As Mississippi leaders develop redistricting plans, local communities could lose out most

Redistricting efforts in Mississippi have, so far, been hard to follow.

After the U.S. Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in its Louisiana v. Callais decision, state lawmakers called for a special session that was canceled nearly as belatedly as it was announced, leaving an uncertain future for the state’s legislative and Supreme Court districts.

The SCOTUS decision changed the standard for challenging electoral maps on the basis of discrimination, weakening Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act in the process. Proponents lauded the decision as a win for race neutrality.

Greenville Mayor Errick Simmons, however, says the idea of being race-blind doesn’t do much for his constituents.

“What I hear day in and day out…from the folks in my community, is that phrase no longer brings comfort to them,” Simmons said. “This whole redistricting thing awakens that dark Mississippi past and brings that memory of those racial impacts that affect Black and Brown communities.”

Groups across the Gulf South are organizing, holding rallies and pushing back against efforts to eliminate Black congressional districts.

While a lot of attention is on redistricting at the state and congressional levels, the local level might be the most devastated, particularly for majority-Black cities and towns like Greenville, which, as of 2025, was roughly 80% Black.

“I think that’s absolutely where we’re gonna see the fight play out over the next several years,” said Jackson-based voting rights attorney Amir Badat, who is also the Southern States Director and Senior Advisor at Fair Fight Action.

Before the Callais decision, Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act prohibited discrimination in voting practices and allowed people to challenge electoral maps by demonstrating how they diluted the power of minority voters.

Now, SCOTUS has ruled that a successful case would have to demonstrate that the creators of electoral maps intended to discriminate by race and not just that those maps actually have racially discriminatory effects.

To successfully challenge maps, plaintiffs would also need to show that gerrymandering was not occurring that could be explained by partisan redistricting, which is permitted. Race and party affiliation are highly correlated, with voting differences especially acute in the Deep South.

In practice, that means that maps could dilute minority voting power while not violating the Voting Rights Act if the lines can be explained as partisan redrawing.

“City councils, school boards, election commissions, boards of supervisors — all of those entities were subject to the protections of the Voting Rights Act,” Badat said. “That’s actually why, in Mississippi, we have so many… local Black elected officials. I think what you’re gonna see fairly soon is cities and counties moving quickly to try to redistrict those lines as well.”

Even now, that’s playing out in Mississippi, with one case in federal court challenging DeSoto County’s redistricting in 2022 as diluting the power of Black voters to elect local leaders like county supervisors, election commissioners and education board members.

Previously, certain states, counties, cities and towns had to submit plans for redistricting to the federal government for approval before they could go into effect, known as preclearance. That requirement in the Voting Rights Act, as with Section Two in Louisiana v. Callais, was diluted in the 2013 SCOTUS decision in Shelby County v. Holder, which originated in Alabama.

“Preclearance was really important at the local level because you don’t always have civil rights organizations and a ton of lawyers and litigators who are following all of the local redistricting efforts across the country,” said Badat. “Now, we don’t even have Section 2 to be able to protect against some of the discriminatory efforts that are going to happen at the local level.”

Simmons is acutely familiar with the protections offered to local-level officials through the Voting Rights Act. At 49 years old, he’s only the second Black mayor in the history of Greenville.

“When you move that down to the local level, you begin to see that a state with 38% Black population in Mississippi has the largest amount of Black elected officials than any other state,” Simmons said. “What that means is folks at the very local level — school board officials, mayors, alderpersons, supervisors, and community leaders who serve on the front line, who can advocate every day for the folks that they represent.”

Greenville Mayor Errick Simmons (center) speaks on a panel on rural prosperity hosted by the AEI-Brookings Institute at Mississippi Valley State University in March 2026.

The Voting Rights Act — and its protections at the local level — allowed that to happen.

“The greatest moment of my life is not only my mama, but a 92-year-old Black man who, before his death, on his birthday, came in to say, ‘I just want to come in the mayor’s office,’” said Simmons, who became mayor in 2016. “In 92 years of his life, he had never been in City Hall.

“[People] feel comfort in knowing that that person not only represents them, but that person understands what their interests are.”

For Simmons, having representation of choice is essential to having representation from people who are truly attuned to the needs of the people and who have a stake in the communities they represent.

“This debate is about more than maps: it’s about whether Black communities in Greenville, throughout the Delta, retain the ability to meaningfully shape decisions affecting their future, their economies, their schools, their health care systems, and their children,” Simmons said.

From struggling local hospitals to rural broadband to support for the Delta’s agricultural industry, Simmons warns that the consequences of redistricting at any level could be devastating for minority communities.

It’s a concern echoed by Humphreys County circuit clerk and registrar Marvin Jones.

Jones also sees everything playing out on the national and statewide stage in terms of what it’ll do to his county. Specifically, if state lawmakers redraw the only majority-Black congressional district to get rid of Democratic Rep. Bennie Thompson.

“When we look at our congressman that we have now, he does what he can to take care of Humphreys County, or just the Delta, period,” Jones said. “Sometimes we think about the other [representation] that we have on the Senate side; they represent us, too. But we always have to turn to one congressman to take care of Humphreys County.”

The threat of redistricting, to Jones, is a threat of representation with no ties to the voters in places like the Delta.

Humphreys County Circuit Clerk Marvin Jones (right) speaks at a town hall on rural health in Belzoni in October 2025.

“When we look at when federal dollars, for example, are sent down to the state of Mississippi, and those dollars are turned away only because they don’t want to disperse them into the poor parts of the state,” Jones said. “It’s not only affecting just Black people — it’s affecting everybody.”

And without that support at the highest level, Jones believes that resources will continue to be whittled down for the Delta, and local leaders will be left without the support they need to help their communities.

This story was produced by the Gulf States Newsroom, a collaboration between Mississippi Public Broadcasting, WBHM in Alabama, WWNO and WRKF in Louisiana and NPR.