Ed Blackmon Jr. was 16 years old, locked in a Canton jail cell with the roar of a poultry truck engine still fresh on his mind, when he decided to become a lawyer.
The police had just jailed him and dozens of others on trumped-up charges of participating in a parade without a permit after orchestrating a mass protest in the middle of the Civil Rights era in support of voting rights for Black Mississippians.
The demonstrators had only marched 30 yards from a local church when police put them in handcuffs, hauled them off in a poultry delivery truck that still had chicken dung in it, and threw them into the Madison County Jail to face the bogus charges.
While lying on the hot jail floor during the summer, the young protester encountered someone who would change his trajectory in life, arguably the course of Mississippi. Blackmon met Carsie Hall, a sharp-dressed NAACP attorney who defended protesters during Freedom Summer.
Former state Rep. Ed Blackmon describes an editorial cartoon depicting himself and a political rival in the mid-70s debating Canton redistricting, at his law office on Wednesday, June 10, 2026, in Canton. Credit: Vickie D. King/Mississippi Today“Carsie walked up to the cell, and he told us, ‘Don’t worry about it. On Monday, I’m getting y’all out of here.’ At that moment I said, ‘I want to be a lawyer.’”
Hall followed through on his promise, and law enforcement released the protesters from jail. Blackmon graduated from law school in Washington, D.C., a few years later.
Now 78, Blackmon has spent his life using the law to build Black political power in Mississippi: suing to dismantle at-large electoral districts, redrawing legislative maps to more than double Black representation in the Legislature and even engineering the state’s first majority-Black judicial subdistricts.
But the U.S. Supreme Court has largely unwound the Voting Rights Act, which made much of Blackmon’s work possible, in its recent Callais decision. The landmark decision has cleared the way for Southern states such as Mississippi to dismantle majority-Black political districts.
Both House Speaker Jason White and Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann have created committees to explore redistricting over the summer and fall. Gov. Tate Reeves has indicated he will likely call a special legislative session before January for lawmakers to redraw the state’s legislative districts.
The Canton attorney and former legislator of 40 years says he’s watched this movie play out before, and Blackmon knows how it ends: not well, but it’s not forever.
“Mississippi is a good example for the rest of the country,” Blackmon told Mississippi Today in an interview at his law office. “The country right now is where Mississippi is, where Mississippi’s been for a long time.”
An editorial cartoon at the law office of former state Rep. Ed Blackmon depicting Blackmon and a political rival in the mid-70s debating Canton redistricting, Wednesday, June 10, 2026, in Canton. Credit: Vickie D. King/Mississippi TodayWhen Blackmon first returned to his hometown after law school, very few Black officials were elected to local or state offices, including in Canton. A reason Black candidates faced steep odds of winning office is that local candidates had to run in at-large districts, a voting system in which officials represent an entire city or county rather than a specific slice of it, such as a ward or district. White politicians used this system to effectively prevent Black candidates from winning office.
Blackmon filed a federal lawsuit under the Voting Rights Act to force the city of Canton to create proportional, single-member districts, which divide a city or county into distinct pieces, each electing its own candidate. This way, a concentrated minority population in one area of a city had a real chance to elect someone of their choice.
The litigation was successful, and he successfully replicated these lawsuits in cities across the state. But these lawsuits took precious time, money and effort to tackle bit by bit.
By 1984, Blackmon was elected to the House himself, one of only a handful of Black legislators at the time. To his surprise, the speaker appointed him to the Apportionment and Elections Committee, which had jurisdiction over redistricting.
During the 1992 redistricting cycle, Blackmon realized he had a golden opportunity to attempt to redraw the entire state at once by working from within the political system rather than using the courts to challenge the maps district by district.
He fought to substantially redraw the 122 House districts and overhaul the map by creating more majority-Black districts.
But his plan got a cold reception, even with other Black legislators, because, like their white colleagues, they also wanted to protect their districts and not have to campaign in a new area.
“At the end of the day, we’re selfish politicians just like everybody else,” Blackmon said. You want to protect your district. That’s the first thing that comes to mind. You want to protect your district, and that’s it.”
Blackmon pressed ahead and took his own legislative map and traveled with Carrol Rhodes, his friend and fellow attorney, to the U.S. Department of Justice, which at the time still had to approve, or “preclear,” any changes to Mississippi’s election maps.
The Justice Department was able to compare it to the Legislature’s map, which it rejected. This sent the fight back to a three-judge federal panel, which told lawmakers to either draw new maps themselves or have the courts do it for them.
The panel’s threat coincided with an ongoing battle for House speaker, arguably the most powerful position in state government. With the House divided over who should be speaker, Blackmon suddenly found he could wield new power when Speaker Tim Ford needed to secure more votes to continue serving.
He struck a deal with Ford: Blackmon could secure him nine votes for speaker, in exchange for control over redistricting, a Black speaker pro tempore, Black committee chairs and secretaries.
Ford won the speakership. Blackmon got his maps. The next election, Black representation in the Legislature more than doubled, from 21 members to 47.
Looking back, Blackmon said one regret of his was not building enough flexibility into those maps to keep evolving them as Mississippi’s political landscape changed.
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He planned to gradually reduce the concentration of Black voters in some districts over time, spreading them into more districts to make them competitive rather than packing them into a smaller number of safe seats.
But when he attempted to “unpack” the majority-Black districts into more competitive ones, his own Black colleagues, who were by then protected incumbents, didn’t want their districts touched.
Now, the Legislature could be on the verge of reducing the number of majority-Black seats in the Capitol, erasing a lot of Blackmon’s work, though the longtime legislator said he thinks it would take a lot to fully eradicate the system he helped build.
Blackmon said he isn’t counting the fight as over, just paused. He points to his sons, state Sen. Bradford Blackmon and state Rep. Lawrence Blackmon, as evidence that the work continues, even if progress now comes in smaller increments than the sweeping changes of the 1990s.
The elder Blackmon said the next generation will have to continue this fight and learn from his successes. He believes when the pendulum swings back toward opportunity for Black candidates to make gains, they have to seize it.
“It may not even be in my lifetime, but I guarantee you it will swing,” Blackmon said.
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