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4 The Struggle against Discriminatory Legislative Redistricting The Judicial Response to Discriminatory Legislative Reapportionment If black voters in Mississippi were to achieve any political progress in post-1965 Mississippi, changing the all-white composition of the state legislature was critical. The state legislature was one of the most powerful , if not the most powerful, of all the institutions dedicated to the preservation of white supremacy and racial segregation in Mississippi . It was the state legislature that passed statute after statute to resist school desegregation, thereby delaying the beginning of compliance with the Brawn decision for a decade, longer than any other southern state; that led the effort to crush the civil rights movement in Mississippi by establishing the State Sovereignty Commission and passing laws to suppress peaceful civil rights protest activities; and then, when the Voting Rights Act threatened the political status quo, responded by enacting political massive resistance legislation to nullify the new black vote. The 1960 census indicated that Mississippi was 42 percent black, yet the state legislature was all white. Racial progress in all areas depended on substantial changes in the political climate and in the composition of the state legislature. The Mississippi legislative reapportionment litigation embodied the two elements of the national legislative reapportionment movement that gained momentum in the 1960s with the Supreme Court's one-person, one-vote rulings. As George Bundy Smith has described them, the first element is the one-person, one-vote struggle: the effort to achieve equality of representation by insuring that state legislative districts are substantially equal in population.l The one-person, one-vote movement of the 1960s sought to correct the overrepresentation of rural areas and the underrepresentation of both urban and suburban areas that was particularly severe in the South. Thus, it is "population-based" and majoritarian "with the aim of having a true majority of voters select their representation" and "emphasizing and Struggle against Discriminatory Redistricting 103 protesting a wrong to the majority of Americans.,,2 The second element of the reapportionment movement, as Smith describes it, is the effort to eliminate legislative districts and methods of election that deny minority voters representation. This "racially-based" thrust "emphasizes and protests a wrong to minorities.,,3 As such, it "is a continuation of the traditional struggle of Black people for civil and political rights in America.,,4 In the South, the struggle for black political rights in legislative reapportionment after 1965 initially focused on multimember legislative districts as the primary impediment to black voters gaining representation of their choice in the state legislatures. In 1971 the Supreme Court indicated, "The question of the constitutional validity of multi-member districts has been pressed in this Court since the first of the modern reapportionment cases. These questions have focused not on population-based apportionment but on the quality of representation afforded by the multi-member district as compared with single-member districts."5 In the wake of the first reapportionment cases, legal scholars and social scientists criticized multimember districts as both racially discriminatory and contrary to principles of good government. They objected to the winner-take-all aspect that overrepresented the winning faction and submerged racial and political minorities; to the long "bedsheet" ballots in such districts that listed numerous candidates for multiple seats, depriving voters of the opportunity to make intelligent choices and giving undue influence to slating organizations; and to the disadvantage multimember districts conferred on voters of single-member districts who had only one vote in legislative deliberations versus the superior bloc voting power of the numerically larger legislative delegations from multimember districts. 6 In the 1960s the national trend was clearly in favor of single-member districts'? but in 1965 almost every southern state employed multimember districts in one or both houses of the state legislature. With the black voter registration gains of the 1960s, southern state legislatures -as the discussion of the Mississippi Legislature in chapter 2 shows--increasingly used multimember districts as a racial gerrymandering device to dilute black votes. Thus, the issue of the "quality of representation" afforded by such districts became more focused as growing numbers of legal challenges were filed based on submergence of black voting strength. During the 1970s, reapportionment lawsuits brought by black voters and Justice Department objections under section 5 of the Voting Rights Act eliminated racially discriminatory multimember districts in a majority of the southern states.8 Once multimember districts were replaced with single-member dis- [13.58.247.31] Project MUSE (2024-04-19...

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