Mississippi with its distinction as the state where the tide of progress is blocked and pushed back, is in the news. It is in an abortion case before the Supreme Court.
But first, some history.
During Reconstruction, Mississippi became a Black power center in this country. There were not only more Black people than white ones; there were also more registered Black voters than white ones.
Mississippi gave the United States its first two Black senators.
But white racists employed every method of intimidation possible to dissuade Black people from voting.
Hence the Mississippi Plan, in which terrorist groups like the Red Shirts and rifle clubs used physical violence — including murder — and economic coercion to wrest back control of the state’s government.
President Ulysses S. Grant resisted sending troops because of political considerations, This keeps resurfacing over and over throughout the history of this country and continues to this day.
A compromise over the contested presidential election of 1876 allowed Reconstruction to fail and led to the withdrawal of federal troops from Southern states.
By 1890, white supremacists had gathered enough power in Mississippi to call a constitutional convention to write white supremacy into the state’s DNA. Although a majority of the state was Black, only one Black delegate was allowed at the convention.
The new Constitution included voter suppression tactics like poll taxes and tests.
Six years later, in 1896, a Black man named Henry Williams was indicted on charges of murder and sentenced to be hanged. He appealed on the grounds that the jury was almost entirely white, and Williams argued that this was a violation of his 14th Amendment rights.
The case, Williams v. Mississippi, made it all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled unanimously that Williams had not shown that Mississippi’s new Constitution was discriminatory.
Justice Joseph McKenna cited a South Carolina Supreme Court ruling that declared “the Negro race had acquired or accentuated certain peculiarities of habit, or temperament, and of character which clearly distinguished it as a race from the whites; a patient, docile people, but careless, landless, migratory within narrow limits, without forethought, and its criminal members given to furtive offenses, rather than the robust crimes of the whites.” Unbelievable!
The Supreme Court of the United States rubber-stamped Jim Crow, so Black progress could be rolled back for decades.
Other states followed Mississippi’s example and convened constitutional conventions of their own, where they instituted statutes to disenfranchise Black people.
Turning to the oral arguments before the Supreme Court on Wednesday in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.
It is another Mississippi case poised to roll back constitutional rights, opening the door for another age of Jim Crow, only this time the targets won’t be Black bodies but women’s bodies.
In the late 1800s, opponents of progress had exercised a methodical, decades-long campaign to subjugate and oppress Black people. The same has been done to women by the opponents of abortion.
Remember that no civil rights are permanent. Every right you win, you must defend. Rights, unfortunately, can be withdrawn. Whether Roe v. Wade falls or is significantly diminished, it will raise the question: Which rights are next? Presumably, many others could be vulnerable.
So join the NABWMT against this racism and sexism and do what you can to protect Black and Women’s rights.