JACKSON, Miss.—While researching a case, attorney Ed Blackmon stumbled across leftovers of Mississippi’s segregationist past — laws enacted to discourage the fight for equal rights for blacks.
They were the same laws authorities used to arrest him nearly 45 years ago when he was a teenager attending a protest to support black voter registration. Blackmon, now a state lawmaker, knew he had the power to do something about it.
Blackmon, 60, successfully pushed a bill through the state Legislature this year to remove the laws, which were declared unconstitutional long ago. With the stroke of a pen and little fanfare, Republican Gov. Haley Barbour quietly repealed them and erased what for many was a painful reminder of institutional racism.
“I had an indelible memory of what those laws meant and when I saw it, I was reminded of my own experience,” said Blackmon, who now has a successful law practice and has served in the Mississippi House for 25 years.
Though Blackmon’s success shows progress once thought unthinkable in Mississippi, some have wondered why it wasn’t celebrated in the public square. The bill slipped un-noticed through the legislative process — so quietly, in fact, those who had been active in the civil rights movement didn’t even know it was being considered.
Some say that could be a sign that while lawmakers were willing to wipe the racist codes from state law, they may still worry there could be backlash in a state that still struggles to emerge from its past of racial strife.
Hollis Watkins, one of the hundreds who worked to educate blacks about their rights the summer of 1964, said the gesture was good, but “for us to repeal terrible laws and not let the public know this is some-thing we are doing” shows relics of the turbulent Civil Rights era still linger.
The removed laws date back to 1964, when thousands of civil rights activists from across the nation, many of them white college students, decided to descend on Mississippi to educate blacks and register them to vote as a means of toppling the state’s racist social order. The activists were aware of the dangers, including police beatings and arrests on trumped-up charges, but they were undeterred, said Ed King, a white Methodist minister involved in the civil rights movement.
Legislators and others who wanted to keep the status quo knew the activists usually met in churches to organize their protest rallies and registration drives. The all-white Legislature passed a series of laws that went into effect June 11, 1964, that essentially made such gatherings illegal, although the laws were later deemed unconstitutional.
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Freedom Summer laws gone
April 27, 2009
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