Mississippi’s Jim Crow-era prohibitions on allowing people convicted of certain crimes to vote will remain after the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal in the case today.
The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of upholding the law last year in Harness v. Watson. Mississippi’s white supremacist leaders adopted it in 1890 in an attempt to disenfranchise Black residents for life. White lawmakers designated certain crimes that they believed Black people were more likely to commit as lifelong disenfranchising crimes. The law still disproportionately disenfranchises Black Mississippians at higher rates than white residents.
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson recounted the law’s history today in a dissent against the court’s refusal to take the case. Justice Sonia Sotomayor joined her.
“The President of the 1890 Mississippi Constitutional Convention said it plain: ‘Let us tell the truth if it bursts to the bottom of the Universe … We came here to exclude the negro. Nothing short of this will answer.’ To further that agenda, the Convention placed nine crimes in §241 of the State’s Constitution as bases for disenfranchisement, believing that more Black people would be convicted of those crimes than White people,” Jackson wrote. “… Eight of those crimes have remained in §241 since 1890, without interruption. Thus, the Convention’s avowed goals continued to be realized via its chosen mechanism: Today (just as in the Convention’s aftermath), thousands of Black Mississippians cannot vote due to §241’s operation.”
During the Reconstruction era, newly emancipated Black Mississippians made enormous gains as Black men gained the right to vote. But in 1890, white Mississippi lawmakers began drafting a new constitution riddled with Jim Crow laws. The new system instituted an explicitly white-supremacist regime, with its drafters bent on disenfranchising, criminalizing and denying opportunity to the state’s Black residents.
The legislative committee that drafted Mississippi’s 1890 Constitution was initially explicit in its white-supremacist goals. They adopted a resolution declaring that “it is the duty of this Com. to perform its work in such a manner as to secure permanent white rule in all departments of state government and
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