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Mississippi NAACP Asks Cochran To Support Voting Rights Act After Black Voters Helped Him Win Runoff

Mississippi NAACP Asks Cochran To Support Voting Rights Act After Black Voters Helped Him Win Runoff

Black voters helped propel Senator Thad Cochran (R-MS) to his victory against Tea Party challenger Chris McDaniel in the Mississippi Republican Senate runoff election on Tuesday night. Now the Mississippi NAACP is asking Cochran to start representing these voters’ interests — by supporting efforts to re-establish the Voting Rights Act protections that were struck down by the Supreme Court last year.

In a Wednesday interview with HuffPost Live, Mississippi NAACP president Derrick Johnson said, “Our advocacy towards [Cochran’s] office is to support amending the Voting Rights Act, free of any conditions such as voter ID. I think that this is an opportunity for him to show some reciprocity for African-Americans providing a strong level of support for him.”

Last June, the Supreme Court threw out Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act, which meant that states with a history of voting discrimination — like Mississippi — no longer need clearance from the federal government to make changes in their voting processes. The Court argued that the law was based on old data and that voting rights protections were no longer necessary.

Since then, many states have moved forward with strict voting restrictions, such as implementing voter ID laws and reducing early voting. According to the Brennan Center, 22 states have passed new restrictions since 2010; 15 states, including Mississippi, put new voting restrictions in place for the first time this year.

Many black voters who supported Cochran in the runoff didn’t turn out in the original primary, which McDaniel narrowly won. Mississippi’s primaries are open, which means that Democrats could vote in the runoff if they hadn’t voted in the original Democratic primary. In Jefferson County, which has the largest percentage of black voters in the country, turnout increased by 92 percent from the primary.

FiveThirtyEight‘s Harry Enten shows that Cochran could not have won without this increase in black voter turnout, as the 10 counties where Cochran did markedly better in the runoff than he did in the primary were counties where blacks make up 69 percent or more of the population.

This was no accident; Cochran’s campaign made a conscious effort to expand the electorate by getting black voters to the polls..

“We’ve got efforts reaching out to black voters in Mississippi who want to vote for Thad because they like what Thad is for,” Cochran campaign advisor Austin Barbour toldThe New York Times. “Thad Cochran is someone who, even with his conservative message, represents all of Mississippi.”

Now that Cochran’s on the other side of the hardest election of his career, Johnson feels that Cochran owes black voters, not just for his runoff win, but for the fact that he even became a senator at all.

“Truth be told, not only would he not have won the election last night, he would not have been a sitting senator at all but for the volunteers and the staff of the NAACP, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, CORE, who worked diligently over several years which culminated to what we now know as Freedom Summer,” he said in his HuffPost Live interview.

It’s been 50 years since Freedom Summer, when activists in Mississippi registered blacks to vote and set up schools in the face of resistance from the Ku Klux Klan and local residents.

Regardless of the history in his state, Cochran still supported the Supreme Court’s decision last year.

“The Court’s finding reflects well on the progress states like Mississippi have made over the last five decades,” he said in a statement after Section 4 was gutted. “I think our state can move forward and continue to ensure that our democratic processes are open and fair for all without being subject to excessive scrutiny by the Justice Department.”

Cochran’s office has shown no indication that the senator has changed his mind; on the contrary, it sees the runoff as evidence that Mississippi’s new voting rules work.

“Ballot access in Mississippi, with its new voter ID process, proved to be solid across the state on Tuesday,” Chris Gallegos, Cochran’s communications director, wrote in an email to The National Memo.

AFP Photo/Justin Sullivan

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50 Years On, Race Relations In Mississippi Take A Far Different Tone

50 Years On, Race Relations In Mississippi Take A Far Different Tone

By Liz Willen, The Hechinger Report

PHILADELPHIA, Miss. — Emily Dannenberg stepped off an air-conditioned tour bus into oppressive Mississippi heat. The white Columbia University graduate student had come to this steamy rural town on Monday with a mission: to mentor both black and white teenagers and help them make sense of their state’s violent and racist past.

“I’d always been biased against this state, without ever visiting it,” said Dannenberg, standing near a memorial to civil rights workers Andrew Goodman, James Earl Chaney, and Michael Schwerner, who were arrested, kidnapped, and murdered during the massive volunteer effort known as Freedom Summer 50 years ago.

The three activists were setting up schools and registering blacks to vote in the Jim Crow South when they encountered fierce resistance from the Ku Klux Klan and local law enforcement. In 1964, resentment of Northerners invading their home turf on a mission to expose brutality and discrimination reached a deadly crescendo. Activists from all over are visiting Mississippi to commemorate the events and “teach greater moral bandwidth for a new generation,” according to organizers of Freedom50 events.

In the tiny town of Philadelphia, Dannenberg and a busload of high school students from the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation summer youth institute confronted the Magnolia State’s tormented legacy, including the so-called “Mississippi Burning” murders, 50 years later.

Many students on Dannenberg’s tour said they grew up in the shadow of horrific historic events, but they knew little about Freedom Summer and the sheer racist terror that characterized the era.

“It’s hard for all of us to imagine just how bad it was,” said Susan Glisson, executive director of the Winter Institute, who stood in the front of the tour bus and described cross and church burnings, racial intimidation, and the murders in meticulous detail.

“There were separate bathrooms for blacks and whites,” Glisson said. “There were separate black and white Bibles and black and white drinking fountains. Every part of Southern life was segregated . . . Fifty years later, folks are still dealing with the pain and trauma of that time.”

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. called Philadelphia “a terrible town.” His words: “This is the worst I’ve ever seen. There is a complete reign of terror here.”

Many of the events Glisson described were new to the students, who acknowledged that their civil rights education often extended no further than Dr. King and the refusal of Rosa Parks to give up her bus seat to a white passenger.

Miracle Clark, a 16-year-old black high school student from the Mississippi town of Cleveland, said she was unaware that so many Freedom Summer volunteers were white.

“I never really knew that white people could be on black people’s side,” Clark said. “When I go back to my town, I want to tell everyone about it.”

Before the bus tour, the 27 students and their 14 mentors watched Neshoba, a documentary about the murders of the three civil rights workers, chilled by footage of the trio’s burned-out blue Ford Fairlane being dragged from the Bogue Chitto swamp near Philadelphia on June 23, 1964.

A horrified nation knew that instant that the men were likely dead. Scores of students, who were about the age Dannenberg is now, were told that if they cared about democracy, they had to come south — even though in Mississippi, at that moment, they faced imminent danger.

It took another 44 days after the grim discovery of the station wagon for the badly beaten bodies of Goodman, 20, Chaney, 21, and Schwerner, 24, to be found — down a dirt road and buried beneath a newly constructed earthen dam on a privately owned farm.

Seven years later, the federal government took the case over from reticent state prosecutors, convicting just seven out of 18 indicted Klan members of conspiring to violate the men’s civil rights.

Forty years after the murders, a massive, multiracial call for justice from Philadelphia Coalition within this insular community of lumber mills and pecan trees gained traction, with additional pressure from politicians, journalists, and family members of the three men. Those efforts led to revelations that allowed prosecutors to bring new charges against an 80-year-old Klansman, Edgar Ray Killen, a preacher and sawmill operator whose 1967 trial ended in a deadlocked jury.

Photo via WikiCommons

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