A federal judge has ordered Mississippi to redraw its Supreme Court electoral map, after finding the map dilutes the power of Black voters.
U.S. District Judge Sharion Aycock ruled the map, which was enacted in 1987, violates the Voting Rights Act and cannot be used in future elections.
The Mississippi branch of the American Civil Liberties Union helped litigate the lawsuit, arguing the map cut Mississippi’s Delta region—a historically Black area—in half.
“This win corrects a historic injustice,” said Ari Savitzky, a senior staff attorney at the ACLU Voting Rights Project. “All Mississippians will benefit from fair district lines that give Black voters an equal voice—and new generations of Black leaders an equal chance to help shape the state’s future by serving on the state’s highest court.”
The state has a north, central and southern Supreme Court district, each of which elect three justices to eight-year terms in staggered non-partisan election cycles. Only one of the nine current justices, Leslie King, is Black. He first joined the court after Gov. Haley Barbour appointed him to fill a vacancy; voters then elected him to the position in 2012 and re-elected him in 2020. The other eight justices are white.
The lawsuit, which was filed on April 25, 2022, argued that the map diminished the Black vote in the Central District.
Aycock’s ruling notes that only four Black people have served on the Mississippi Supreme Court. All of them held the same seat in the Central District and were first appointed to the position by a sitting governor.
Mississippi’s population is 38% Black.
“Although Mississippi’s population is almost 40% Black, none of the three districts from which voters elect justices to the Mississippi Supreme Court is a majority Black district,” the American Civil Liberties Union of Mississippi said in a statement when it first announced the legal challenge in 2022. “The lawsuit asserts that Mississippi Supreme Court boundaries deny Black voters an equal opportunity to participate in the political process and elect candidates of their choice.”
Aycock, whom Republican President George W. Bush appointed in 2007, wrote in her opinion about Mississippi’s racially polarized electorate.
“White voters typically vote as a bloc such that they are usually able to defeat the Black candidate. … Although Black Mississippians today do not face the same challenges as in times past, facially race neutral mechanisms that remain in place today disproportionately impact Black Mississippians in the voting arena. Race, not partisanship, best explains the divergent voting patterns between Black and White Mississippians,” she wrote.
The ruling noted that in a 2012 Mississippi Supreme Court race involving a Black candidate running against a white candidate, 81% of Black voters voted for the Black candidate while just 5% white voters did so. In a 2020 race involving a Black candidate running against a white candidate, 90% of Black voters blacked the Black candidate while only 6% of white voters did so.
The judge said that she will impose a deadline for the Mississippi Legislature to create a new map.
Democratic Gov. Bill Allain appointed the state’s first Black Supreme Court justice, Reuben Anderson, in 1985. All four Black justices have been men.
In 2020, Latrice Westbrooks, a Black Mississippi Court of Appeals judge, ran for a seat on the Mississippi Supreme Court, but lost narrowly to T. Kenneth Griffis, a white justice former Republican Gov. Phil Bryant appointed in 2019. Had she won, Westbrooks would have been the first Black woman to serve on the Mississippi Supreme Court.