Mississippi isn’t known for being politically progressive, so what happened during the November elections when three Black democrats won should have gotten our attention. Here’s why.
After enslavement ended, Black men in Mississippi elected the country’s first Black member of Congress: Hiram Revels. Whites in the state were determined to make sure Black votes would never matter again, and other states with Black people followed suit.
Legislators added poll taxes and literacy tests to the state’s 1890 constitution, and white terrorists murdered Black voters. This horror ended when Black activists fought to remove a constitutional provision that made statewide elections dependent on the popular vote in 2020, and won a redistricting case that gave more power to Black voters in 2022.
In November, three Democrats won, meaning the Republican supermajority in the state legislature was finally dead. In the state with the nation’s largest Black population, what happens now sets precedents for other states seeking to balance power, just as it did back in the day.
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