In seething rage after the state GOP was called out for destroying the state capital's water system, Mississippi Republicans are now moving to put as much of the city of Jackson under state control as they can, and are passing legislation to make the changes permanent. The result is an effort to effectively dismantle the city's government and to rip power from Black leaders in the most Black city in the country.
Citing rising crime, Mississippi’s Republican-controlled House recently passed a bill that would expand areas of Jackson patrolled by a state-run Capitol Police force and create a new court system with appointed rather than elected judges. Both would give white state government officials more power over Jackson, which has the highest percentage of Black residents of any major U.S. city.
The state Senate has also passed a bill to establish a regional governing board for Jackson’s long-troubled water system, with most members appointed by state officials. The system nearly collapsed last year and is now under control of a federally-appointed manager.
The proposals for state control have angered Jackson residents who don’t want their voices diminished in local government, and are the latest example of the long-running tensions between the Republican-run state government and the Democratic-run capital city.
“It’s really a stripping of power, and it’s happening in a predominantly Black city that has predominantly Black leadership,” said Sonya Williams-Barnes, a Democratic former state lawmaker who is now Mississippi policy director for the Southern Poverty Law Center Action Fund. “You don’t see this going on in other areas of the state where they’re run by majority white people.”
Norris notes state government officials have long been unwilling to help Jackson with the water system and other problems.
“We had to go through all this by ourselves. Solo,” he said. “Now, all of the sudden you want to come and take it and say, ‘OK, well, we’re going to take over.’ You know, treating us like kids. We’re not kids.”
Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba said the proposal for courts with appointed judges reeks of apartheid and “plantation politics.”
“If we allow this type of legislation to stand in Jackson, Mississippi, it’s a matter of time before it will hit New Orleans, it’s a matter of time before it hits Detroit, or wherever we find our people,” Lumumba said.
The sponsor of the expanded police and court bill, Republican Rep. Trey Lamar, from a rural town more than 170 miles (275 kilometers) north of Jackson, said it’s aimed at making Mississippi’s capital safer and at reducing a backlog in the judicial system.
“I can assure you that the bill has zero racial intent whatsoever,” said Lamar, who is white, in response to arguments that courts with appointed judges would disenfranchise Jackson voters. “There is nothing racial about the bill on its face, and there is no intent for the effect to be racial."
Not any more racial that cross burnings or poll taxes, folks.
Nowhere is the Republican playbook to destroy government more apparent than in the Jim Crow South, where a city regularly doomed by a white supremacist state government is set up to fail at every turn, and then the local government services are taken into receivership by the kindly Republicans trying to "save" those people from themselves.
It's American apartheid. Subjecting Black folk to a white court system, a white police department, white water and infrastructure, and white government without any say over their own city.
And yes, Mayor Lumumba is right, cities like New Orleans, Detroit, Milwaukee, Louisville, and Omaha are next if the GOP has its way.
You may want to wash your hands of red states and let the people who live there "get what they deserve" but the people who live there don't deserve this.
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