Audio recording is automated for accessibility. Humans wrote and edited the story.
“Voter Voices” is a series of Mississippians sharing their thoughts on voting rights, the state’s history of voter suppression and the new gerrymandering push embroiling Mississippi, the South and the nation after the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision in a Louisiana case gutted the federal Voting Rights Act’s requirements for majority Black districts.
For Margaret Ann Niven, 72, the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais induces nothing less than raw fury.
Niven, who is white, views the ruling and subsequent calls from some Mississippi Republicans to gerrymander electoral maps as an extension of a public policy agenda that harms Blacks residents.
Niven. Credit: Margaret Ann Niven
“They intend not to have any Black representation in the state,” Niven said. She said she believes the Legislature’s failure to expand Medicaid is also a policy that disproportionally harms Black Mississippians.
Both chambers of the Republican-dominated Legislature passed bills to expand Medicaid in 2024, but they ultimately couldn’t agree on a final proposal amid fierce opposition from Republican Gov. Tate Reeves.
The potential elimination of majority Black electoral districts should the state Legislature choose to redraw electoral maps is a gut punch to those raised under a certain progressive optimism, Niven said while recounting her childhood.
Niven was born in Greenville before her family moved just over 35 miles east to a tiny unincorporated community in the Arkansas Delta called Jerome. She often spent summers back in Greenville with her grandmother, and the family became devoted readers of Hodding Carter, the Pulitzer Prize-winning progressive journalist who covered Jim Crow-era Mississippi.
“That especially influenced my mother in the way she dealt with us, concerning race relations and voting,” Niven said.
In Jerome, her grandfather owned a store that served as the town’s only polling location. On the morning Niven’s mother set out to vote during the 1960 presidential election, she dressed herself and her children in their fanciest attire.
As they approached the sidewalk outside the store, they passed several Black men standing outside. Her mother paused and said, “I want you all to know that I will be voting for Mr. Kennedy.”
Before settling in Jackson as an adult, Niven became a librarian in the Arkansas Delta. Most of the students she interacted with were Black, an experience she believes most proponents of the current redistricting push lack.
“I worked in the Arkansas Delta, which was very poor, and at some point, over 90% of my students (were) Black. And I had grown up in the little town, and my parents had told us we had to speak to every single person on the street that we passed, so we had to treat Black people as well as white people with respect,” Niven said. “I realized how lucky I was.”
