Constitution of Mississippi

The Constitution of Mississippi is the primary organizing law for the U.S. state of Mississippi delineating the duties, powers, structures, and functions of the state government. Mississippi's original constitution was adopted at a constitutional convention held at Washington, Mississippi in advance of the western portion of the territory's admission to the Union in 1817. The current state constitution was adopted in 1890 following the reconstruction period. It has been amended and updated 100 times since its adoption in 1890, with some sections being changed or repealed altogether. The most recent modification to the constitution occurred in November 2020, when Section 140 was amended, and Sections 141-143 were repealed.

Since becoming a state, Mississippi has had four constitutions. The first one was used until 1832, when the second constitution was created and adopted. It ended property ownership as a prerequisite for voting, which was limited to free white males at the time. The third constitution, adopted in 1868 and ratified the following year, was the only constitution to be approved and ratified by the people of Mississippi at large and bestowed state citizenship to all of Mississippi's residents, for the first time including newly-freed slaves. The fourth constitution was adopted on November 1, 1890, and was created by a convention consisting mostly of Democrats in order to prevent the state's African-American citizens from voting. The provisions preventing them from voting were repealed in 1975.

While the state constitution adopted in 1890 is still in effect today, many of its original tenets and sections have since been modified or repealed; some of these may have been in response to U.S. Supreme Court rulings such as Harper v. Virginia. In the decades since its adoption, several Mississippi governors have advocated replacing the constitution, however, despite heated debates in the legislature in the 1930s and 1950s, such attempts to replace the constitution have so far proved unsuccessful. A few months before the start of the American Civil War in April 1861, Mississippi, a slave state located in the Southern United States, declared that it had seceded from the United States and joined the newly formed Confederacy, and it subsequently lost its representation in the U.S. Congress.

Four years later, with the victory of Union forces at the end of the American Civil War, slavery was abolished via the newly enacted Thirteenth Amendment. Mississippi held a constitutional convention in 1865. A new Mississippi constitution was created in May 1868 that bestowed citizenship and civil rights upon newly freed slaves in the state. Mississippi regained its congressional representation after it was fully readmitted back into the United States in February 1870.

The 1868 state constitution, which was the third constitution that the State of Mississippi's history, lasted until 1890, when after the Compromise of 1877 and a lengthy campaign of terrorist violence to establish Democratic rule in the state succeeded, a constitutional convention composed almost entirely of white Democrats created and adopted the fourth (and current) constitution to specifically disenfranchise, isolate, and marginalize the state's African American population. Unlike the 1868 constitution, the 1890 one did not go to the people of the state at large for their approval and ratification. The convention created, approved, and ratified it all on its own initiative, as was done in the case of the 1817 and 1832 state constitutions.

The new constitution was utilized by the Democrats and the state government, in conjunction with terrorist violence, to marginalize and prohibit black Mississippians from participating in the state's civil society until the 1960s and 1970s.

Mississippi was not the only U.S. state at the time that created a new constitution specifically for the purpose of disenfranchising their African American voters; other ones did as well, South Carolina followed suit in December 1895 under its Democratic governor in replacing its 1868 state constitution. In the 1950s and 1960s, following investigations by the United States government, these discriminatory provisions were ruled by the U.S. Supreme Court to have violated the rights guaranteed to American citizens under the tenets of the U.S. Constitution, thus rendering them legally unenforcable. However, it would take 20 years to formally remove them from the state's constitution, which was done when they were finally repealed in the 1970s and 1980s by the state government, nearly a century after they were enacted.

There have been legislative efforts to replace the Mississippi constitution that was adopted in 1890 (which has since had over 100 subsequent modifications and amendments) with a new one - notably in the 1930s and 1950s - but ultimately, such efforts have been unsuccessful as of 2021.

Several Mississippi politicians have opined in favor of a replacement of the 1890 constitution, on the grounds that it is morally repugnant due to its discriminatory history, and have noted it contains clauses detrimental to the state's monetary commerce and businesses enacted by Democrats to prevent private companies from out of state hiring African-American workers in Mississippi, one of the vestiges of the segregationist era. and Rowan v. Runnels.

Judiciary

The constitution changed how judges were chosen, with them being elected and no longer appointed, as defined in Article IV.

Dueling

Dueling, which was a somewhat common occurrence in the early 19th century United States, such as the one between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr that resulted in the death of Hamilton, was now outlawed under the 1832 state constitution. The new constitution even required politicians to deliver an affirmation that they would not engage in a duel:

Term limits

Term limits were set for elected offices under the 1838 constitution, and exist today.

Slavery

The 1832 constitution, like the 1817 one that preceded it, prohibited the Mississippi Legislature from passing any laws designed to set free people from slavery, unless the slave had committed a "distinguished" deed to the benefit of the state, or had the consent of the owner, who was to be monetarily compensated for the emancipation of the slave:

This retaining of this clause from the 1817 to the 1832 constitution reflected the course of Southern popular opinion at the time, in which laws that restricted state legislatures from ending slavery in their states, by making it impossible without the full consent of slave-owners, were passed or retained, or laws that made it more difficult for slave-owners to set their slaves free were also passed. As noted by future Republican U.S. president Abraham Lincoln in an 1857 speech regarding the Dred Scott decision:

This represented a shift in ideology regarding the moral nature of slavery after the Missouri Compromise of 1820, in which many people began to see slavery not as a "great evil" as they did in the late 18th century, but rather, in the words of 19th century South Carolinian Democrat John C. Calhoun, a "positive good". As a result of this shift, laws began to be passed throughout Southern slave states that restricted the emancipation of slaves, something that was somewhat common during the late 18th century around the time of the American Revolution, where slave owners such as Edward Coles and Robert Carter freed their slaves using the American Enlightenment principles of the colonial revolutionaries as their inspiration. Abraham Lincoln noticed this shift in ideology, writing in an 1855 letter to a friend that:

This shift in opinion hardened Southerners' and Democrats' actions in the defense of the institution of slavery, ultimately culminating in the American Civil War, which would end slavery in the United States forever.

1868 Constitution

thumb|Page one of the original copy of the 1868 Constitution, showing the preamble and first seven sections of the first article.

thumb|With the Confederacy defeated by the Union at the end of the American Civil War, slavery was ended and outlawed throughout the United States. The former Confederate states adopted new state constitutions, which granted newly freed slaves and African Americans the right to vote for the first time. An 1867 drawing in Harper's Weekly lauds the Union victory by showing freed slaves and U.S. Colored Troops veterans exercising their newly bestowed right to vote by casting ballots for the first time.

The 1868 constitution was adopted on May 15, 1868, and approved and ratified by the people of the state a year later on December 1, 1869. This was unlike the 1890 constitution that replaced it 22 years, for that constitution was completely created and approved by a convention. In use for 22 years, the 1868 constitution was the first in the history of the state to have been approved by popular consent, when it was sent to the people at large for their ratification. It was also the first state constitution of Mississippi to have been created by both African American and white delegates.

The very first article of the post-war 1868 constitution was Article 1, also known as the Bill of Rights. Borrowing many tenets from the United States Bill of Rights, it specified the rights that all residents of the state held.

Preamble

The 1868 constitution's preamble stated the purpose of the constitution's creation and adoption, which was given as, the establishment and perpetuation of "justice", "public order", "right", "liberty" and "freedom":

This differed from the wording of the 1890 state constitution that replaced it, in which any and all references to "justice", "public order", "liberty", "right" and "freedom" were completely removed from the preamble by the convention's delegates. The words "in Convention assembled" appear after "the people of Mississippi", whereas the 1868 one was:

Citizenship

The very first section of the state constitution's Bill of Rights section determined who was a citizen of the state. The section declared that "all persons" who lived within the borders of the State of Mississippi were its citizens. This extended citizenship to all persons who lived in the state, regardless of their gender or color:

Slavery

With the defeat of the Confederacy at the hands of the Union in the American Civil War, the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified to outlaw slavery throughout the United States. As a result, the 1868 constitution of Mississippi was the state's first one to ban slavery throughout the state:

History

thumb|During much of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Democrats, calling themselves "The White Man's Party", sought to violently disenfranchise African Americans in the name of white supremacy, by using party-sponsored paramilitaries and terrorist organizations such as the "[[Red Shirts (Southern United States)|Red Shirts". Using as their party slogan, "This is a White Man's Country!", the Democrats opposed the Republican-sponsored "Reconstruction Acts", which required that the former Confederate states adopt the Fourteenth Amendment and respect the right of African Americans to vote if they were to fully rejoin the United States. An 1868 political cartoon from Harper's Weekly, showing a former Confederate soldier and two Democrats triumphantly standing on the back of a U.S. Colored Troops veteran, condemns and criticizes the Democrats' efforts.]]

thumb|[[Adelbert Ames was Mississippi's last Republican governor in the 19th century, leaving office in 1876 after a fraud-wrought election the previous year in which many black and Republican voters were violently kept from the polls by terrorists. Ames resigned several months later, amid threats of impeachment by a hostile Democrat-controlled state legislature. He was the last Republican governor of Mississippi in the 19th century and for much of the 20th century as well. A Republican would not become governor of Mississippi again until 1992; more than 115 years after Ames's tenure had ended.]]

thumb|The legislature of the State of Mississippi, in 1890.

thumb|A poster showing the members of the 1890 Mississippi constitution convention.

The current constitution of Mississippi was adopted on November 1, 1890, having replaced the 1868 constitution that had been adopted and ratified following the end of the American Civil War to bestow freedoms and civil rights upon newly freed slaves.

During the convention, which took place in Jackson and began on August 12, 1890, running through November 1, several issues were discussed, ranging from the construction of levees in the flood-prone Mississippi Delta to the regulations of railroads. However, the most important issue, indeed, the primary cause, catalyst and reasoning for why the convention had been called into being in the first place, were the implementation of "literacy tests" and "poll taxes" as prerequisites for voting, the intended subjective enforcement of which would disenfranchise virtually nearly every African American in the state for decades. This was something that did not exist under the 1868 constitution. Although the wording mandating the tests ostensibly implied that they were to be applied equally to all persons, the convention desired to subjectively enforce these literacy tests and poll taxes to prevent African Americans voters from casting ballots. According to the convention's delegates, some of whom were former Confederates, Black suffrage was an effort to "pull down civilization".

Indeed, according to the president of the 1890 constitutional convention, Sol S. Calhoon, a judge from Hinds County, the convention was called specifically to disenfranchise the state's African American voters, restrict their rights and isolate and segregate them from the rest of society. He unabashedly stated that a constitution not doing this was unacceptable to the convention's members:

In the years following the American Civil War, forces of the U.S. Army were stationed in the readmitted Southern U.S. states, protecting the lives and rights of African Americans and freed slaves. The Democrats were vehemently opposed to the presence of the U.S. military being there, for it prevented a violent Democratic takeover of said states. However, there were not enough army soldiers to be everywhere at all times, and, as such, although they could supervise voter registration to be fair and impartial, they could not protect freedmen as they went to and from the voter registration office to register, which resulted in many freedmen being lynched. With violence against freedmen increasing, the Civil Rights Act of 1875 was signed into law by Republican U.S. president Ulysses S. Grant to protect them. However, that law would be short-lived, as the U.S. Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional in 1883.

In August 1877, former U.S. president Ulysses S. Grant, who had left office several months prior and was embarking on a tour of the world, wrote in a letter from London to U.S. Navy officer Daniel Ammen after the Compromise of 1877, about the contradictions of the Democrats in their vocal support for using overwhelming military force to quell workers' strikes, but objecting when it was used to defend the rights of African American voters from being infringed upon. He stated that the U.S. government should protect the rights of all its citizens from being infringed upon, regardless of their color:

By 1890, following years of terrorism and paramilitary violence, African Americans had "largely disappeared from the arena of Southern politics". The Democrats had wrested control of Mississippi state's government to rid it of the Republican Party's influences, with the state's last 19th century Republican governor, Adelbert Ames, resigning from office in 1876 due to threats of impeachment by a hostile legislature. The previous year, in November 1875, terrorists and Democrats had forcibly kept many black and Republican voters from going to the state's polls in a fraud-wrought election, using armed violence. This resulted in the Democrats gaining control of the Mississippi Legislature.

With the ascension of Rutherford B. Hayes to the U.S. presidency and the subsequent Compromise of 1877, a Southern Democrat was appointed to the U.S. cabinet and the U.S. Army's forces were withdrawn from public and confined to their bases, leaving 1,155 soldiers by 1879. This effectively removed the last obstacle preventing the Democrats from violently taking over said states and disenfranchising African American voters and marked the effective end of the Republican Party in the states of the former Confederacy for nearly a century.

The state government of Mississippi, now controlled mostly by the Democrats, decided to bring to an end their campaigns of terrorist violence designed to disenfranchise the black voting population of the state, by using other methods to do so. However, rather than using solely terrorism to disenfranchise black voters and their white allies, the Democrats decided to use the law to do so, by enshrining into the state constitutions provisions that would allow them to do just that. They set their sights on replacing the 1868 constitution of Mississippi, which legally guaranteed freedoms, citizenship, enfranchisement and other human rights to black citizens, to which both Northern and Southern Democrats were vehemently opposed.

Sections 213 and 213A discuss higher education.

Article 9

Sections 214–222 discuss the Mississippi National Guard.

Article 10

Sections 224 and 225 allow the State to require convicts to perform labor, either in state industries or by working on public roads or levees (but not to private contractors); Section 225 also granted the state the power to separate "white" and "black" convicts, however this power was later repealed. Section 226 prohibits any convicts in county jails from being hired outside the county.

Section 223 was repealed in 1990.

Article 11

Sections 227–239 generally discuss the creation of levee districts within the State. The text discuss the two levee districts which were created prior to the adoption of the current Constitution – the district for the Mississippi River and the district for the Yazoo River.

Article 12

Sections 240–253 discuss matters related to voting.

Section 214 required an elector to be a resident of the state and county for at least one year prior to an election, and six months resident within the municipality they desired to register to be an elector. These were later determined to be unconstitutional by a US Federal Circuit Court in Graham v. Waller, as they served no compelling state interest, and a 30-day residency requirement was instituted in the same judicial order on a temporary basis. Subsequent statutes passed by the legislature kept the 30 day residency requirement.

Sections 241A, 243 and 244 were later repealed: all three were designed, in some part, to disenfranchise minority voters (241A required that a person be "of good moral character", 243 instituted a poll tax, and 244 instituted a literacy test, all of which have been ruled unconstitutional).

Article 13

This article consists of only Section 254, which states how the State shall be apportioned into State Senatorial and State Representative districts after every Federal census, provided that the State Senate shall consist of not more than 52 Senators and the State House shall consist of not more than 122 Representatives.

Sections 255 and 256 were later repealed.

Article 14

Sections 257 through 272A contain miscellaneous other provisions not related to other Articles.

Section 263, which made illegal the marriage of a "white person" to a "negro" or "mulatto", and was formally repealed in December 1987.

Section 263A, enacted in 2004, defines marriage as between a male and a female.

Sections 269, 270 and 272 were repealed.

Article 15

Section 273 discusses how amendments to the constitution may be proposed and approved. This section is divided into 13 subsections.

Subsection (1) states that amendments may be made by either the Mississippi Legislature or by initiative.

Subsection (2) states that, for Legislature-proposed amendments, 2/3 of each house must approve the amendment, plus a majority of the voters.

Subsection (3) states that, for initiative-proposed amendments, the number of signatures required must be at least 12% of the total votes cast for Governor of Mississippi in the most recent gubernatorial election, provided that no more than 20% of the signatures can come from any one congressional (i.e., U.S. House of Representatives) district. However, since the 2002 congressional reapportionment, Mississippi has had only four Congressional districts; thus, this requirement has not been able to be met since that time. In 2001, the Mississippi Supreme Court (in a 6-3 decision which invalidated an approved Article 16 allowing for medicinal marijuana use) took a strict interpretation of this section, thus making it impossible to propose an amendment via initiative barring either an amendment to the constitution or Mississippi gaining a fifth Representative in a future apportionment.

Subsection (5) prohibits certain portions of the constitution from being amended by initiative; for example, the entirety of Article 3 (Bill of Rights) is off-limits.

Subsections (7) and (8) discuss the procedures in the event that a Legislature-proposed amendment is similar to that of an initiative-proposed amendment.

Sections 274 through 285 contain transitional provisions.

Previously the Article contained Sections 286 and 287 which were classified as "ADDITIONAL SECTIONS OF THE CONSTITUTION OF MISSISSIPPI NOT BEING AMENDMENTS OF PREVIOUS SECTIONS"; these were later renumbered as 145A and 149A and placed under the article related to the judiciary.

Criticisms

The Mississippi Constitution has faced various criticisms since its inception in 1890.

Disenfranchisement

The 1890 convention considered the portions of its new constitution that instituted literacy tests and poll taxes as being the most important. Indeed, the implementation of these measures was the reason for the convention's very existence.

The portion of the 1890 constitution that would specifically allow the state to prevent black voters from casting ballots was Article 12's Section 244, which required that after January 1, 1892, any potential voter prove that they were literate. One method to determine their literacy was for the voter to describe, to a registrar, a "reasonable interpretation" of the state constitution.

After World War I, Sidney D. Redmond, a black lawyer from Jackson and the chairman of the Mississippi Republican Party, attempted to investigate the disenfranchising of black voters in Mississippi. He wrote letters of inquiry to several Mississippi counties, which went unanswered. He then inquired via telephone, and many of the counties responded to his inquiries by telling him that they did not "allow niggers to register" to vote.

Several decades later, following an investigation by the United States government into the discriminatory voting practices of Southern U.S. states, the U.S. Supreme Court would declare that methods employed by state governments to disenfranchise African-American voters and prevent them from casting ballots were direct violations of the precepts of the United States Constitution. As a result, Section 244 was rendered effectively null and void under the rulings of U.S. court decisions such as Harper v. Virginia, and the section was formally repealed by the state on December 8, 1975, 85 years after it was created.

Gun control

In addition to disenfranchising black voters, the 1890 constitutional convention placed into the state constitution, for the first time, the explicit ability of the state government to explicitly restrict the right of people to bear arms across the state. It did this in Article 3's Section 12, by shifting the right of bearing arms from the broad definition of "all persons" to the more restrictive term of "citizen" only,

Segregated prisons

Unlike the 1868 constitution, which did not grant the state the power to do so, the 1890 constitution explicitly granted to the state government, in Section 225, the power to separate "white" and "black" convicts "as far as practicable":

The wording granting the state the power to implement the "separation of the white and black convicts as far as practicable" would later be repealed, although the section prescribing the "constant separation of the sexes" is still in effect.

Segregated schools

Unlike the 1868 constitution, which contained no such requirement, the 1890 constitution introduced for the first time and mandated, in Section 207, that "children of the white and colored races" attend separate schools. Unlike Section 225, which merely granted the state the ability to segregate "white and black convicts", Section 207, created on October 7, 1890, specifically mandated that schools be segregated between "the white and colored races":

The result of the establishment of separate schools for students of "the white and colored races", which did not exist under the 1868 constitution, was that students of the latter race were forced to attend schools that were, in almost every instance, deliberately of substandard quality when compared to the schools attended by white students:

This patriarchal white supremacist view held by the Democrats, who sought to limit educational and economic opportunities for African Americans, differed greatly from the views of that of the Republicans in the 1870s and 1880s, who believed that African Americans should be allowed to vote, own land and property, attend high-quality schools and own firearms, believing that doing so was morally right and would improve the strength and well-being of the country:

In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that laws such as Section 207 violated the United States Constitution, and, as such, the law became legally unenforceable. However, it took until December 22, 1978, for the section to be modified to not violate the U.S. Constitution, 24 years after the ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court that deemed it illegal. During this period, Mississippi's politicians considered altering the constitution to abolish public schools entirely, and, amongst some politicians, to give white and negro children funds to attend separate private schools. However, the fact that Mississippi lacked the tradition of private schools present in the Northeast and Midwest made them feel this was impractical.

References

Works cited

External links

https://www.sos.ms.gov/content/documents/ed_pubs/pubs/Mississippi_Constitution.pdf

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Judiciary

Dueling

Term limits

Slavery

1868 Constitution

Preamble

Citizenship

Slavery

History

Article 9

Article 10

Article 11

Article 12

Article 13

Article 14

Article 15

Criticisms

Disenfranchisement

Gun control

Segregated prisons

Segregated schools

References

Works cited

Further reading

External links

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