After Freedom Summer: How Race Realigned Mississippi Politics, 1965-1986

8. City Wards and Jacksonian Democracy

171 8 8 City Wards and Jacksonian Democracy The struggle against vote dilution in Mississippi’s municipalities resembled the fight against discrimination in legislative and county supervisors’ districts. Many of the same actors played major roles, and initial legal reverses could not overcome ultimate success for the civil rights forces. The challenges on the municipal level also differed from other battles, with a focus on at-large elections in Jackson, the state’s largest city, while litigants waged numerous other battles in smaller towns across the state. The effort to create a ward system in Jackson and put black representation in a city with an almost fifty percent black population developed slowly, with the extension of the Voting Rights Act in 1982 finally changing Jackson’s city government and breaking its racial and gender barriers twenty years after the Act’s initial passage. In the nineteenth century, Mississippi towns, like most other U.S. municipalities, operated under a ward system where the voters of each ward elected an alderman to represent them. During the progressive era in early twentieth century, a new plan came to the state. Business elites and urban progressives throughout the United States pushed the commission form of municipal government, a system first used in Galveston , Texas, in which voters elected commissioners citywide.1 While the commission system effectively diluted the black vote, the Constitution of 1890 had already disfranchised black Mississippians and thus minimized the role of race in the adoption of the commissions in Mississippi. Clarksdale first adopted the plan in 1910, and other urban areas followed. Mississippi’s municipal code allowed but did not require 172 | After Freedom Summer ward voting for towns with fewer than 10,000 residents, so the practice of ward voting continued in many other Mississippi towns even while the larger cities created commissions.2 The next push for at-large voting had clearer racial overtones. In 1962 the Mississippi legislature, in the midst of the civil rights movement, amended the municipal code to require all municipalities with mayoralderman forms of government to elect their council members at-large, effectively nullifying any future black voting.3 Since the legislature amended the code prior to the Voting Rights Act, at-large elections initially escaped the scrutiny of the Justice Department . The Supreme Court’s 1969 decision in Allen v. State Board of Elections opened the way for more voting rights lawsuits by expanding the interpretation of section five to include vote dilution schemes such as at-large voting. The state’s first federal ruling against at-large municipal voting came in Perkins v. Matthews, a suit challenging Canton’s 1969 switch to at-large elections. The Supreme Court said that section five preclearance did apply to municipal changes in government, but most Mississippi cities adopted their at-large systems earlier than 1965 and thus were not affected by the ruling. The court limited its ruling to Canton and left the legality of the 1962 law unresolved.4 The 1962 law did not last much longer than Canton’s at-large elections . In 1973, eight black plaintiffs from the Mississippi cities of Moss Point, Macon, Starkville, and West Point, with the aid of civil rights attorneys, filed a lawsuit against the statute. The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Mississippi heard the case of Stewart v. Waller, so named for a Starkville woman in the case, Rosa Stewart.5 On July 14, 1975, the judges declared the 1962 statute unconstitutional . They recognized that according to the Fifth Circuit’s ruling in Zimmer v. McKeithen, a Louisiana case from 1972, at-large voting measures were not inherently unconstitutional, but the judges clearly believed that the 1962 law discriminated on the basis of race, which Whitcomb v. Chavis prohibited.6 The court cited a number of factors, in particular the difficulties black candidates had in winning at-large elections. Statewide, the number of black aldermen elected since 1962 in cities with a less than a two-to-one population ratio of blacks to whites had never exceeded one percent of the total number of elected aldermen. With this evidence in mind, the court ruled that the 1962 statute purposefully violated the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.7 City Wards and Jacksonian Democracy | 173 The limited ruling did not represent a total victory for the black plaintiffs . The court’s injunction forced forty-seven municipalities to revert to the method of...