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Voters elected Johnny DuPree to the Mississippi Senate. His 2025 win marked the first time that Hattiesburg residents would have a Black senator representing them in Jackson, even though over half of the city’s population is Black. Now, because of machinations with the legislative map, that representation could be in jeopardy.
DuPree may be one of the first Black politicians to bear the brunt of the Supreme Court’s consequential April ruling in Louisiana v. Callais. But he won’t be the last. An NPR analysis predicts that post Callais redistricting could portend the largest drop in Black representation across the country since the collapse of Reconstruction.
Some politicians are already sharpening their knives. Gov. Tate Reeves has said it is a matter of when, not if, the tenure ends for Rep. Bennie Thompson, who is the sole Black member of the state’s congressional delegation holding one of Mississippi’s four House seats.
In Mississippi, like in many other states in he aftermath of the Callais U.S. Supreme Court ruling, a state-level Voting Rights Act has been introduced in the Legislature. However, voter suppression policies aimed at Black voters, along with hostile majorities in the state’s legislative chambers, make the legislation’s pathway for enactment incredibly narrow.
DuPree’s district only had a Black majority because a federal court found that parts of the state’s 2022 legislative maps violated the Voting Rights Act. The 2025 maps sought to correct a historic injustice. With that map likely gone because of Callais, the Black majority district it created could be wiped away too. For DuPree, the erasure is unsurprising given the state’s tradition of voter suppression.
In an October interview, he quipped, “here we go again.”
Black Mississippians have been saying some version of that since 1890. In an interview earlier this year, community organizers Oleta Fitzgerald and Phaedra Robinson told Human Rights Watch, “Courts are stacked, the Legislature is stacked. It’s always been a fight for us in Mississippi, and it feels like they want to go back to the good old days.”
Sens. Hillman Frazier, left, and Johnny L. DuPree are seen on the Senate floor at the Capitol in Jackson on Thursday, Feb. 12, 2026. Credit: Eric Shelton/Mississippi TodayUntil 1944, Mississippi, representative of the one-party rule that dominated Jim Crow states, held its November general elections after a Democratic Party primary in which only white people were allowed to participate.
The legislative maps are one front, but not the only one. Take a look at Section 241 of the state Constitution, which was drafted back in 1890 to codify Jim Crow era restrictions. That constitutional section imposes a lifetime bar on voting for crimes the delegates believed Black people were more likely to commit.
In 2022, the full U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals agreed the original provision was “steeped in racism” but upheld it anyway.
The Sentencing Project estimates at least 43,700 Black Mississippians couldn’t vote in the 2024 elections because of that rule. Getting your vote back takes a governor’s pardon or a two-thirds vote of the Legislature. Between 2000 and 2015, only 335 people managed to claw back their right to vote.
That’s not all.
Mississippi ranks dead last nationally in the Cost of Voting Index, which measures how hard states make it to vote. The state requires photo identification at the polls, offers no early voting for most residents and no online registration.
Following the adoption of the 1890 Mississippi Constitution, near-universal registration among Black eligible voters dropped to around 7% and stayed that way until 1964. Within three years of the Voting Rights Act, nearly 60% of Black Mississippians were registered. Black Mississippians still register at rates among the highest in the country. That progress came from federal enforcement action and the Voting Rights Act. Those federal protections are exactly what Trump administration policies and Supreme Court rulings have been dismantling.
Within hours of the 2013 Supreme Court decision in Shelby County v. Holder, which gutted parts of the Voting Rights Act, Mississippi announced it would move forward with restrictive voter ID rules. It also requires notarizing both absentee ballot applications and ballot envelopes.
A new law Gov. Reeves signed in April called the SHIELD Act took effect July 1. It lets local officials demand a birth certificate, passport or naturalization papers from applicants and current voters whose citizenship they cannot confirm. Those documents cost money and time. Rural and low-income Mississippians, many of them Black women running households, often don’t have either to spare.
The U.S. has human rights obligations under international law that point the way back onto a better path. The United Nations Human Rights Committee has said that drawing electoral boundaries should not distort the distribution of voters or discriminate against any group.
In 2014 it also said the US “should ensure that all states reinstate voting rights to felons who have fully served their sentences.” The Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination prohibit laws with racially discriminatory effects even when they look neutral.
Mississippi organizers have outlasted worse. Medgar Evers was shot in his own driveway in 1963 after a meeting about voter registration.
Today, Black women across this state are the ones knocking on doors and arranging childcare, so mothers and grandmothers can get to the polls.
As the winds at the federal level shift, it’s all the more important to pass the Mississippi Voting Rights Act, which would enshrine powerful and critical voting rights protections into state law.
Henry Hicks is a consultant at Human Rights Watch.
Cassandra Welchlin is the executive director & co-convener of the Mississippi Black Women’s Roundtable.
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