{"id":27545,"date":"2022-01-08T10:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-01-08T10:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cjstudents.com\/index.php\/2022\/01\/08\/the-racist-1890-law-thats-still-blocking-thousands-of-black-americans-from-voting-us-voting-rights\/"},"modified":"2022-01-08T10:00:00","modified_gmt":"2022-01-08T10:00:00","slug":"the-racist-1890-law-thats-still-blocking-thousands-of-black-americans-from-voting-us-voting-rights","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cjstudents.com\/index.php\/2022\/01\/08\/the-racist-1890-law-thats-still-blocking-thousands-of-black-americans-from-voting-us-voting-rights\/","title":{"rendered":"The racist 1890 law that\u2019s still blocking thousands of Black Americans from voting | US voting rights"},"content":{"rendered":"

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The Mississippi<\/a> officials met in the heat of summer with a singular goal in mind: stopping Black people from voting.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe came here to exclude the Negro,\u201d said the convention\u2019s president. \u201cNothing short of this will answer.\u201d<\/p>\n

This conclave took place in 1890. But remarkably, approximately 130 years later, the laws they came up with are still blocking nearly 16%<\/a> of Mississippi\u2019s Black voting-age population from casting a ballot.<\/p>\n

The US stands alone as one of the few<\/a> advanced countries that allow people convicted of felonies to be blocked from voting after they leave prison. The policy in Mississippi underscores how these laws, rooted in the explicit racism of the Jim Crow south, continue to have discriminatory consequences today.<\/p>\n

One of those affected is Roy Harness, a 67-year-old social worker, who may never be able to vote because of a crime committed decades ago.<\/p>\n

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\"A<\/picture><\/div>
<\/svg><\/span>Roy Harness is a social worker, carpenter and army veteran. Because of a 1980s felony conviction, he is unable to vote.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In the mid-1980s, he was convicted of forgery after he ran up a debt to a drug dealer and cashed a series of fake checks. He spent nearly two years in prison and hasn\u2019t been back since.<\/p>\n

In recent years, Harness, who is also an army veteran, has been on a new path. He enrolled in college when he was 55 and got his bachelor\u2019s degree when he was 63. He got a master\u2019s degree in 2019. Now a full-time social worker, Harness keeps a shelf behind his desk filled with awards and accomplishments \u2013 a reminder to his clients of all they can accomplish.<\/p>\n

In 2013, he tried to register during a voter registration drive at his college, but <\/strong>saw on a pamphlet that forgery, the crime he had been convicted of decades earlier, was a disenfranchising crime in Mississippi.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt makes me feel bad. I\u2019ve served my country, nation \u2026 got a degree and [I] still can\u2019t vote, no matter what you do to prove yourself,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

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\"Roy<\/picture><\/div>
<\/svg><\/span>Roy Harness\u2019s certificates and degrees highlighting his accomplishments on display in his office.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Mississippi also makes it nearly impossible for anyone convicted of a felony to get their voting rights back. Fewer than 200 people have succeeded in restoring their voting rights in the last quarter-century, the Guardian can reveal, based on newly obtained data<\/a>. <\/p>\n

Now, Harness is involved in a new effort to change Mississippi\u2019s law.<\/p>\n

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A<\/span><\/span>fter slavery ended in Mississippi, following the US civil war, newly enfranchised Black voters in the state were beginning to wield political power. In 1870, Mississippi sent Hiram Revels<\/a> to the US Senate, the first Black person to serve in the body.<\/span><\/p>\n

By 1890, the delegates who gathered for a constitutional convention in Jackson, the state capital, were determined to blunt this trend.<\/p>\n

They faced a significant roadblock to their racist goal. The new 15th amendment to the US constitution explicitly prohibited states from preventing people from voting based on their race. And so the delegates came up with a plan that would effectively prevent Black people from voting without explicitly saying that was their intent.<\/p>\n

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\"Session<\/picture><\/div>
<\/svg><\/span>Members of the Mississippi legislature pictured during at the 1890 constitutional convention.<\/span> Photograph: Courtesy of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The delegates enacted a poll tax and literacy tests, measures that would become widespread across the south, as a way of keeping people from voting. But they also enacted a provision that disqualified people convicted of specific felonies from voting. The crimes they picked were those they believed, based on prejudices, Black people were more likely to commit. Bribery, burglary, theft, arson, bigamy and embezzlement were among the crimes that would cause someone to lose their voting rights. Robbery and murder were not.<\/p>\n

Mississippi continues to see the legacy of its efforts to shut Black voters out of the political process today. It has one of the highest concentrations<\/a> of Black people in the country, yet has not elected a Black person to statewide office<\/a> in well over a century. It was among the states<\/a> with the lowest voter turnout in the US in 2020.<\/p>\n

Even though Black Mississippians comprise about one-third of eligible voters in the state, they account for more than half of the 235,152 people <\/a>who can\u2019t vote in the state because of a felony conviction, according to an estimate by the Sentencing Project, a criminal justice non-profit. Overall, more than one in 10 citizens of voting age can\u2019t cast a ballot in Mississippi because of a felony conviction \u2013 the highest rate of disfranchisement in the US.<\/p>\n

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Bar chart showing the number of applicants for voting right restoration accepted and denied. Since 1997 most have been denied.<\/a><\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n

And it is astonishingly difficult for those affected to get their right to vote restored.<\/p>\n

To vote again, people with disqualifying felonies in Mississippi must first convince a lawmaker to introduce a bill in the legislature on their behalf to restore their voting rights. In other words, they need their own, individualized piece of law.<\/p>\n

The bill must then pass both chambers of the legislature by two-thirds vote and be approved by the governor. Mississippi is the only state in the country where people convicted of felonies need to go through the legislature to get their voting rights back, said Christopher Uggen, a professor at the University of Minnesota who studies felon disfranchisement.<\/p>\n

The only other path to get one\u2019s voting rights back is a gubernatorial pardon, which hasn\u2019t been granted in Mississippi in nearly a decade.<\/p>\n

The process is the same one the delegates spelled out during the 1890 racist constitutional convention, where the felony disqualification rule was created. It was included as a safeguard to ensure that well-connected white Mississippians who committed one of the disenfranchising crimes had a way of gaining their voting rights back.<\/p>\n

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\"Dennis<\/picture><\/div>
<\/svg><\/span>Dennis Hopkins stands for a portrait in Potts Camp, Mississippi where he works as a city maintenance supervisor. Like Hopkins, Roy Harness, can\u2019t vote because of a decades-old conviction.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Mississippi does not keep track of how many people successfully get their voting rights restored each year. But data<\/a> compiled by Blake Feldman, a criminal justice researcher in Mississippi, shows it\u2019s almost no one. Feldman began tallying the data in 2018 for the Southern Poverty Law Center, and has continued to track it since.<\/p>\n

Since 1997, an average of about seven people have been successful each year. In the 2021 legislative session, just two people made it through the process.<\/p>\n

There are no posted instructions anywhere online, said Hannah Williams, a research and policy analyst at MS Votes, a non-profit that works to expand voter access. Applicants must submit a paper form \u2013 there is no online option \u2013 to their lawmaker and convince them to vouch for them. After that, their fate is in the hands of lawmakers, who can reject an application for any reason.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere really isn\u2019t a way to guarantee anything because the process doesn\u2019t really make sense. There\u2019s no information. You can\u2019t go to a website. And to be honest, you can\u2019t even call the capitol to get information, because they don\u2019t really know what the process is,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

\u201cUnless you know somebody that knows somebody that knows somebody who has their ear to the floor, you don\u2019t know when you have to turn these applications in,\u201d she added.<\/p>\n

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A circle area chart comparing the number of people with felony convictions denied voting rights in Mississippi in 2020 (235,152) to the number who have had their rights restored since 1997 (185).<\/a><\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n

Nick Bain, a Republican who chairs the Mississippi House judiciary committee, which oversees the bills for rights restoration, acknowledged the process was \u201cconvoluted\u201d. Both chambers can set whatever criteria they want people to meet before they restore someone\u2019s voting rights. Those criteria, which are not posted publicly, do not have to agree.<\/p>\n

\u201cI do believe it\u2019s patently unfair the way that we do the process. And maybe as a Republican, that may not be the Republican thinking on that,\u201d he said. \u201cWe have a problem with consistency. The process, it\u2019s by no means perfect. By no means is it efficient \u2026 But right now it\u2019s the only process that we have.\u201d<\/p>\n

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W<\/span><\/span>hile the law today continues to disproportionately affect African Americans, white Mississippians are affected too. Dennis Hopkins, a 46-year-old maintenance supervisor from Potts Camp, Mississippi, was convicted of grand larceny as a teenager in the 1990s, released from prison in 2001, and hasn\u2019t been able to vote since. Because he was convicted of a felony when he was a teenager, he\u2019s never been able to vote in his life.<\/span><\/p>\n

Even though he has raised nine children (he\u2019s adopted several), become a local fire chief, and coached many school sports teams with hundreds of kids, he can\u2019t vote.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m thinking \u2018you sentenced me to four years in prison and you\u2019re giving me a life sentence,\u2019\u201d he said. \u201cI feel like I\u2019m a branded man and I\u2019m not equal to everybody else.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\"Portrait<\/picture><\/div>
<\/svg><\/span>Dennis Hopkins is a lead plaintiff is a federal lawsuit that is challenging Mississippi\u2019s disenfranchisement law. While he is involved in his community as a city maintenance supervisor and football coach, he is unable to vote because of a felony conviction as teenager.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Harness and Hopkins are now the lead plaintiffs in two separate high-stakes federal lawsuits challenging Mississippi\u2019s felon disfranchisement laws.<\/p>\n

One suit <\/a>argues that the list of original disqualifying crimes unconstitutionally targeted Black people and therefore should be struck down. The second, filed by the Southern Poverty Law Center in 2018<\/a>, also challenges the Mississippi policy and takes aim at the arcane restoration process.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe process is fundamentally arbitrary and inherently susceptible to discrimination,\u201d lawyers wrote. \u201cThere is no oversight of any kind to ensure that legislators do not exercise their discretion to vote against a proposed suffrage bill on the basis of an individual\u2019s race, religion, or political leanings.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even though the core of Mississippi\u2019s policy remains what was drafted during the 1890 convention, lawyers for the state have argued its discriminatory taint has been removed. There have been small tweaks to the law; voters chose to remove burglary disenfranchising crime in 1950 and added murder and rape in 1968.<\/p>\n

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\"A<\/picture><\/div>
<\/svg><\/span>Dennis Hopkins at a field where he coaches students. His players touch the silver football before every game as a measure of encouragement.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In February, the US court of appeals for the 5th circuit upheld Mississippi\u2019s policy<\/a>, writing that 20th-century tweaks to the law removed the discrimination written into it in 1890. But the court later agreed to rehear <\/a>the case, and there were oral arguments in September. A decision is expected in the coming months.<\/p>\n

In late October, both Harness and Hopkins traveled to the state capitol and appeared before a panel of lawmakers. They were there for a hearing convened by Bain, who wanted to explore new ways to fix the process for getting voting rights back.<\/p>\n

At the end of the hearing, one of the lawmakers approached Hopkins and offered to file a rights restoration bill on his behalf. Hopkins was unaware the process was even a possibility \u2013 he had been told there was no way for him to get his voting rights back. Still, he refused.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s not gonna help everyone else. I told them no \u2013 I\u2019d prefer not to do that,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cI tell my kids how important the vote is \u2026 it shames me to tell them I can\u2019t vote and here is why,\u201d he said. \u201cI know there\u2019s a lot of people who say, \u201cmy vote doesn\u2019t count. Well I beg to differ. It does count.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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