Republican-proposed jurisdiction fuels allegations of ‘apartheid in Jackson’
Eighty per cent of the white residents in Mississippi’s majority-Black capital city would be included in a proposed new judicial district with hand-selected prosecutors and judges, an analysis by the Guardian has found, leading to further allegations of deliberate racial prejudice in a Republican-backed bill.
Eighty-two per cent of Jackson’s residents are Black, but the new district would incorporate all of the city’s significantly populated white-majority neighborhoods. It would only leave about 5,000 white residents of Jackson living within the city’s remaining law enforcement boundaries. About a quarter of Jackson’s Black residents would be included in the district.
In this new district judges and prosecutors would not be elected. They would be appointed by the state's white, conservative chief supreme court justice and the white, Republican attorney general. The bill’s Republican proponents in the Mississippi legislature have argued it is designed to assist the city in dealing with rising crime and criminal court backlogs. But Lumumba insisted the area within the district had some of the city’s lowest crime rates, and pointed out that the courts would also hear civil and chancery matters as well as criminal cases.
“Should the senate pass house bill 1020 and force us to sue in federal court, which I assure you we would do, this map is Exhibit 1 of discriminatory intent,” Johnson said. “It would have been rejected soundly. I have no doubt that it would have been rejected. It would pretty much have been an open-and-shut case,” he said.
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