By Christopher Young,
Contributing Writer,
Nearly 300 filled the auditorium in Hattiesburg Thursday, September 17, 2026, at 6PM for the sixth planned statewide ‘listening sessions,’ put on by the Mississippi Joint Congressional Committee on Reapportionment & Redistricting. There are a total of eight planned sessions. These committee members, appointed by Lt. Governor Hosemann and House Speaker Jason White, have an odd job right now. They become robots of our Republican Governor who has demanded another mid-cycle redistricting, despite no mandate whatsoever to do so, and the staff of PEER (Joint Legislative Committee on Performance Evaluation and Expenditure Review) end up aiding in that process, despite considering themselves to be “a non-partisan legislative watchdog entity,” per the Mississippi.Gov website.
Fifteen legislators sat mostly expressionless at the rear of The Thomas V. Fraschillo Stage at USM’s Mannoni Performing Arts Center, with four others seated in front of them – from left to right in the photo above, Ben Collins (PEER – timekeeper for the event), Representative Noah Sanford (R-90) – Committee Chair, Senator Dean Kirby (R-30), and Ted Booth (General Counsel for PEER). Seventeen total legislators, 13 Republican, 4 Democrat. I wonder if they knew already what they were about to hear from the public?
The voters seem to be increasingly tired of the Republican power-grabs that are the true goal of redistricting in Mississippi – and always seem to come with racial disenfranchisement – diluting minority voting representation and strength. Mississippi’s governor leads the charge. He doesn’t seem to mind African American State Troopers providing physical security for him and his family, but the idea of an African American or other minority holding too much power makes him seethe. Just two weeks after the Louisiana v Callais decision was handed down, Reeves was on social media and SuperTalk claiming it is only a matter of time before Bennie Thompson’s “reign of terror” over the 2nd District would end. As a reminder, Congressman Thompson’s narrowest margin of victory was 55 percent. In most of his reelection bids he has won by 60-85 percent. Reeves, on the other hand, was reelected in 2023 by a margin of just 3.24 percent.
By my count, forty speakers came to the microphone to say their piece. They stood on the floor and looked upward to speak to the legislators seated above them. Fourteen white women, ten white men, nine African American women, and seven African American men.
Comments by the speakers, who had all requested to speak when they were signing in for the event, were overwhelmingly in favor of keeping the current (2025) districting maps. At least half of the speakers claimed that the Supreme Court’s Callais decision only required a change in Louisiana, and that there is no requirement for Mississippi to make changes now, when we are only a few years away from a new Census. Numerous speakers highlighted that race, and politics are thoroughly intertwined in Mississippi, so the concept of drawing race-neutral districts is disingenuous. “This whole thing is not about fairness, it’s about partisan advantage,” said one speaker.
Here in Forrest County – Hallowed Ground – the home of giants of the Civil Rights Movement like Vernon Dahmer, Sr. and Clyde Kennard, another giant rose from the front row and approached the microphone. Mr. Clarence Magee, President of the Forrest County NAACP, at age 94, had some things to share and you could have heard a pin drop when he began to speak. “Keep the 2025 maps. I’m a Korean War veteran. I served in Germany for eleven months and fifteen days. I was discharged in New Jersey and returned to my Mississippi home in 1956 with the excitement of being a full-fledged citizen. I was required to take a literacy test five times and was denied five times. I paid poll taxes for ten years. I was a plaintiff in the 1962 (Department of Justice vs Theron C. Lynd… https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F2/301/818/28775) case and in 1963, I received my Voter Card, and it says at the top ‘done by the order of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.”
Then, before repeating “keep the 2025 maps, they gave us some hope,” and taking his seat, he read aloud the second verse of Lift Every Voice and Sing, “Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us. Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us. Facing the rising sun of our new day begun. Let us march on till victory is won.” The explosion of applause that followed was the type to make a grown man cry, yet a glance at the legislators…well, you already know.
There were three attendees that were clearly in favor of the mid-cycle redistricting effort based on their comments, all white. The other thirty-seven were not. One white woman’s comments included, “…I think we can all recognize right from wrong. The math can be legally defensible and still be a betrayal of the people it’s supposed to represent. No thanks….I’m asking you to hold every proposal from either party to the same test. Does this map serve the voters of Mississippi, or does it serve the people drawing it?” Deborah Gambrel, a white resident said, “you representatives on the stage have an opportunity to stop the evil.” A white man identifying himself as a Navy veteran said, “…standing here, looking up at you all, this is Kabuki Theater if I’ve ever seen it…” The slang definition is a derogatory term indicating that an event is intensely scripted, predictable, and performed for show, not for substance.
Be the first to comment