Political Redistricting:
Key to effective access to the formation of public policy

Southern Echo began its first major effort around the redistricting of political districts at all levels of government in Mississippi.  We understood that the white community, no longer able to keep black citizens from registering to vote and voting, saw the drawing of political districts as the modern device through which the white community could make it extremely difficult for accountable black candidates to win elections. Thereby, the white community reasoned, it could maintain exclusive control of the political and education systems.

After an 18-month struggle led by these grassroots organizations and individuals, the Mississippi State Legislature adopted a redistricting plan in 1992 which created the maximum number of electable black districts.

Community organizing the key to redistricting success

After the 1990 Census, Southern Echo held redistricting training workshops in 1991 in more than 20 counties in Mississippi so that grassroots people would have:

As a result of the foundation laid during the legislative redistricting, an organized African American community, with legal, organizing and technical assistance from Southern Echo, provided the leadership in the development of the 1991 Congressional redistricting plan that retained an electable black Congressional district in the Mississippi Delta, notwithstanding the determined resistance to an electable black district from the National Democratic Party, the Mississippi Democratic Party, and some state AFL-CIO leaders.

After the legislative redistricting plan was approved by the legislature and federal court in the spring of 1992, Southern Echo immediately held a series of non-partisan workshops across the state to inform people about the new legislative district lines, candidate qualifying deadlines, and how to run unity caucuses to prevent the splitting of the black vote that would enable white candidates to win. In the summer of 1992, Southern Echo held a non-partisan residential training school at Tougaloo College on Poll Watching, Absentee Balloting, and How to Run a Political Campaign.

Campaign for Democracy

Beginning in the 1993 legislative session, it became apparent that a unified Legislative Black Caucus could hold the balance of power on appropriations bills in the state legislature. In reaction, between 1994 and 1998 Mississippi’s ultra-conservative Republican Governor and right wing leaders in the legislature introduced a package of proposed laws designed to:

Several attempts to pass this legislation through the Initiative and Referendum Petition process were defeated by the lack of support by registered voters in the 2^nd Congressional District, rooted in the Mississippi Delta. At one point during this process,

Southern Echo held 68 meetings in 40 communities in the Delta and hill country, during one 30 day stretch, to educate grassroots black community leaders and activists, and white farmers, on the referendum initiative to reduce the size of the state legislature in order to force a new redistricting.

1999 represented a sea change in the legislative process at the state level. Bills to require voter identification at the polls died in committee. The flood of bills to change the political system to diminish the impact of the black vote evaporated. The consciousness of the public, black and white, had been raised. The black vote was here to stay and the black community will not submit to manipulation of the political system to blunt its impact on the formation of public policy.

Effective redistricting
plus Election of accountable officials
plus Involved community organizations
= Impact on public policy formation

These are some examples of how the redistricting process, supported by community organizing work, paved the way for the African American community to begin to impact the formation of public policy.

Prior to the 1990-1992 redistricting process, the only legislation supported by the Legislative Black Caucus that addressed the concerns of the black community was the creation of a holiday to celebrate the birthday of Dr. King.

The success of the redistricting process was the direct result of the intense involvement of grassroots community people with their representatives at the state and local levels, for the first time. This collaboration forged a knowledgeable, organized base for impacting the outcome of the redistricting decisions, which in themselves are public policies. As a result of the success in the redistricting in the early 1990s, and in the subsequent elections, the Mississippi Legislative Black Caucus, when united, now holds the balance of power on important legislation, especially appropriations bills.

In 1995 the state legislature finally ratified the 13^th Amendment to the United States Constitution abolishing slavery. Although this was largely symbolic, it demonstrated that the black caucus had become large enough to require that the entire legislature do the “right thing”, something it had resisted since 1870. In a state where symbolism is often substance in matters of race, ratification was an important gesture.

In 1997 the state legislature passed the first major appropriations bill for public education in this generation. With leadership from the black caucus and community groups, the legislature adopted the Mississippi Adequate Education Program and appropriated 650 million dollars over five years to improve the buildings and grounds, technology and teacher salary support, with a focus on poorer school districts. The ultra-conservative Republican governor vetoed the bill. [The governor had said in his second inaugural address in January, 1996, that state funds for public education should be cut dramatically, and that the state would be better off to use its funds to re-open the state penitentiary as a plantation and put welfare mothers to work there.] The legislative leadership offered to compromise with the governor for an appropriation half the original size. But the Legislative Black Caucus, under the leadership of Sen. Bennie Turner, the first black chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, fought to override the Governor’s veto. The black caucus stuck together. The full appropriation was passed in a veto override by one vote in the Senate and three votes in the House. Every caucus vote counted. This victory in the formation of education policy could not have been achieved without the enlarged caucus which resulted from the success in the 1992 and 1995 elections, which in turn depended on the success in the 1990-1992 redistricting process.

In 1999 the state legislature finally adopted the National Voter Registration Act (“motor voter”). Mississippi was the last state in the nation to do so. Efforts had been frustrated for four years. For three years the bill was bottled up in the House Elections Committee, where the conservative Republican chairman pocketed the bill. But in 1998 community people from activist organizations across the Delta, including Southern Echo and the Mississippi Education Working Group, worked with state legislators to understand the importance of ending the systematic exclusion of more than 40,000 voters who had registered to vote but were denied access to state elections. In 1998 the bill was forced out of committee and passed by both houses of the legislature. But the governor vetoed the bill and a veto override effort in the state senate fell one vote short. Later that year a federal court ordered that voters registered under the motor voter law be permitted to vote in state elections and that the order would be made permanent if the state legislature did not act.

In 2000 the State Department of Education pushed the state legislature for adoption of  extensive legislation to create a state run to hold local districts accountable for low performance on standardized tests. The Mississippi Education Working Group drafted extensive, specific amendments to the legislation, Sen. Bill 2488, to provide for the systematic participation of parents and community leaders in the evaluation of local schools, the development of improvement plans, and the implementation of improvements, most of which were adopted by the state legislature, with support from the State Department of Education. Key to the process was that the Senate Education Committee was chaired by Sen. Alice Harden, a former school teacher and long-time member of the Legislative Black Caucus with whom Echo had built a relationship during the redistricting process in the early 1990s.