The 1966 and 1971 legislative plans were declared unconstitutional for excessive malapportionment and were never used in state legislative elections. The 1975 legislative plan was objected to under $ 5 of the Voting Rights Act. The 1967, 1971, and 1975 Mississippi legislative elections were conducted on the basis of the District Court-ordered plans.

Multi-member districts include floterial districts, in which one or more legislators are elected from subdistricts, and others are elected districtwide.

Map 1.

Map showing louse districts in II.B. 1290 in which Black majority counties are combined with more populous white majority counties to create district-wide white majorities.

Map 2.

The Justice Department also objected to at-large, countywide voting in majority white counties which diluted the vote of substantial black population concentrations within the county.25 For example, in Hinds County the black population was sufficiently large (84,000) to create at least five majority black single-member House districts and two majority black single-member Senate districts. Black voting strength was cancelled out, however, when the Legislature's plan required that the entire county delegation (12 Representatives and 5 Senators) be elected county-wide in a coutny which was 60 percent white.

Despite the Attorney General's §5 objection to this plan which prevented state officials from implementing it as law, the District Court in the reapportionment case ordered the plan into effect anyway as a "temporary" court-ordered plan for the 1975 legislative elections.26 The District Court did, however, subdivide Hinds County into single-member districts, and three additional black Representatives were elected from Hinds County in the 1975 elections, raising the total number of black House members to four. The Mississippi Senate remained all-white."

1979 elections.-Faced with the Supreme Court's 1975 ruling that any state reapportionment law would have to pass § 5 review, the Attorney General's objection to multi-member districting, the Mississippi Legislature finally abandoned its historic practice of multi-member districting and in 1978 enacted a new plan under which the entire legislature was elected exclusively from single-member districts. Attorney General objected to the configuration of certain districts, but his objection was overturned by the D.C. District Court." In the 1979 legislative elections, 17 blacks were elected to the Mississippi Legislature, 15 to the House and two to the Senate.

The

The use of discriminatory multi-member districts in state legislative elections from 1965 to 1979 meant that the black voters of Mississippi newly enfranchised by the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were denied any effective representation or voice in state legislative affairs for fourteen years. This almost total exclusion of black representation had the most serious consequences for the operation of state govern

ment.

Black voters were denied any effective voice in the appropriation and allocation of state funds. As a result, the historically all-black colleges and universities in Mississippi were consistently underfunded and denied benefits and programs accorded the historically all-white schools. Also, Mississippi continued to maintain the lowest level of welfare payments (28 to 32 percent of need) of any State in the nation, and the desperate needs of the poor black population in such areas as housing, education, health, and employment were not met.

An atmosphere of racism and disregard for the black community was perpetuated in legislative actions. During this period the Mississippi Legislature enacted measure after measure designed to impede the registration of black voters, dilute black voting strength through disciminatory electoral mechanisms, make it more difficult for black candidates to get elected, provide state tuition payments to support the establishment of a private, statewide network of segregation academies formed to avoid public school desegregation, and the like. Approximately 20 discriminatory state laws enacted during this period by the Mississippi Legislature were struck down by the Federal courts as unconstitutional or voided by § 5 objections under the Voting Rights Act.

Despite studies showing that conditions at the State Penitentiary were "philosophically, psychologically, physically, racially and morally intolerable," the State Legislature failed to take any action to correct conditions for the predominantly black inmate population until enjoined by the Federal District Court.30

25 Id., pp. 17-23.

Connor v. Finch, Civil No. 3820(A), Order Establishing Certain Temporary Districts For The Election Of Senators and Representatives in the Mississippi Legislature for the Year 1975 Only, July 11, 1975.

27 In 1976, the District Court formulated a single-member district court-ordered plan, but the Supreme Court reversed for excessive population variances and racial gerrymandering of districts. Connor v. Finch, 419 F. Supp. 1072, 1089, 422 F. Supp. 1014 (S.D. Miss. 1976), rev'd, 431 U.S. 407 (1977). The Supreme Court again rejected the use of multi-member districts despite "defendants' unalloyed reliance on Mississippi's historic policy against fragmenting counties," 431 U.S. at 415. The District Court also had to be twice ordered by the Supreme Court to develop final plans in compliance with Supreme Court decrees. Connor v. Coleman, 425 U.S. 675 (1976); Connor v. Coleman, 440 U.S. 612 (1979). Finally, the District Court, in 1979, ordered into effect a compromise single-member district plan acceptable to all the parties, Connor v. Finch, 469 F. Supp. 693 (S.D. Miss. 1979), but this plan was superseded by the plan enacted by the Mississippi Legislature, which was used in the 1979 elections.

25 Miss. Code Ann. §§ 5-1-1, 5–1–3 (1972) (1980 Cumm. Supp.).

"Mississippi v. United States, supra.

30 Gates v. Collier, 349 F. Supp. 881 (N.D. Miss. 1972), aff'd 501 F.2d 1291 (5th Cir. 1974).

Black voters were deprived of any significant influence in the operations of state government, including the employment practices of state agencies. A study of state employment conducted by the Mississippi Council on Human Relations in 1974 found that 44 of 68 state agencies had no black employees at all, and that blacks constituted only 5.8 percent of all state employees in a state which was almost 40 percent black. Since 1969 at least eleven employment cases alleging racial discrimination have been filed against state agencies, including such agencies as the Mississippi Highway Patrol (which had no black uniformed patrol officers until 1973), the Mississippi Cooperative Extension Services (which had no black county agents until 1974), the Joint Legislative Committee on Performance Evaluation and Expenditure Review (a watchdog agency of the state legislature itself), the Board of Trustees of Institutions of Higher Learning (which supervises the state universities system), the State Welfare Department (which had no black county welfare directors until 1980), the Mississippi Agricultural and Industrial Board (established to attract industry and tourism to the state), the State Attorney General's Office (which consistently defends with vigor racial discrimination suits filed against the state), and the Mississippi Air National Guard.31

Black people, denied opportunities to improve the quality of their lives in Mississippi, left the state at an alarming rate to seek better jobs, housing, and educational opportunities. 32

If the $5 preclearance requirements of the Voting Rights Act are allowed to lapse, black citizens of Mississippi will be deprived of the important protections against at-large legislative voting provided by that section, and Mississippi would be legally free to return to multi-member legislative districts. If that happened, black citizens would be deprived of the gains they have made thus far, and black representation in the Mississippi Legislature would be considerably diminished.

Discriminatory multi-member districting represents a continuing problem in Southern legislature reapportionment. As a result of the enforcement of § 5 and reapportionment litigation, discriminatory, multi-member districts have been eliminated in Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, and Georgia. Multi-member districts and atlarge voting still are used, however, in the Arkansas House of Representatives, in both houses of the Florida Legislature, in both houses of the North Carolina General Assembly, in the South Carolina Senate, and in the Virginia House of Delegates. Arkansas has only three black representatives, Florida has no black senators and only four black representatives, North Carolina has one black senator and only three black representatives, and the South Carolina Senate remains all-white.

FOUR: AT-LARGE COUNTY AND MUNICIPAL ELECTIONS

During the Fifth Circuit oral argument in Bolden v. City of Mobile, the lawsuit challenging at-large city voting in Mobile, Alabama, Circuit Judge John Minor Wisdom called at-large voting "the last vestige of racial segregation in voting in the South." At-large voting in Mississippi generally denies black voters any opportunity for representation in county and city government. Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act has played a crucial role in Mississippi in preventing counties, cities, and towns from switching to at-large voting. Section 5, however, does not reach at-large voting systems in effect before November 1964, and pre-existing at-large municipal voting systems which cancel out black voting strength presently pose one of the most difficult barriers to equal political participation by black people in Mississippi. 1. Switching to at-large elections: The role of § 5

Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act prevents Mississippi counties, cities, and towns from switching from district to at-large voting when the change has either a racially discriminatory purpose or effect. In its first legislative session following the passage of the Voting Rights Act, the Mississippi Legislature enacted several statutes requiring and allowing members of county boards of supervisors and county school boards-previously elected by district-to be elected at-large in countrywide voting. When several counties switched to at-large voting for county supervisors,

33

31 Individual and systematic, class-wide racial discrimination in state employment has been found by the courts in the following Mississippi cases: Morrow v. Crisler, 491 F.2d 1053 (5th Cir. en banc), cert. denied, 419 U.S. 895 (1973) (Department of Public Safety and Highway Patrol); Wade v. Miss. Cooperative Extension Service, 372 F. Supp. 1256 (N.D. Miss. 1974), aff'd in relevant part, 528 F.2d 508 (5th Cir. 1976); Phillips v. Joint Legislative Committee on Performance Evaluation and Expenditure Review, 637 F.2d 1014 (5th Cir. 1981 (three state agencies). 32 E. Nolan Waller, "Net Migration for Mississippi's Counties, 1969-1970" (1975). "See F. Parker, "County Redistricting in Mississippi: Case Studies in Racial Gerrymandering," 44 Miss. L. J. 391, 393-98 (1973); Washington Research Project, "The Shameful Blight: A Survival of Racial Discrimination in Voting in the South" (1972); United States Commission on Civil Rights, "Political Participation” 22-23 (1968).