‘We will not go back to Jim Crow’: thousand of Mississippians rally for voting rights

Thousands of Mississippians, along with allies from other southern states, gathered at the state’s War Memorial Building auditorium on Wednesday in support of voting rights. It was the latest in a series of actions protesting the supreme court’s recent decision gutting the provision of the Voting Rights Act preventing racial discrimination, and held on a site integral to the state’s history of Black disenfranchisement.Section 2 “stopped states, counties, cities, from passing redistricting maps that discriminate against Black voters and it led to the biggest growth of Black political power since Reconstruction”, said Amir Badat, the southern states director at the voting rights group Fair Fight Action.“And now, the Roberts court has opened the door to the biggest destruction of Black political power since the end of Reconstruction.”The rally was led by a coalition of organizations, including People’s Advocacy Institute, Mississippi-votes" class="entity-link entity-organization" data-entity-id="131052" data-entity-type="organization">Mississippi Votes, Mississippi-poor-peoples-campaign" class="entity-link entity-organization" data-entity-id="131053" data-entity-type="organization">Mississippi Poor People’s Campaign, One Voice, Fair Fight, Mississippi-for-a-just-world" class="entity-link entity-organization" data-entity-id="131055" data-entity-type="organization">Mississippi for a Just World and NAACP, among them. It followed the “All Roads Lead to the South” rally in Montgomery, Alabama, over the weekend.Since the supreme court decision in Louisiana v Callais, southern states have scrambled to redraw their congressional districts and dilute Black political power in the process. Florida’s Republicans signed a new map shortly after the supreme court decision came down. Republicans in Tennessee eliminated the state’s one Black congressional district and Alabama, Louisiana, South Carolina and Georgia are all moving in turn.Mississippi, whose population is nearly 40% Black, was initially set to enter the redistricting battlefield, with Tate Reeves, the state’s governor, calling a special session to be held on 20 May. Reeves since reversed his decision, though he said he expects the state to redraw maps before elections in 2027.In 1890, following Reconstruction, white supremacist Mississippi legislators met at the Old Capitol – next to the War Memorial, the site of the rally – and enacted the state’s constitution, which implemented the “Mississippi Plan” to disenfranchise Black voters.The special session that Reeves called was also slated to be held at the Old Capitol, the site that effectively ushered in Jim Crow in Mississippi.“We had to come here to the crime scene because it’s time to arrest the state of Mississippi,” said Danyelle Holmes, senior social justice organizer with Repairers of the Breach and the Poor People’s Campaign. “Today we come to serve notice that we will not go back to the days of Jim Crow. We will not go back to 1890. We are a people who will take a stand and fight.”Multiple people waved signs bearing images of legendary civil rights activist Medgar Evers, the NAACP field secretary of Mississippi who was murdered because of his efforts to secure the vote for Black Mississippians. Signs read “Protect our vote” and “Jim Crow Must Go”, and the crowd heard from speakers, activists and advocates warning against redistricting efforts in southern states. They sang freedom songs popularized by the civil rights movement; participated in call and responses and prayers that evoked Black churches; and stood to their feet to march through downtown Jackson.Chanting, the crowd weaved from the Old Capitol, passed the state capitol, governor’s mansion and state and local buildings, to the Jackson Convention Complex, where the rally continued. There, the crowd swelled to the thousands.On the convention stage, the crowd heard from Bennie Thompson, the representative whose district Reeves and other Mississippi Republicans have expressly planned to target, Derrick Johnson, the NAACP president, Eddie Glaude, an author, and others.Justin Jones, a Tennessee state representative, drove six hours from Nashville to attend the rally. He, along with student activists from Mississippi-for-a-just-world" class="entity-link entity-organization" data-entity-id="131055" data-entity-type="organization">Mississippi for a Just World, helped lead the rally to the convention complex.“We’re not going down without a fight. We may not be a swing state in Mississippi or Tennessee or Alabama, but we’ll swing back on you,” he said to the audience. “We’ll fight back with everything we have. We come in the spirit of our ancestors. We come in the spirit of those who aren’t intimidated by bully clubs and water hoses. We are an intergenerational movement. We come as one, but we stand as 10,000.”