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Mississippi Voters Ask Supreme Court to Hear Case On 1890 Jim Crow Law

The Mississippi Center for Justice is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to review a Jim Crow voting law that Mississippi’s white-supremacist leaders adopted in 1890 in an attempt to disenfranchise Black residents for life. White lawmakers wrote a provision into the Mississippi Constitution that designates certain crimes that they believed Black people were more likely to commit as “disenfranchising crimes.”

On Aug. 24, the conservative 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans admitted in a ruling that the provision was “steeped in racism,” but the court’s white, conservative majority voted to uphold it anyway by claiming Mississippi has made enough changes since 1890 to override the white-supremacist “taint” of Jim Crow.

In a statement on Friday, Oct. 28, the Mississippi Center for Justice announced that they had filed a petition with the U.S. Supreme Court for review in the case, Harness v. Watson. MCJ first filed the lawsuit in 2017 on behalf of two disenfranchised Black Mississippians, Roy Harness and Kamal Karriem.

“At a time when our state and nation are struggling with the vestiges of history and racism, it is important that the United States Supreme Court step in and address this remaining vestige of the malicious 1890 plan to prevent an entire race of people from voting in Mississippi,” Rob McDuff, the lawyer leading the case and the director of MCJ’s Impact Litigation Project, said. 

“At a time when our state and nation are struggling with the vestiges of history and racism, it is important that the United States Supreme Court step in and address this remaining vestige of the malicious 1890 plan to prevent an entire race of people from voting in Mississippi,” Rob McDuff, the director of MCJ’s Impact Litigation Project. AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis

“Although the Supreme Court has become more conservative in recent years, we hope it will see that the continued implementation of this racist provision is an affront to the promise of the Equal Protection of the Law contained in the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution,” McDuff added.

Civil-rights and voting-rights advocates have grown concerned in recent years that the

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