By Caleb Bedillion, The Marshall Project
This article was first published by The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization covering the U.S. criminal justice system. Sign up for their newsletters, and follow them on Instagram, TikTok, Reddit and Facebook.
Mississippi’s Black voters recently won a victory that puts them on the brink of having greater sway over who sits on the state’s Supreme Court.
But that win may be short-lived.
In the coming months, the U.S. Supreme Court will rule on a case that could weaken or overturn key parts of the Voting Rights Act — a Civil Rights-era law that protects the power of racial minorities to elect candidates of their choice.
If the law is upended, it could radically alter the country’s voting maps, a shift that would be felt heavily in Mississippi and unwind decades of progress for Black voters across the U.S.
Last year, a federal judge found that the current voting map used to elect Mississippi Supreme Court justices illegally diminishes Black voting power in violation of the Voting Rights Act.
U.S. District Court Judge Sharion Aycock then ordered Mississippi lawmakers to redraw one of the three districts that are used to elect the state’s nine Supreme Court justices. In their ongoing legislative session, lawmakers have taken preliminary steps to comply.
Mississippi has the highest Black population share of any state, at about 37%, but just one of the nine justices is Black. There have only ever been four Black justices on the Mississippi Supreme Court in the state’s history, and none of them have ever served at the same time.
That electoral history is “bleak,” according to Aycock, who heard arguments over the matter in a non-jury trial last year in northern Mississippi. A George W. Bush appointee, Ayock concluded in her decision that “Black candidates who desire to run for the Mississippi Supreme Court face a grim likelihood of success.”
The Voting Rights Act requires otherwise, Aycock ruled. The act, first passed in 1965, has been a bedrock legal guarantee of political equality and full democratic inclusion for Black Americans and other racial minorities.
The pending U.S. Supreme Court decision in Louisiana v. Callais could weaken or even eliminate Section 2, a key part of the Voting Rights Act. This section is critical to lawsuits that challenge racial discrimination in election maps and that Aycock relied on to support her ruling. The case, brought by a group of self-identified “non-African American” voters against Louisiana’s congressional map, could put into doubt legal rulings across the country that have required districts that favor racial minorities.
Lawmakers are responding to Aycock’s order, but slowly.
Powerful committee heads overseeing the process say they want to see if a decision in the Callais case comes before legislators adjourn for the year in early April. A decision could come at any point before the end of the Supreme Court’s term in June, and many legal observers said after the oral arguments in October that they expect the court to severely limit the Voting Rights Act.
That leaves Mississippi’s Black voters in a legal quagmire, holding out hope for the prospect of greater influence over the state’s high court while fearing a national unwinding of Black political power and representation.
“It’s unsettling for people of color here in the state of Mississippi to be waiting for them to push their pencil to draw lines,” said Rep. Kabir Karriem, a Democrat who chairs the Legislative Black Caucus in the Mississippi House of Representatives. “It’s long overdue, but with the [U.S.] Supreme Court holding us in the balance, we don’t know what to expect.”
Mississippi’s voting districts under scrutiny
The Mississippi Supreme Court, like all state-level high courts, potentially wields significant power. In Mississippi, that power has risen and fallen throughout the decades, as has the court’s commitment to upholding the Constitutional promise of racial equality.
In recent years, the state Supreme Court has struck down the process to put citizen-led initiatives on the ballot and made it harder for death row prisoners to appeal their cases. It has also pushed modest reforms of the state’s beleaguered public defense system and imposed requirements intended to make money bail less burdensome.
Mississippi is among only six states to elect Supreme Court justices from district-level elections rather than statewide elections or gubernatorial appointments.
That’s an arrangement that, at least on paper, could improve the standing of Black voters in Supreme Court elections. While Black voters make up a sizable bloc, they aren’t a majority of the state, and voting patterns remain highly polarized by race in the state. No Black candidate has won a statewide election since Reconstruction.
Even so, the districts used in Supreme Court elections weaken the influence of Black voters, according to a 2022 lawsuit filed by a coalition of Black voters.
The current districts were drawn in 1987, an unusually long time compared to the other states that use judicial voting districts for state supreme court seats. There are three districts, each of which sends three justices to the court. Black voters currently make up just shy of a majority in one of the three districts, with the Black-majority Delta region split between two different districts.
When the lawsuit was filed, there were two justices on the court who had won elections with Black support.
But by the time Aycock ruled last August, there was only one. A White justice who had historically been elected with the support of Black voters — and who often dissented from the court’s conservative majority — was defeated in 2024 by a White Republican state senator.
That left Leslie King as the lone justice on the court with a history of Black electoral support. King is only the fourth Black justice to sit on the court since the 1985 appointment of Reuben Anderson by the governor. To stress the hardship Black candidates face in judicial elections, plaintiffs in the suit emphasized that all four Black justices in the state’s history first reached the high court through gubernatorial appointments, not by winning elections.
“A Black candidate has never won without possessing the incumbency advantage,” Aycock noted, describing that fact as “critical” to her ruling.
Aycock not only ordered the Mississippi Legislature to give Black voters greater power in one of the three Supreme Court voting districts. She also indicated that she’s likely to order special elections for at least some of the court’s seats, though she delayed that decision until she reviews a new map.
That would follow court-ordered special elections last year that boosted Black representation in both chambers of the Legislature, following a different voting rights lawsuit.
The Voting Rights Act’s fate
At the heart of the Callais challenge to the current legal landscape is a claim that states cannot intentionally draw voting districts to achieve a certain racial composition — such as a district that favors Black voters — even when done to remedy a disadvantage faced by minority voters in electing their favored candidates.
If the Supreme Court sides with plaintiffs, it could unravel many wins for Black representation, both old and new. Republicans in Mississippi could eventually redraw the state’s congressional map and eliminate its majority-Black district, currently held by Bennie Thompson, a Democrat, and at least one leading Republican considering a run for governor has floated that possibility.
But the fallout from a Callais decision that guts the Voting Rights Act would reach far beyond Congress, said Kareem Crayton, a lawyer and scholar who helps lead efforts around voting law and race for the Brennan Center for Justice, a policy think tank and advocacy center.
“Most of the claims that are brought are not congressional,” said Kareem Crayton. “A lion’s share of Section 2 litigation that has succeeded has been at the local and state levels.”
That means disruptions to current redistricting law would be deeply felt at the levels of government many people interact with the most, at a time when there’s already great strain on many of the country’s political institutions.
“This matters to real people,” Crayton said. “If all of those settled understandings about who is responsible to you, who is accountable to you, are thrown into doubt, that’s not good for our democratic system.”
Legislative, legal wrangling ahead
Since state legislators gaveled into session in January, the state House and Senate have each passed placeholder bills, but these bills don’t yet contain revised voting lines.
Despite Aycock’s order, Mississippi lawmakers may choose not to enact a new map at all if the U.S. Supreme Court revises the legal landscape around redistricting, said Rep. Kevin Horan, a Republican, who chairs one of the committees that initiated a possible redistricting bill.
However, Horan told The Marshall Project - Jackson and Bolts that as of now, he intends to comply with Aycock’s order and plans to advance a new Supreme Court map, “if the Senate will agree.”
State Sen. Brice Wiggins, a Republican from Pascagoula, similarly advised senators recently that redistricting may be necessary if the nation’s high court doesn’t rule soon.
Horan said legislative staffers are working on maps, but declined to discuss the details.
If no decision comes from the high court within the next few weeks and legislators do adopt new maps, then the Callais ruling, when it comes, is certain to prompt a volley of legal filings and arguments.
An appeal of Aycock’s order is already pending before the U.S. 5th Circuit of Appeals, which put the appeal on hold until the Callais decision is handed down. The 5th Circuit might take the appeal up again or it could send the case back down to the district court for Aycock to reconsider her ruling.
Depending on the details of the Callais opinion, civil rights attorneys favoring redistricting might find themselves arguing to salvage Aycock’s opinion on new legal grounds, to preserve a newly adopted map, to petition a court to draw its own map or to push forward special elections.
For Karriem, who leads a Black caucus with 58 members, the stakes aren’t primarily procedural or technical. They aren’t even about grand theories of law and interpretation.
For him, this is a dire moment.
Black communities are bracing, Karriem said, for “devastation.”
Sometimes I think we should just call it. This country has never been a democracy. And the likelihood of it ever becoming one seems to be rapidly diminishing.