Mississippi conservative politicians immediately started discussing ways to reconfigure legislative, judicial and congressional maps after the U.S. Supreme Court recently rolled back protections against racial discrimination in drawing political districts.
Attorney Carroll Rhodes has litigated redistricting cases in Mississippi for most of his career to help elect more Black candidates to office. But Rhodes, a 74-year-old Hazlehurst native, said he still has hope for the future after the high court’s Louisiana v. Callais ruling that weakened the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
The U.S. Supreme Court is seen in Washington on Feb. 24, 2026. Credit: AP Photo/Matt RourkeRhodes said it could take a long time to undo the decades of work he and his colleagues in the civil rights community have done to create a majority-Black congressional district and majority-Black legislative districts in a state with a history of racist violence fueled by white supremacy.
Rhodes compared the Callais ruling to the end of Reconstruction when the federal government removed troops who had been protecting the rights of Black men to vote and hold elected office in the South. Departure of the troops ushered in the era of Jim Crow and voter disenfranchisement.
“Callais pulled the protection of the Voting Rights Act,” Rhodes said. “And I foresee that there are efforts underway to break up Black-majority districts, Latino-majority districts throughout the old Confederacy, throughout all the states in the old Confederacy.”
Mississippi Today interviewed Rhodes about his work, the history of redistricting lawsuits and what he thinks the Supreme Court’s recent ruling means for Mississippi.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Mississippi Today: Has most of your legal work been about civil rights, redistricting, things like that?
Carroll Rhodes: Most of it’s been civil rights. A lot of it is redistricting. Of course, I’ve had to do other things over the years to pay the bills.
MT: Remind me, where did you go to law school?
CR: The University of Mississippi.
MT: So what drew you to the legal profession? Where did the drive come from to want to be a lawyer?
Former Mississippi Supreme Court Justice Reuben Anderson speaks at a state flag commission meeting Wednesday, Sept. 2, 2020, in Jackson, Miss. Credit: AP Photo/Rogelio V. SolisCR: You’re not gonna believe this. I ought to make this off the record, but I’m gonna go ahead and tell you.
Ever since I was 5 years old, I knew that I wanted to be a lawyer, and ever since I was 5, we had just gotten a television. Seeing some of the fights for the rights of Black people. So I just knew. It was a calling. Like some ministers. It was a calling.
MT: And did you know it always wanted to be for civil rights litigation?
CR: I knew I always wanted to be about civil rights ever since I was a young guy, which is unusual. I’m going to tell you why it’s unusual. As far as role models, I didn’t know anything about R. Jess Brown, Jack Young. I didn’t know anything about any Black lawyers, really. Back then, I just knew that I wanted to be a lawyer doing civil rights.
MT: Were you one of the first African Americans to attend law school at Ole Miss?
CR: No. Reuben Anderson was the first. And there was another lawyer. I forgot his first name, but Reuben gets the credit for not just being the first one there but the first to graduate. (Editor’s note: In 1963, Cleve McDowell became the first Black student to attend the law school. University officials expelled him after they caught him with a pistol for self-protection. He went on to receive his law degree from Texas Southern University in Houston.) And I remember Constance Slaughter Harvey came. So there were several other lawyers who had who had gone through before.
And I would’ve gone probably sooner, except I went to Millsaps College. I wanted to go to law school, but couldn’t afford it. And so I tried to get a job here in Mississippi. Everywhere I went, I couldn’t get one. I finally had a lady, a white lady, at it was called South Central Bell back then, who told me, “You qualify to be here, but you’ll never get hired.” And I said, “Why?” She said, “You’ve been blacklisted.”
Like with the Sovereignty Commission files, because we did civil rights stuff. So I wound up joining the Air Force instead and worked for a couple of years. So that’s why. Otherwise, I would’ve been in law school in ’73, but I went in ’76.
Constance Slaughter-Harvey on Wednesday, March 2, 2022, at her law office in the building that once housed her parents’ store, the Six Cees, the first Black-owned business of its kind in Scott County. Slaughter-Harvey purchased the building in 1977 and converted it into her law office in Forest. Credit: Vickie D. King/Mississippi TodayMT: We don’t know if the Legislature will try to tackle congressional or legislative redistricting in a special session or the next regular session. But we do know that they’re thinking about it, at some point. And, I know that there were decades of litigation that went into trying to create a majority-Black congressional district, several majority-Black legislative districts. You mentioned you were involved in the ’91 litigation.
CR: From ’91 onward.
MT: Everything didn’t just get better after the Voting Rights Act?
CR: Irrespective of what the Supreme Court said. It didn’t get better on its own.
MT: What was the first redistricting case in Mississippi that you worked on or that you remember having some sort of involvement in?
CR: The first one I remember having involvement in was in 1976. The year I started Ole Miss Law School.
Frank Parker was a lawyer with the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, and they had an office here in Mississippi. And Barbara Phillips. And I graduated from a segregated all-Black high school in Hazlehurst called Harris High School. And one of the teachers there was a man by the name of Fred Jones.
And Fred Jones could pass for white. He was just that light-skinned. But he was also president of the Hazlehurst NAACP. And Fred Jones and some others had brought a suit against the city of Hazlehurst, my hometown, to change the method of election, because the members of the board of aldermen were elected at-large.
And Hazlehurst’s population at that time might’ve been 38% or 40% Black. No Black could win, and the NAACP got the lawyers committee to handle it. And Frank Parker asked me, I was more like an interpreter. He asked me to talk –
MT: To speak Southern?
Civil rights attorney Carroll Rhodes speaks of the history of redistricting and his legal work in helping to create majority-Black legislative districts in Mississippi during an interview at the state Capitol on Tuesday, May 12, 2026, in Jackson. Credit: Vickie D. King/Mississippi TodayCR: Yes. Frank was a Harvard-trained, Harvard-educated lawyer and lawyers often speak in legalese. You know, it’s hard for people to understand. And I was in law school, and Frank knew I was from Hazlehurst. So Frank asked me if I would come down sometimes and help explain. I was the interpreter. I would interpret it into plain English.
MT: What did you learn from him?
CR: He was a doer. As a matter of fact, Frank handled most of the early voting rights cases in Mississippi, dealing with congressional and legislative reapportionment.
Frank, I know he was involved in going to the U.S. Supreme Court, even on the legislative side, I think that was 14 times. So Frank was the one who started training me. And it just so happened, I got into it because Fred Jones, one of my school teachers, had gotten me to file the suit.
MT: What do you remember about that case? Did that spark your interest in redistricting, or fuel the fire?
CR: Yes, it did. And I had a good constitutional professor at Ole Miss, George Cochran.
And George Cochran had clerked for, I think, he had worked for the chief justice on the Supreme Court. And Cochran was interested in civil rights stuff, too. So I had the experience with the lawyers’ committee.
MT: So what, other than the local Hazlehurst redistricting, what was the first major redistricting that you were involved with? Was it congressional or legislative?
CR: And the reason I was giving the history about Frank was in 1980, the U.S. Supreme Court came down with the Mobile versus Bolden decision, and that was the first time the Supreme Court said that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act required proof of discriminatory intent. And so the civil rights community back then wanted Congress to amend Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, and was willing to extend Section 5.
And, after Congress amended Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the civil rights community had a big meeting in Birmingham with lawyers and civil rights activists on whether we would map out a strategy for challenging racial discriminatory redistricting plans and challenging at-large elections, because most, a lot of elections were at-large back then. And, so not only did we get additional training there, but that’s where I got involved.
And after the 1982 amendment, they extended Section 5, and I was involved with the Crystal Springs NAACP. The president at that time was challenging the county. She was the one who wanted to challenge the districts for members of the Board of Supervisors in Copiah County. At that time, all five supervisors were white. And so every time the Board of Supervisors came up with a redistricting plan, back then, they had to be pre-cleared. And I was involved with helping the community put together comprehensive objections to every plan that they came up with. And this was in ’82. So many different discriminatory plans throughout the country had been pre-cleared by the Justice Department, and we were successful in putting together the first comprehensive package to get the Justice Department to enter an objection to redistricting plans.
Voting stickers available for those who cast ballots Tuesday, April 1, 2025, in Jackson. Credit: Vickie D. King/Mississippi TodayThe Copiah County redistricting plan was the first one they entered an objection to, and it was in 1982, and we set the model for it.
MT: Across the state?
CR: Across the country. Across the country, where they had Section 5 coverage, and objections started flowing after that. And we had to bring lawsuits because not only were the plans discriminatory, but the reason they had to redistrict was because they were malapportioned.
They did not meet the one person, one vote. And so we brought suits. We brought several suits that were comprehensive. Copiah, Madison and many counties in the state, at one time. And so that was my first case. Actually, Frank was the lead counsel. But he let me handle the litigation. So, in ’82, after the Voting Rights Act was amended, that was my first foray into redistricting.
MT: So, have you ever been involved in any litigation with the 2nd Congressional District?
CR: Yeah. Back in ’84. Frank was involved with that, too. And I wasn’t. I was on the sidelines. When the first suit was brought in ’82, and then, I think, in ’84 was when the 2nd Congressional District was redrawn.
And although I wasn’t actually involved in the litigation part, I was involved in the community organizing.
MT: As you know, in the mid-’60s to, I would guess, the mid-’80s, correct me if I’m wrong, the way the Delta was drawn, was you had districts that would sort of run from east to west to split up the Delta.
CR: Yeah, and that’s where Frank was involved in litigation that took multiple times to go back and forth with the Supreme Court till they got it. Finally, the Delta remained intact.
MT: And I believe one of the judges involved in the three-judge panel was former Gov. J. P Coleman, who was a federal Court of Appeals judge?
CR: Yes.
MT: And, I know there were two other district judges, but they kind of dragged their feet a lot of times.
CR: They did. That’s why, that’s why Frank had to keep going back to the Supreme Court. An interesting side note on J. P. Coleman, when he was elected governor in 1955, when he did his gubernatorial address, he was opposed to integration. And he told them it would be easier to dip the Atlantic Ocean dry with a teaspoon than it would be for integration across the Mississippi. So it just shows you his way of thinking.
A visitor to the Mississippi Capitol uses his cellphone to photograph a graphic of the state that depicts population growth or loss in each county over a 10-year period, according to the Census, in Jackson, Miss., on Thursday, Aug. 26, 2021. Credit: AP Photo/Rogelio V. SolisSo that’s why Frank and they had to go to court so many times. Because every time the Supreme Court said, “No, I think y’all did it wrong. Redo it.” He makes only a slight little change. But, still discriminatory, they had to go back.
MT: Switching gears now. What about legislative redistricting? You said it was the ’90s when you first got involved in legislative redistricting. What were the circumstances surrounding that litigation?
CR: The 1982 amendments to Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, and Henry Kirksey at the time was the guru map maker. As a matter of fact, he was the one who did all the maps for congressional redistricting for Frank. And Kirksey had looked at legislative districts on the House and Senate side and said the way they were drawn, the criteria they would be, the Legislature was using to draw a whole lot more Black member districts, would give Black voters more of a chance to elect candidates of their choice.
And as a matter of fact, Kirksey drew some alternative plans for us that showed that we could double the number of Black-majority seats in the legislature. And we tried to negotiate with the Legislature to get the Legislature to create additional districts.
They would not do it. And so we wound up having to litigate that issue. And we settled the case. We doubled, more than doubled, the number of Blacks in the Legislature from 20 to 40-something districts.
Former Mississippi House Speaker Pro Tempore Robert Clark waves to friends in the Old Capitol Museum in Jackson on Aug. 9, 2017, during a program that recognized his 1967 election as Mississippi’s first Black legislator of the 20th century. Credit: AP Photo/Rogelio V. SolisMT: This may seem like a silly question, but what were the political effects, the political results of having more Black representation in the Legislature and having a Black congressman from Mississippi?
CR: Prior to having a Black congressman, and prior to having Blacks elected in the Legislature, Black communities’ interests were ignored. And for a long time in Mississippi, it was a one-party state. The Democratic Party ruled, and getting the Democratic nomination was tantamount to winning the general election.
That only started changing in the ’80s and, and the ’90s when more white Democrats started fleeing the Democratic Party and going to the Republican Party, singing out of the same hymn book, saying that, “I didn’t leave the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party left me.” And the reason they were saying that was because the Democratic Party’s stance on civil rights issues.
And so when that change took place, and you have Black-majority districts, Black communities could have people who press their issues within the Legislature. The downside was that as more Blacks got elected, more white voters fled to the Republican Party, or started voting for Republicans. And up until today, the Democratic Party is viewed as a Black party. The Republican Party is almost viewed as a white party. And you still have one-party rule. But we, we just changed that with the last case.
A view of the Mississippi flag at the state Capitol in Jackson on Wednesday, April 1, 2026. Credit: Eric Shelton/Mississippi TodayMT: Up until when you had Billy McCoy as House speaker, you would have certain Black legislators serve in leadership roles. There were white Democrats, too. And you had Black members who were the chairs of powerful committees. Like Robert Clark –
CR: Yes, and Percy Watson. They had a lot of Blacks as chairs of powerful committees, but whites still led the Democratic Party. As more Blacks got elected, more Blacks became chairman and whites fled to the Republican Party. And voting in Mississippi is racially polarized. And the Voting Rights Act did not have anything to do with the polarization. It was polarized before there was a Voting Rights Act.
MT: After the Callais decision, and I know you’re a bit of an optimist –
CR: I’m an eternal optimist.
MT: But, what do you think the effect of the Callais decision will be on redistricting now, especially in Mississippi, but across the country?
Rep. Percy W. Watson, D-Hattiesburg, discusses House Bill 2 on Thursday, Jan. 15, 2026, at the State Capitol in Jackson. Credit: Eric Shelton/Mississippi TodayCR: The Callais decision is a Hayes versus Tilden compromise moment in history. Now let me explain that. In 1876, Rutherford B. Hayes was the Republican candidate for president, Samuel Tilden was the Democratic candidate. The Republican Party was formed in part by abolitionists. The Dred Scott decision, one of the most horrible decisions ever by the Supreme Court, where Chief Justice Taney talked about, Blacks didn’t have any rights to associate with whites in any way, said, were so inferior and a person born of African descent had no rights which a white man was bound to respect.
And he and others on the court and within the legislative body, a lot of them were slave owners, and particularly Democrats in the South. They were Democrats. The Republican Party was formed in part with the abolitionists. They got Abraham Lincoln elected. And folks finally convinced Lincoln that slavery was wrong.
He did the Emancipation Proclamation. After the Civil War, when the North won, they, kind of, I say, corrected the Constitution with the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments. And the Republican Party was part of the push for the ratification of those amendments. The Democratic Party opposed it. You have whites in Mississippi, ever since then, even like Yellow Dog Democrats, they would remain loyal to the Democratic Party because the Democratic Party believed in states’ rights.
States’ rights believed that you could own people as property. And so Democrats were for keeping the Black people segregated. Republicans said let’s treat them as equals.
A portrait of former U.S. Sen. Blanche Kelso Bruce hangs in the Senate Gallery. The portrait by Simmie Lee Knox is based on a Matthew Brady photograph. Credit: Courtesy of U.S. SenateSo that’s the background for the Hayes-Tilden compromise because, in the election of 1876, there was some controversy about three Southern states, Louisiana, South Carolina and Florida, about their delegations.
And it went on for a while until some of the Republicans got with some so-called moderate Democrats and decided to do the compromise. And the reason for the compromise, after the 15th Amendment was ratified in 1870, Blacks began to vote in record numbers. We got two Black senators. Well, all were elected from the state Legislature.
But we had 15 or 16 Black representatives in the House. After the Hayes versus Tilden compromise, we had federal troops who were protecting the rights of Black people to vote. After that compromise, Hayes had to withdraw the federal troops. That started the reign of terror and then the second Mississippi plan with Jim Crow came into place. And the number of Blacks in Congress fell. The number of Blacks elected, because we had lieutenant governors, governors, members of the House and Senate. We had sheriffs. All of those went away because of the protection of the federal government. The federal troops were pulled out.
Callais pulled the protection of the Voting Rights Act. And I foresee that there are efforts underway to break up Black-majority districts, Latino-majority districts throughout the old Confederacy, throughout all the states in the old Confederacy. But I think history might not repeat itself this time.
MT: Why do you think that? Or why do you hope that it won’t?
CR: Well, the Blacks back then and now are not quite the same. Blacks back then were more easily intimidated.
Things might not go as smoothly this time around as they did. But it’s the same effect, withdrawing federal protection. The Voting Rights Act was a federal protection that we had. And that’s why I’m saying this is a repeat of the Hayes versus Tilden compromise with the federal protection.
MT: Do you think that there can be any realistic VRA challenges or VRA lawsuits filed with redistricting now going forward?
Pictured here are U.S. Sen. Hiram Revels of Mississippi, left, with six Black members of the U.S. House, Ben J.S. Turner of Alabama, Josiah T. Walls of Florida, Jefferson H. Long of Georgia, and Robert C. De Large, Joseph H. Rainy and R. Brown Elliot, all of South Carolina. Credit: Library of CongressCR: It might as well be constitutional challenges because this Supreme Court has done away with what Congress intended. So I think there will be a tussle, but there’s one thing different. There are benchmark districts established now. And so I think it’d be easier with lower federal judges to defend those benchmark districts. We’ve learned something from J.P. Coleman. Every time they make a small tweak, it keeps those districts in play.
MT: Do you think that, say, the 2nd Congressional District, do you think that if the Legislature wanted to, they could just carve it up? Or do you think that there’s some protection?
CR: There’s a long history in Mississippi that was litigated, and before Section 2, the district was shaped because of the 14th and 15th Amendments. So that district is the way it is. And the criteria that the state has used for the redistricting, we use compactness, contiguity, it’s going to make it hard for them to break it up without it being shown to be racially motivated. They can use politics all they want. And the other thing they need to worry about is being careful what they ask for. Like in Texas, they came up with five new Republican seats.
They might not win in any of those because the sentiment of voters has changed. And if you break up this huge swath of Black voters and put them in, you might not wind up with a Republican being elected.
MT: Are you scared or worried that essentially your life’s work, everything that you fought for since the ’70s, in terms of redistricting, all the legal motions, the hearings that you’ve attended to try to get more Black representation and more majority-Black districts, are you worried that essentially all of that could go up in flames?
Voting rights activists gather outside the Supreme Court in Washington, early Wednesday, Oct. 15, 2025, as the justices prepare to take up a major Republican-led challenge to the Voting Rights Act, the centerpiece legislation of the Civil Rights Movement. Credit: AP Photo/Cliff OwenCR: It would take a long time to dismantle that work. And before that work gets dismantled, there might be a change in the makeup of the Supreme Court.
MT: Is there anything else you want to talk about, or that you want to say that I didn’t ask about?
CR: For so long, Mississippi was just like the Supreme Court. Most of the elected officials were white. They would fight the creation of Black-majority districts.
But whenever they went across the country or other places to recruit business, they’d tout the number of Black elected officials in Mississippi’s history. But here, they fought those changes.
It’s the same way as the Supreme Court. They would tout the advancements made, but those advancements were made under the Voting Rights Act – not in spite of it. But they tout it as if these advancements were made in spite of the Voting Rights Act.
And white Republicans need to be careful what they wish for. They might get it and not like it.
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