2015/06/03 – Being black in Mississippi during the Jim Crow era was nothing to live for.  Routine lynchings, beatings, unemployment and arbitrary arrest were all a rotten part of a hard life.  As an African-American living in the South, voting was something that happened to other people, not you.  In fact, Mississippi whites created a long, embarrassing list of legal roadblocks to keep black people from electing more civilized leaders.  Some of the barriers included property qualifications demanding the ownership of $300 or more in real estate or personal assets, before allowing a vote.  Mississippi also imposed poll taxes and a literacy test that very few Mississippi whites could even hope to pass, if held to the same standard.

Sometimes the election Nazis running the 1950’s-era Mississippi registrar’s office would even read a constitutional amendment aloud and then ask the applicant to explain the passage.  If the black applicant actually had an articulate answer, it was probably news to the white Mississippi election official, who probably still thought the Preamble was a kind of dance.

The laws existed exclusively to keep black and brown people out of politics and create a powerless underclass.  During Virginia’s 1901-1902 Constitutional Convention, segregationist Sen. Carter Glass lauded these Jim Crow laws, saying: “This plan … will eliminate the darkey as a political factor in this state in less than five years, so that in no single county … will there be the least concern felt for the supremacy of the white race in the affairs of government.”

Sadly, one of these barbaric methods to undermine American democracy was a law that’s tragically still with us: felony disenfranchisement.

The Mississippi Constitution lists 21 crimes that wipe out a convict’s right to vote:  arson, armed robbery, bigamy, bribery, carjacking, embezzlement, extortion, felony bad check, felony shoplifting, forgery, larceny, murder, obtaining money or goods under false pretense, perjury, rape, receiving stolen property, robbery, statutory rape, theft, timber larceny, and unlawful taking of a motor vehicle.

The Mississippi Constitution of 1890 — created with significant animosity toward blacks — initially listed 10 crimes that would strip voting rights, but lawmakers generously added eleven new crimes in 2004.

Getting convicted for any of the 21 crimes will knock out your ability to vote in the state of Mississippi for the rest of your life, long after you’ve done your time in prison, paid your fine and moved on with your life.  While some of the listed crimes are crimes of passion, most of them are money-related, meaning poor people tend to commit them.

The Mississippi Supreme Court did its own analysis of the infamous Section 241 of the 1890 Mississippi Constitution and determined that money crimes were emphasized on purpose.  U.S. District Judge Henry T. Wingate specifically cited some old Supreme Court deliberations while assessing the case McLaughlin v. City of Canton in 1995.

“[The black] race had acquired or accentuated certain particularities of habit, of temperament and of character, which clearly distinguished it, as a race, from that of the whites — a patient, docile people, but careless, landless, and migratory within narrow limits, without forethought, and its criminal members given rather to furtive offenses than to the robust crimes of the whites (such as murder).  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,” Wingate wrote.

It turns out that a racist political convention created almost exclusively to turn blacks into powerless punching bags still costs countless Mississippi blacks their right to vote when they write a bad check for groceries.  Now, thanks to that enduring zombie law, blacks account for nearly 60 percent of the 182,000 disenfranchised Mississippi citizens who can’t vote without explicit permission from the governor or legislature.  That’s higher than the population of Jackson, the state’s most heavily populated city.

Politicos and researchers are convinced that this maggot-infested leftover from Jim Crow endures because politicians in office know a good tool when they see one.

“It’s politics,” said Nicole Porter, director of Advocacy at Washington D.C.-based Sentencing Project, a non-profit that advocates for voting rights.  “The resistance on behalf of lawmakers has all been about politics, particularly in states with conservative or Republican leadership.  The political establishment, in certain states, is working to undermine the political mobility of certain populations, of which people with criminal records may be a sizable proportion.”

That’s a nice way of saying that blacks vote Democratic, and Republican lawmakers don’t want blacks voting Democratic.  Using a law to snatch away the voting rights of former felons is a great way to kill a significant portion of the black vote, so long as a significant portion happens to have run-ins with the law.  This isn’t hard when “the law” is going out of its way to encourage “run-ins” with black people.

Although simple marijuana possession is not one of Mississippi’s disenfranchising crimes, it still provides a damning example of law enforcement’s over-zealous targeting of one race over another.  Consider this ACLU chart depicting a U.S. survey of marijuana use by race:

Source:  https://www.aclu.org/files/assets/aclu-thewaronmarijuana-rel2.pdf

As you can see, marijuana usage between the two races is fairly close.  Now compare that to Mississippi’s marijuana arrest rate:

Source:  https://www.aclu.org/files/assets/aclu-thewaronmarijuana-rel2.pdf

Comparing the two charts, it’s easy to see why almost 14 percent of the African-American Mississippi population is restricted from voting due to legal problems.  Blacks suffer an incarceration rate that is six times the national average.  In Mississippi, the black incarceration rate is 3.5 blacks for every one white prisoner.  This method of vote suppression is particularly egregious in a country with an incarceration rate that rose from 1.17 million in 1976 to 5.85 million by 2010.

It reached the point where even former Attorney General Eric Holder noticed the disturbing trend last year, and admitted that zombie Jim Crow was decades late for re-burial.

“It is time to fundamentally rethink laws that permanently disenfranchise people who are no longer under federal or state supervision,” Holder told the Leadership Council on Civil and Human Rights Criminal Justice Forum at Georgetown law school.  “These restrictions are not only unnecessary and unjust, they are also counterproductive.  By perpetuating the stigma and isolation imposed on formerly incarcerated individuals, these laws increase the likelihood they will commit future crimes.”

Unfortunately, changing the state law means either changing the attitudes of spineless legislators who are terrified of black voters, or trading in the legislators for people with more backbone.

This is where voting comes in.  If you are not a registered voter but want to vote in the next election, or you are a registered voter who is unsure of your registration status, please call the Mississippi NAACP at (601) 353-6906 and speak with an associate to get the ball rolling on how you can improve Mississippi law.  You need to be registered at the address where you now live at least 30 days before an election in order to vote.

It’s past time to plug a stake into the ugly heart of Jim Crow, forever.

Source: NAACP Writers