Mississippi legislators have enacted a law that would create a new judicial system covering the state’s capital city, Jackson, in place of the current county court system.
Set to take effect July 1, 2023, opponents have criticized the Republican-dominated legislature’s move as creating a “separate and unequal” court system that is not answerable to the majority-Black community it would seek to govern.
Supporters justified the law as an effort to curb the city’s crime level, which includes one of the highest murder rates in the nation. But the move is the second time in as many months that state legislatures have taken highly visible actions to effectively disenfranchise Black voters: On April 6, the Tennessee House of Representatives expelled two Black members who represented mostly Black districts.
As a sociologist who studies race and ethnicity, I have closely followed how states move. Throughout U.S. history, I see three main periods of legislative disenfranchisement in which legislative bodies have voted to expel members. These events have been shown to be a form of “white backlash” working to keep Black officeholders out of power and their constituents powerless without representation.
Reconstruction and Legislative Disenfranchisement
After the Civil War, the United States engaged in a brief period known as Reconstruction, which lasted from 1865 to 1877. It was a deliberate attempt to reverse the negative effects and legacies of slavery by enacting economic, political and social policies that directly benefited the formerly enslaved Black people of the South.
The efforts included formally abolishing slavery nationwide, guaranteeing equal protection of the laws to everyone regardless of race, and allowing formerly enslaved people to vote. In addition, formerly Confederate land was set aside for newly freed Black families, and former Confederate soldiers were not allowed to vote.
But after Tennessee politician Andrew Johnson, who had been Abraham Lincoln’s running mate in 1864, took office upon Lincoln’s assassination, many of those provisions of Reconstruction were reversed. Former Confederate combatants were allowed to vote, and confiscated Confederate property was returned to its prewar owners.
Under the Black Codes, which were restrictive laws in the post-Reconstruction South, a
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