‘We’re going backwards.’ Mississippians share experiences of voter suppression, dread of redistricting battle ...Middle East

This article is the first in a series on Mississippians sharing their thoughts on the new gerrymandering push embroiling Mississippi, the South and the nation.

Inside a tin-roofed shed on a grassy stretch along Dentville Road in Hazlehurst, Michael Watts’ grandmother did something she had never done before – she voted.

It was 1987, and Betty Watts had been too fearful to vote for her entire adult life. Polling taxes, literacy tests and intimidation aimed at deterring Black people from voting persisted until the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, when Betty Watts was middle-aged, and vestiges of Jim Crow and more subtle voter suppression lingered.

When Betty Watts was in her 60s, a white Democrat named Ray Mabus ran for governor promising that Mississippi would “never be last again.” The prospect of ousting adherents to a movement that took pride in “standing athwart history” propelled Betty Watts to the polls for the first time.

Mabus would go on to become the 60th governor of Mississippi, securing almost 90% of the Black vote, which included the late Betty Watts. The memory of his grandmother voting for the first time still lingers in Michael Watts’ memory. It resurfaced weeks ago when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down part of the Voting Rights Act and opened the door for states such as Mississippi to eliminate majority Black electoral districts.

Despite having the highest percentage of Black residents of any state in the country, Mississippi has no Black statewide elected officials and only one Black member of Congress, whose seat Republicans now have in their sights as a result of the Supreme Court ruling.

The ruling in the Louisiana v. Callais case places Mississippi and other Southern states at the center of a national partisan and racial political battle over redistricting.

The ruling has also prompted some Mississippians to grapple with questions over race and political representation in a state that’s home to people who lived through a period of widespread voter suppression targeting Black residents, or had family members who did. Such controversies aren’t only a distant relic of history.

As recently as last year, a George W. Bush-appointed federal judge ruled that Mississippi’s Supreme Court districts diluted the Black vote and ordered them redrawn. But now the legal landscape has changed, and some Mississippians worry about the diminishment of hard-won progress in voting rights and fairness.

‘That’s crazy’

President Donald Trump has urged Mississippi officials to redraw the state’s four congressional districts as part of his national push for Republican states to flip Democratic districts to the GOP in this year’s federal midterm elections.

In the Deep South, where partisanship and race are intertwined, this poses the specter of undoing decades of civil rights gains in voting.

Republican Gov. Tate Reeves, a devoted ally of Trump, has called off a special session he initially ordered to redraw state Supreme Court districts in light of the Callais decision, which could signal the state is unlikely to take the step of redrawing congressional maps before the 2026 midterms. But in a radio interview, Reeves vowed the state would redraw lines to oust Rep. Bennie Thompson, the lone Democrat and lone Black member of the state’s congressional delegation.

“The tenure of Congressman Bennie Thompson reigning terror on the 2nd Congressional District is over,” Reeves said. “It’s not a question of if. It’s a question of when.”

In Mississippi, the impact of the Supreme Court decision is almost certain to trickle down to the state and local level, as the decision significantly narrows how courts can require states to account for race in redistricting. The majority-white, Republican-dominated Legislature has already formed special committees in both chambers to consider redistricting, putting some legislative seats held by Black Democrats at risk.

Now, as Watts contemplates the effort to redraw lines and oust Black Democrats from office, he remembers that day nearly four decades ago, watching his grandmother vote for the first time. What stands out is the potential eradication of all the progress made in Mississippi to increase Black representation in elected offices.

“It kind of hurts to see how, in my lifetime, all of that is gone,” Watts said. “My grandmother was in her 60s, voting for the first time when I was 8 years old. And that’s just, that’s crazy.”

Betty Watts had come from Carpenter, Mississippi, and his grandfather, Tom, from Utica. They spent their lives as sharecroppers and met while picking cotton. When the Watts family later moved to Hazlehurst, they washed clothes in an iron pot out back and left them to dry outside. If it rained and the laundry wouldn’t dry, Betty Watts would hang her grandson’s clothes near their wood stove, and Michael Watts would go to school smelling of smoke. The family home had a five-gallon bucket in lieu of a toilet.

These material conditions and the burdens they imposed on daily life made voting a distant concern, Michael Watts said. When elections were discussed in the Watts household, it was often due to the fear they induced.

The specter of poll taxes and literacy tests, even after they were banned, instilled in Betty and Tom Watts a sense that they wouldn’t measure up to the standards imposed on those who exercised their right to vote.

“She didn’t want to do it because she was afraid she was going to fail them,” Watts said of his grandmother.

In 1987, Watts’ mother explained that poll taxes and literacy tests were gone, which helped coax Betty to the polls. But for Michael Watts’ late grandfather, Tom Watts, the fear would be insurmountable.

He never voted.

Michael Watts has a different fear — that the political representation in his home state will begin to look more like it did before Betty Watts summoned the courage to vote for the first time in the shed on Dentville Road.

“We’re going backwards,” Watts said. “That is not what the voters need. Their leaders are getting chosen for them. That’s not how it’s supposed to work.”

‘People are waking up’

Public opinion among Black Mississippians is not monolithic. That’s part of the argument made by Republicans like Reeves, who said federal law before the Callais decision engaged “in the offensive and demeaning assumption that Americans of a particular race, because of their race, think alike and share the same interests and preferences.”

The overwhelming majority of Black people in Mississippi vote for Democrats. But in the wake of the Callais decision, some have complicated feelings about the incumbents who represent their communities, even if they disagree with Republicans’ plans to gerrymander districts.

Bridgette Morgan, 37, is an attorney from Greenville. The predominantly Black Mississippi Delta is one of the poorest parts of the state, and many of its elected officials say the needs of their region are overlooked by the Republican-controlled Legislature.

Other areas have more hospitals and more taxpayer-funded special projects. The lion’s share of economic incentives and private investment have flowed east of Interstate 55, which divides the Delta from the rest of the state.

With that reality in mind, Morgan, who is Black and considers herself an independent, moved to Jackson and got involved with politics. She saw the city as the “playground of civil rights.”

“I was enamored by it,” Morgan said.

But she quickly became disillusioned with the area’s leaders, most of whom were Black Democrats. Morgan ran unsuccessfully for Hinds County Court judge, a defeat she said was brought about by opposition from Jackson’s entrenched political class.

Morgan believes some incumbents in heavily Black districts have failed to deliver for the constituents who elected them, which exacerbates the apathy that leads to lower turnout in these same districts.

“They’re apathetic at this point about this outcry about redistricting,” Morgan said. “People are waking up to some of our own leaders taking advantage, and we’re not getting what we voted for.”

A debate has long raged between white Republicans and Black Democrats about whether Mississippi’s longstanding issues with poor health outcomes and poverty in places such as Jackson and the Delta persist due to disinvestment from the state or mismanagement by local officials.

Unlike Watts, Morgan’s grandparents died when she was young, so the historical memory of race-based voter suppression never loomed as large.

She wants to see increased political competition in majority Black areas of the state, where she believes politicians have grown accustomed to getting re-elected without much effort or improving the lives of their constituents.

But she is quick to affirm that she does not want Black representation intentionally drawn out of existence, whether such an effort is driven by racism or partisanship.

“I am not for intentionally drawing out Black representation,” she said. “If that’s what the whole thing is — to keep any type of person who is Black from office — I have an issue with it. Of course, we want to be represented by people who look like us. But you can look like us and still not have our best interests at heart.”

Partisan gerrymandering is ‘just as bad as any other kind’

Melody Worsham, 64, grew up in Ocean Springs, the daughter of a military father stationed in Vietnam while the family lived in Mississippi.

Worsham, who is white, remembers hearing about Black neighborhoods on “the other side of the tracks,” and stories of difficulty setting up voting precincts in these areas.

When Worsham was in third grade, Black students arrived at her school through busing and desegregation orders, and she befriended a girl who sat behind her in class. On the playground, they once touched each other’s skin, curious whether it would feel different.

“We just wanted to see what we had in common,” Worsham said.

She also remembers “whites only” signs in downtown Ocean Springs persisting on some storefront windows into the late 1970s and early ’80s.

For Worsham, who now works in the mental health field and lives in Biloxi, these visceral memories cannot be divorced from the current calls to redraw electoral maps and potentially eliminate Black representation in service of a partisan agenda.

“It’s disgusting how they’ll go, ‘Oh, see, we’ve been wrong all this time, and we’ve got to correct the egregious sins of our past.’ And it’s like, no — you’re just trying to commit another sin that you have rationalized,” Worsham said.

But Worsham also has reservations about how map drawing was practiced before the Callais ruling.

Protecting minority representation should not uphold the assumption that race always predicts political affiliation.

“We’ve got to stop assuming that all Black people are Democrats,” she said. “I hang out with Black people all the time, and not all of them are Democrats.”

Worsham would like to see maps drawn by population count and geography alone.

“The partisan gerrymandering,” Worsham said, “is just as bad as any other kind.”

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