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With bipartisan majority, House passes bill to restore voting rights to people convicted of nonviolent crimes

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A large majority of House members voted on Thursday to approve a plan that creates a process for people previously convicted of some nonviolent felony offenses to have their voting rights restored — the first of such a vote in Mississippi in more than a decade. 

The House voted 96-11 to pass House Bill 1609, a bipartisan proposal to automatically restore suffrage to people convicted of nonviolent disenfranchising felonies after they’ve completed the terms of their sentence.

“It lets folks, five years after they’ve finished their sentence and satisfied all conditions, restore their rights … for folks that have cleaned their life up and gone straight,” House Speaker Jason White, R-West, told Mississippi Today. “It’s not about rewarding that, but it’s about recognizing it and placing them on that better path.”

Under the Mississippi Constitution, people convicted of any of 10 types of felonies lose their voting rights for life. Various opinions from the Mississippi Attorney General’s Office expanded the list of disenfranchising felonies to 23.

White, the first-term speaker, tasked House Constitution Committee Chairman Price Wallace, R-Mendenhall, and House Judiciary B Chairman Kevin Horan, R-Grenada, with coming up with a feasible plan to restore suffrage to some people convicted of nonviolent felons.

READ MORE: Speaker White asks GOP leaders to explore restoration of voting rights to some people convicted of felonies

The House measure would allow people convicted of nonviolent offenses such as bad check writing, perjury and theft to regain their suffrage if they have not been convicted of another felony for five years after completing their sentence and paying any outstanding fines.

But people convicted of murder, arson, armed robbery, carjacking, embezzling more than $5,000, rape, statutory rape, bribery, perjury, human trafficking and voter fraud would still lose their voting rights for life.

Rep. Kabir Karriem, D-Columbus, has filed legislation for years to restore voting rights to people convicted of felony offenses, but it never gained major traction at the Capitol. Karriem called the bill’s passage a “historic moment” and thanked Republican leaders for working with him on the proposal.

“I think this bill restores hope as it makes its way through the process,” Karriem said. “It gives folks who have walked around with a scarlet letter on their chest for so long who have paid their debt to society a sense of hope.”

About 37,900 names are on the Secretary of State’s voter disenfranchisement list as of Jan. 29. The list, provided to Mississippi Today through a public records request, goes back to 1992 for felony convictions in state court.

That number, however, may not be fully accurate because no state agency tracks people once they are struck for the voter rolls. Studies commissioned by civil rights organizations in 2018 estimated between 44,000 and 50,000 Mississippians were disenfranchised.

The practice of stripping voting rights away for life from people originated in the 1890 Constitution, when white supremacist leaders intentionally tried to disenfranchise Black Mississippians or keep them out of elected office. With a justice system fully on their side, the white leaders at the time chose to include crimes they believed Black people were more likely to commit.

Rep. Cheikh Taylor, D-Starkville, who is also the current chairman of the Mississippi Democratic Party, said that while the practice has racist roots, he believes the bill’s passage debunks the notion that only Democrats and people of color are convicted felons.

“People suffer from these conditions in every village and hamlet in the state of Mississippi in all of our districts — and not just minority districts,” Taylor said.  

The current process to have someone’s suffrage restored is burdensome. It requires a lawmaker to introduce a bill on an individual’s behalf, and two-thirds of lawmakers in both legislative chambers must agree. A person can also seek a gubernatorial pardon, though no executive pardon has been handed down since Gov. Haley Barbour’s final days in office in 2011.

The bill now heads to the Republican-majority Senate, where it may receive a frosty reception. The 52-member Senate on Wednesday voted 29-23 to reject a separate bill that would restore Second Amendment rights to people previously convicted of nonviolent felony offenses.

Senate Bill 2626 did not address voting rights, but it could serve as a barometer for how the Capitol’s upper chamber will address the House’s suffrage restoration proposal.

Sen. Jeremy England, R-Vancleave, said he voted against the proposal because he didn’t know enough information about the legislation, but he was open to reconsidering his vote.

“I’m sure even I have constituents who served their time … and would like to have this right restored,” England said.

Senators held the bill on a procedural motion, meaning they could debate the issue again at a later time and change their minds.

Senate Judiciary B Chairman Joey Fillingane, R-Sumrall, and Sen. Rod Hickman, D-Macon, told Mississippi Today that they plan on working with their colleagues to address their concerns and reiterate what the legislation aims to accomplish.

“I think some people just didn’t understand what the bill was trying to actually do,” Fillingane said. “If you’ve completed the terms of your sentence, it was nonviolent, you haven’t committed another crime for five years, then what’s the problem?” 

READ MORE: Lawmakers consider restoring suffrage, gun rights to those convicted of some nonviolent crimes

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

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On this day in 1903, W.E.B. Du Bois urged active resistance to racist policies

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mississippitoday.org – @MSTODAYnews – 2025-04-27 07:00:00

April 27, 1903

W.E.B. Du Bois by James E. Purdy in 1907 from the National Portrait Gallery.

W.E.B. Du Bois, in his book, “The Souls of Black Folk,” called for active resistance to racist policies: “We have no right to sit silently by while the inevitable seeds are sown for a harvest of disaster to our children, black and white.” 

He described the tension between being Black and being an American: “One ever feels his twoness, — an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.” 

He criticized Washington’s “Atlanta Compromise” speech. Six years later, Du Bois helped found the NAACP and became the editor of its monthly magazine, The Crisis. He waged protests against the racist silent film “The Birth of a Nation” and against lynchings of Black Americans, detailing the 2,732 lynchings between 1884 and 1914. 

In 1921, he decried Harvard University’s decisions to ban Black students from the dormitories as an attempt to renew “the Anglo-Saxon cult, the worship of the Nordic totem, the disenfranchisement of Negro, Jew, Irishman, Italian, Hungarian, Asiatic and South Sea Islander — the world rule of Nordic white through brute force.” 

In 1929, he debated Lothrop Stoddard, a proponent of scientific racism, who also happened to belong to the Ku Klux Klan. The Chicago Defender’s front page headline read, “5,000 Cheer W.E.B. DuBois, Laugh at Lothrup Stoddard.” 

In 1949, the FBI began to investigate Du Bois as a “suspected Communist,” and he was indicted on trumped-up charges that he had acted as an agent of a foreign state and had failed to register. The government dropped the case after Albert Einstein volunteered to testify as a character witness. 

Despite the lack of conviction, the government confiscated his passport for eight years. In 1960, he recovered his passport and traveled to the newly created Republic of Ghana. Three years later, the U.S. government refused to renew his passport, so Du Bois became a citizen of Ghana. He died on Aug. 27, 1963, the eve of the March on Washington.

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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Jim Hood’s opinion provides a roadmap if lawmakers do the unthinkable and can’t pass a budget

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mississippitoday.org – @BobbyHarrison9 – 2025-04-27 06:00:00

On June 30, 2009, Sam Cameron, the then-executive director of the Mississippi Hospital Association, held a news conference in the Capitol rotunda to publicly take his whipping and accept his defeat.

Cameron urged House Democrats, who had sided with the Hospital Association, to accept the demands of Republican Gov. Haley Barbour to place an additional $90 million tax on the state’s hospitals to help fund Medicaid and prevent the very real possibility of the program and indeed much of state government being shut down when the new budget year began in a few hours. The impasse over Medicaid and the hospital tax had stopped all budget negotiations.

Barbour watched from a floor above as Cameron publicly admitted defeat. Cameron’s decision to swallow his pride was based on a simple equation. He told news reporters, scores of lobbyists and health care advocates who had set up camp in the Capitol as midnight on July 1 approached that, while he believed the tax would hurt Mississippi hospitals, not having a Medicaid budget would be much more harmful.

Just as in 2009, the Legislature ended the 2025 regular session earlier this month without a budget agreement and will have to come back in special session to adopt a budget before the new fiscal year begins on July 1. It is unlikely that the current budget rift between the House and Senate will be as dramatic as the 2009 standoff when it appeared only hours before the July 1 deadline that there would be no budget. But who knows what will result from the current standoff? After all, the current standoff in many ways seems to be more about political egos than policy differences on the budget.

The fight centers around multiple factors, including:

  • Whether legislation will be passed to allow sports betting outside of casinos.
  • Whether the Senate will agree to a massive projects bill to fund local projects throughout the state.
  • Whether leaders will overcome hard feelings between the two chambers caused by the House’s hasty final passage of a Senate tax cut bill filled with typos that altered the intent of the bill without giving the Senate an opportunity to fix the mistakes.
  • Whether members would work on a weekend at the end of the session. The Senate wanted to, the House did not.

It is difficult to think any of those issues will rise to the ultimate level of preventing the final passage of a budget when push comes to shove.

But who knows? What we do know is that the impasse in 2009 created a guideline of what could happen if a budget is not passed.

It is likely that parts, though not all, of state government will shut down if the Legislature does the unthinkable and does not pass a budget for the new fiscal year beginning July 1.

An official opinion of the office of Attorney General Jim Hood issued in 2009 said if there is no budget passed by the Legislature, those services mandated in the Mississippi Constitution, such as a public education system, will continue.

According to the Hood opinion, other entities, such as the state’s debt, and court and federal mandates, also would be funded. But it is likely that there will not be funds for Medicaid and many other programs, such as transportation and aspects of public safety that are not specifically listed in the Mississippi Constitution.

The Hood opinion reasoned that the Mississippi Constitution is the ultimate law of the state and must be adhered to even in the absence of legislative action. Other states have reached similar conclusions when their legislatures have failed to act, the AG’s opinion said.

As is often pointed out, the opinion of the attorney general does not carry the weight of law. It serves only as a guideline, though Gov. Tate Reeves has relied on the 2009 opinion even though it was written by the staff of Hood, who was Reeves’ opponent in the contentious 2019 gubernatorial campaign.

But if the unthinkable ever occurs and the Legislature goes too far into a new fiscal year without adopting a budget, it most likely will be the courts — moreso than an AG’s opinion — that ultimately determine if and how state government operates.

In 2009 Sam Cameron did not want to see what would happen if a budget was not adopted. It also is likely that current political leaders do not want to see the results of not having a budget passed before July 1 of this year.

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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Mississippi Today

1964: Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party was formed

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mississippitoday.org – @MSTODAYnews – 2025-04-26 07:00:00

April 26, 1964

Aaron Henry testifies before the Credentials Committee at the 1964 Democratic National Convention.

Civil rights activists started the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to challenge the state’s all-white regular delegation to the Democratic National Convention. 

The regulars had already adopted this resolution: “We oppose, condemn and deplore the Civil Rights Act of 1964 … We believe in separation of the races in all phases of our society. It is our belief that the separation of the races is necessary for the peace and tranquility of all the people of Mississippi, and the continuing good relationship which has existed over the years.” 

In reality, Black Mississippians had been victims of intimidation, harassment and violence for daring to try and vote as well as laws passed to disenfranchise them. As a result, by 1964, only 6% of Black Mississippians were permitted to vote. A year earlier, activists had run a mock election in which thousands of Black Mississippians showed they would vote if given an opportunity. 

In August 1964, the Freedom Party decided to challenge the all-white delegation, saying they had been illegally elected in a segregated process and had no intention of supporting President Lyndon B. Johnson in the November election. 

The prediction proved true, with white Mississippi Democrats overwhelmingly supporting Republican candidate Barry Goldwater, who opposed the Civil Rights Act. While the activists fell short of replacing the regulars, their courageous stand led to changes in both parties.

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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