to public office in a racially mixed town. “Call it whatever you want to call it,” Brown Wright told The Marshall Project – Jackson. “But the common denominator is: Let’s [not] give these minorities any power.”
Civil rights gains — and new ways to stop them
Mississippi is one of 13 states that imposes a lifetime voting ban, even after the end of a felony sentence. In most of those states, lifetime disenfranchisement is for violent crimes or government corruption. In Mississippi, a single felony conviction for writing a bad check or shoplifting takes away the right to vote.
Across the nation, courts and state legislatures have restored voting rights for people convicted of felonies. Since 1997, 26 states and the District of Columbia have expanded voting rights for people with felony convictions, according to The Sentencing Project.
Mississippians last amended Section 241 in 1968 — to add murder and rape to the list of disenfranchising crimes, after burglary was removed in 1950. (See the full list of offenses here.)
Though they once outnumbered White people in the state, Black people have never held a majority of representation in the state’s government. Robert Luckett, a civil rights historian and professor at Jackson State University, said the modern conservatism that rules Mississippi can be traced back to the insidious Mississippi Plan to eliminate Black political power.
“Conservatives today, especially in the South, didn’t just pop up out of nowhere,” Luckett said. In his view, “they are directly descended from segregationists, from white supremacy.”
The plan effectively suppressed the Black vote in the 19th and 20th centuries. Luckett and other historians said White political control continues to evolve in the 21st century.
Between 1875 and 1892, the number of Black voters plummeted. Though about 67% had been registered in 1867, fewer than 6% of eligible Black men were registered to vote by 1892, according to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.
Starting early in the 20th century, hundreds of thousands of Black Mississippians left the state during the Great Migration caused by economic and social hardships. By 1940, Black people were no longer a majority in the state. And in many rural places, the order established by slavery remained. Black sharecroppers farmed land owned by White people.
Except for a few pockets of Black political power, such as the all-Black town of Mound Bayou in Bolivar County, the Black vote in Mississippi remained largely dormant until the 1960s.
Black people who remained in Mississippi faced much of the same oppression as their ancestors: lynchings, beatings, intimidation and imprisonment.
George W. Lee, a preacher in Belzoni, Mississippi, was murdered for his efforts to register Black voters in 1955. Fannie Lou Hamer, who rose to become a national civil rights champion, sharecropped in rural Ruleville, Mississippi, and had no idea she could vote until she was 44 years old. Hamer was arrested, sexually assaulted and beaten so brutally that it left her with kidney damage and a permanent limp, she testified at the 1964 Democratic National Convention.
Brown Wright said her father was fired from his job because of her activism. Before her barrier-breaking election in 1968, more than 1,000 civil rights protesters in Jackson were arrested and held in livestock pens in 1965, in one of the largest mass arrests of the Civil Rights Movement.
The passage of the federal Voting Rights Act in 1965 protected the right of Black citizens to vote and outlawed discriminatory barriers like literacy tests. By 1968, 60% of eligible Black residents had registered to vote, and Mississippians elected their first Black state legislator since Reconstruction, according to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.
Brown Wright won her race for the elections commission in Canton, despite a rule change that required her to win votes across all parts of Madison County, instead of just the votes from the single district she would represent.
“It was a clear case of voter suppression,” she said.
After she took office at age 26, she said the board routinely denied her lists of poll workers who had been community activists and disqualified Black candidates. She sued to overturn the discriminatory actions and won.
White people “never intended for Blacks to supersede or give the perception that we were in the process of gaining some semblance of equality. It was never intended to be,” Brown Wright, now 81, told The Marshall Project – Jackson.
Carroll Rhodes, a civil rights attorney who has challenged the state on voting rights for more than 40 years, said that following the 1965 Voting Rights Act, local circuit clerks would come up with devious ways to make it difficult for Black people to register and vote. Some examples he listed were splitting majority-Black areas across different districts to dilute Black voting power and requiring voters to re-register multiple times.
“The only difference is, after Reconstruction, all the way through Jim Crow, it was easy to tell that race was the motivating factor, because they explicitly say it,” Rhodes said. “But the court and the federal government cracked down on those White officials because they were saying they were doing it because of race. So the White official got smart. They no longer say they’re doing it because of race. They come up with other excuses.”
Mass incarceration as modern voter suppression
At the same time that Mississippi’s civil rights activism gripped the nation, a conservative movement laid the foundation for tough-on-crime rhetoric that eventually took hold among both major political parties and fueled the escalation of arrests and mass incarceration.
The key to the new rhetoric was erasing any mention of race. Instead, disciples of this new movement used crime and welfare as coded language to target Black people, attorney and civil rights scholar Michelle Alexander wrote in “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.”
“Barry Goldwater, in his 1964 presidential campaign, aggressively exploited the [civil rights] riots and fears of black crime, laying the foundation for the ‘get tough on crime’ movement that would emerge years later,” Alexander wrote.
Goldwater’s narrative resonated with White Mississippi voters who rejected Democratic incumbent Lyndon B. Johnson’s civil rights reforms. A majority of Mississippians voted for a Republican presidential candidate — Goldwater — for the first time since Reconstruction.
White Mississippians then continued to vote for Republican presidential candidates in almost every election after 1964, while the state government maintained a status quo of White men, mostly Democrats, who dominated the state legislature and governor’s office. Despite splitting the vote across party lines, the common denominator in White Mississippians’ voting practices was their singular goal of maintaining power.
After the Voting Rights Act, tough-on-crime rhetoric fueled initiatives like GOP President Richard Nixon’s war on drugs and Democratic President Bill Clinton’s 1994 crime bill that increased mandatory prison sentences. Mississippi now incarcerates more people per capita than any other state. About 60% of all incarcerated people in the state were Black in 2022, according to the Mississippi Department of Corrections,
Though not all incarcerated people have lost their right to vote, a lack of information about who can and can’t vote makes it difficult for many affected by the legal system to access ballots.
However, some in Mississippi’s government have tried to change the state’s disenfranchisement laws.
In 2008, the Mississippi House passed a bill to restore voting rights to the disenfranchised, excluding rape and murder convictions, but the bill died in the state Senate.
A 2023 lawsuit challenge to felony disenfranchisement was successful when a three-judge U.S. Fifth Circuit Court panel ruled that the lifelong voting ban violated the Eighth Amendment’s cruel and unusual punishment clause. However, the state appealed to the full appeals court, and the disenfranchisement law remains in place. In its defense, the state said disenfranchisement is not punishment and that the Legislature, not the courts, should decide on any modifications.
In March, the Mississippi House voted across party lines to approve a bill that would restore the right to vote for people convicted of some nonviolent offenses. However, the bill died in the state Senate without a committee hearing.
Rhodes, the civil rights attorney, is co-counsel for the Mississippi State Conference of the NAACP in a lawsuit that challenges the state’s congressional redistricting plan, saying it dilutes Black voting power. The case is pending in federal court.
“There will always be a constant struggle. I learned that early on,” Rhodes said. “The forces that want to undo the progress that’s been made will always be there.”
Mississippi has a long history of voter suppression. An 1890 rule that permanently strips people convicted of certain crimes of their right to vote remains in the state’s constitution. This practice, called felony disenfranchisement, impacts an estimated 55,000 people today. State lawmakers this year considered, then rejected, lifting the voting ban for some nonviolent offenses.
When Mississippi was admitted to the union in 1817, White men reserved decision-making power for themselves. After the Civil War, they used violence, terror and Jim Crow laws to keep power in their own hands and out of the hands of the formerly enslaved Black people who outnumbered them. Here is a quick look at how voting intimidation and voting rights have evolved through the last 150 years.
The Civil War ended, freeing enslaved people in Mississippi and starting the period known as Reconstruction. Enslaved Black people accounted for 55% of the state population in 1860.
An illustration from an 1867 issue of Harper’s Weekly shows freedmen and U.S. Colored Troops veterans exercising their newly granted right to vote.
CREDIT: A.R. Waud/Harper’s Weekly, via Smithsonian Museum of American History
1866
A federal civil rights bill is passed. At the same time, the White-controlled Mississippi government created “Black Codes,” which criminalized behaviors and conditions of newly freed Black people such as being unemployed, required them to get special licenses to preach and own guns, and required Black children to work as apprentices to former slave masters.
1867
After federal officials took control of voter registration, more than 79,000 Black men registered to vote by the fall. Mississippi voters elected 94 delegates, including 16 Black men, to write a state constitution that would admit Mississippi back to the Union. This 1868 constitution granted citizenship and extended civil liberties to Black men. By this time, nearly 97% of eligible Black men had registered to vote.
1869
Mississippi elected its first Black secretary of state and its first Black legislators in 1869. When they took office in 1870, Black men constituted 14% of the state Senate and 47% of the state House of Representatives. That same year, Mississippi’s Legislature sent Hiram Rhodes Revels, the first Black U.S. senator in the nation, to fill the state’s vacant Senate seat.
An illustration depicts the first Black congressional representatives, including U.S. Sen. Hiram Rhodes Revels of Mississippi.
CREDIT: Currier & Ives, via Library of Congress, LC-DIG-ppmsca-17564
1870-1875
Black political representation increased for Mississippians. They elected a Black lieutenant governor in 1873 and another Black U.S. senator in 1874, and consistently held the secretary of state position through 1874. The 1874-1875 legislature reflected the height of Black political representation, with 69 Black men across the state House and Senate.
1875
White Democrats devised what is known as the first “Mississippi Plan” that used violence and intimidation to stop Black people from voting. White vigilantes and paramilitary groups including the Ku Klux Klan committed a series of massacres, including the Vicksburg Massacre of 1874, which killed as many as 300 Black people, and the Clinton Massacre of 1875, which killed about 50 Black people.
1877
Federal troops were withdrawn from Mississippi, ending Reconstruction, and ushering in the era of Jim Crow laws that legalized racial segregation.
1890
The state constitution was rewritten, adding felony disenfranchisement crimes and introducing voter suppression methods such as literacy tests and poll taxes. These were all part of a second “Mississippi Plan,” a concerted effort by White leaders to nullify the Black vote. By 1892, less than 6% of eligible Black men were registered to vote.
Crimes that would lead to a lifetime loss of voting rights were bribery, burglary, theft, arson, obtaining money or goods under false pretenses, perjury, forgery, embezzlement and bigamy.
1910-1930
Many Black Mississippians left the state during the Great Migration. By 1940, they no longer constituted a majority in the state.
1950
Burglary was removed from the list of disenfranchising crimes in the state’s constitution.
1963
Mississippi’s racial violence and civil rights activism became national flashpoints. NAACP Field Secretary Medgar Evers was assassinated in Mississippi. President John F. Kennedy called for a civil rights bill in the wake of Evers’ murder and was assassinated months later.
1964
President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Council of Federated Organizations, a coalition of civil rights groups, led several large efforts, including the “Freedom Summer” of 1964, to boost statewide voter education and registration.
A week after Freedom Summer began, Ku Klux Klan members murdered local activist James Chaney, along with volunteers Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, both from New York. Later that summer, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party ??sent a delegation to the Democratic National Convention, where Fannie Lou Hamer testified on national television about the abuse she faced when trying to register to vote.
As Mississippi became a battleground, GOP presidential candidate Barry Goldwater visited the Neshoba County Fair in August, just a week after Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney’s bodies were found buried in a dam. Goldwater, who carried the state in the national election, represented a shift in conservatism that equated civil rights activism with lawlessness and laid the foundation for “tough on crime” rhetoric that would lead to mass incarceration.
1965
The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights held hearings in Jackson and found Mississippi’s voting practices discriminatory. Months later, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 passed, prohibiting racial discrimination in voting. The following year, a federal court ruled Mississippi’s poll tax unconstitutional. Black political participation began to rise again and in 1967, the state elected Robert G. Clark Jr., its first Black representative since Reconstruction.
1968
Murder and rape were added to the list of disenfranchising crimes in the state’s Constitution.
1970 and beyond
Mass incarceration began to take hold in Mississippi and across the nation. Since 1983, prison populations in the state increased more than 200%, according to the Vera Institute. National “tough on crime” rhetoric contributed to the increase in convictions. Though people not convicted of disenfranchising crimes were allowed to vote from Mississippi’s prisons and jails, many faced challenges in accessing ballots.
1998
In Cotton v. Fordice, the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the felony disenfranchisement clause in the state constitution, stating that its amendments to remove burglary in 1950 and add murder and rape in 1968 took away its “discriminatory taint.”
2008
The Mississippi House passed a bill to restore voting rights to those convicted of felonies, excluding murder and rape. The bill died in the state Senate.
2023
A three-judge U.S. Fifth Circuit Court panel ruled that Mississippi’s lifetime voting ban violated the Eighth Amendment’s “cruel and unusual punishment” prohibition. The full appeals court is reconsidering the case, leaving the disenfranchisement laws unchanged.
March 2024
The Mississippi House of Representatives advanced legislation to restore the right to vote for people convicted of some nonviolent offenses. The bill died in the state Senate in April.
Sources: Mississippi Department of Archives and History; Mississippi Encyclopedia; SNCC Digital Gateway; A Bicentennial History of Mississippi 1817-2017 by Mississippi Secretary of State; National Park Service; Against All Odds: The First Black Legislators in Mississippi by DeeDee Baldwin; Zinn Education Project; Library of Congress; Vera Institute; The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander; Voting in Mississippi: A Report of the United States Commission on Civil Rights 1965.
