No. of Recommendations: 2
...Mississippi's Jim Crow-era prohibitions on allowing people convicted of certain crimes to vote will remain after the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal in the case today...
...Mississippi's white supremacist leaders adopted it in 1890 in an attempt to disenfranchise Black residents for life. White lawmakers designated certain crimes that they believed Black people were more likely to commit as lifelong disenfranchising crimes. The law still disproportionately disenfranchises Black Mississippians at higher rates than white residents...
...in 1890, white Mississippi lawmakers began drafting a new constitution riddled with Jim Crow laws. 'The President of the 1890 Mississippi Constitutional Convention said it plain: 'Let us tell the truth if it bursts to the bottom of the Universe ' We came here to exclude the negro. Nothing short of this will answer.' James K. Vardaman, one of its drafters, explained the goal: 'There is no use to equivocate or lie about the matter ' Mississippi's constitutional convention of 1890 was held for no other purpose than to eliminate the n'ger from politics. Not the 'ignorant and vicious', as some of the apologists would have you believe, but the n'ger.'...
...The State amended the Constitution in 1950, removing burglary as a disenfranchising crime. Later, in 1968, the 5th Circuit's opinion says, the State made additional changes by voter referendum, including by adding 'the 'non-black' crimes of 'murder' and 'rape' to the disenfranchising crimes in Section 241.'..
'If Section 241 had never been amended, the provision would violate the Equal Protection Clause,' the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals' majority said in its ruling last year. '' Critically, however, it has been amended.'...
https://www.mississippifreepress.org/34312/mississ... 