Courts

I Did Not Have Mississippi Creating Whites-Only Courts On My Black History Month Bingo Card

'You don't understand — this isn't blatant racism and segregation, it's tradition and heritage.'

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lady-justice-g9a1c9e23d_1920The thing about representative democracy is that it is supposed to be… you know… representative. Mississippi, through processes like gerrymandering, has gone out of of its way to make the democratic process look more like white people appointing other white people. Now, they’ve decided to just skip the foreplay of Black agency not only in voting, but in the legal system too. From Mississippi Today:

Mississippi’s capital city is 80% Black and home to a higher percentage of Black residents than any major American city. Mississippi’s Legislature is thoroughly controlled by white Republicans, who have redrawn districts over the past 30 years to ensure they can pass any bill without a single Democratic vote. Every legislative Republican is white, and most Democrats are Black.

A white supermajority of the Mississippi House voted after an intense, four-plus hour debate to create a separate court system and an expanded police force within the city of Jackson — the Blackest city in America — that would be appointed completely by white state officials.

Usually there is some silver lining after something like this gets dropped — you know, the traditional good/bad/good sandwiching we’ve all come to know and love when receiving anti-democratic news. Not this time. It just gets worse.

If House Bill 1020 becomes law later this session, the white chief justice of the Mississippi Supreme Court would appoint two judges to oversee a new district within the city — one that includes all of the city’s majority-white neighborhoods, among other areas. The white state attorney general would appoint four prosecutors, a court clerk, and four public defenders for the new district. The white state public safety commissioner would oversee an expanded Capitol Police force, run currently by a white chief.

The appointments by state officials would occur in lieu of judges and prosecutors being elected by the local residents of Jackson and Hinds County — as is the case in every other municipality and county in the state.

That is a very heavy “if.” To any prospective jurisprudence professors writing a book on how democratic practices can give rise to anti-democratic ends, this is an easy chapter. To everyone else who cares about democracy, you should also be very interested in how this plays out. With the Supreme Court giving radio silence after South Carolina’s functional exclusion of Black voters, I do not have high hopes that SCOTUS will be willing to offer any help if House Bill 1020 passes.

The short of it is that the Mississippi House of Representatives is going out of its way to put the “history” back in Black History Month:

For most of the debate, Jackson Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba — who has been publicly chided by the white Republicans who lead the Legislature — looked down on the House chamber from the gallery. Lumumba accused the Legislature earlier this year of practicing “plantation politics” in terms of its treatment of Jackson, and of the bill that passed Tuesday, he said: “It reminds me of apartheid.”

Rep. Blackmon, a civil rights leader who has a decades-long history of championing voting issues, equated the current legislation to the Jim Crow-era 1890 Constitution that was written to strip voting rights from Black Mississippians.

“This is just like the 1890 Constitution all over again,” Blackmon said from the floor. “We are doing exactly what they said they were doing back then: ‘Helping those people because they can’t govern themselves.’”

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Let’s also take the time to not just get bogged down in what a horrible intervention to the democratic process it would be. House Bill 1020 would also double down on the policing of these vote-voided communities:

Opponents of the legislation, dozens of whom have protested at the Capitol several days this year, accused the authors of carving out mostly white, affluent areas of the city to be put in the new district.

The bill would double the funding for the district to $20 million in order to increase the size of the existing Capitol Police force, which has received broad criticism from Jacksonians for shooting several people in recent months with little accountability.

The new court system laid out in House Bill 1020 is estimated to cost $1.6 million annually.

I really hope that this doesn’t pass — best believe this will be adopted in other states if it does. My money will be that it will start slow in other former members of the Confederacy like Arkansas and Georgia, and from then on, who knows? I’d say get out there and vote but that clearly isn’t efficacious at the moment. Thoughts and prayers? May God help us all.

‘Only In Mississippi’: White Representatives Vote To Create White-Appointed Court System For Blackest City In America [Mississippi Today]

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Earlier: If You Had The Supreme Court Supporting Fair And Non-Discriminatory Elections As A Wish This Year, I Have Bad News

Chris Williams became a social media manager and assistant editor for Above the Law in June 2021. Prior to joining the staff, he moonlighted as a minor Memelord™ in the Facebook group Law School Memes for Edgy T14s.  He endured Missouri long enough to graduate from Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. He is a former boatbuilder who cannot swim, a published author on critical race theory, philosophy, and humor, and has a love for cycling that occasionally annoys his peers. You can reach him by email at cwilliams@abovethelaw.com and by tweet at @WritesForRent.

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