Voter voices: ‘We’re well past that.’ State’s troubled past shouldn’t be issue in redistricting

By Michael Goldberg | Originally published by Mississippi Today

“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.

When Michael Baker was in first grade, he said no Black students were attending his school in Vicksburg. The next year, Black students began to arrive.

In this way, Baker, 64, remembers bearing witness to the collision of Mississippi’s sordid racial past and the legal decisions that set in motion its trajectory toward a fairer future.

Now, in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Callais decision, another consequential legal decision with potentially seismic consequences for race relations in Mississippi, Baker thinks the state’s history shouldn’t be a leading concern in how lawmakers choose to respond.

“I remember how this state was with the KKK and the death of those three (civil rights workers),” Baker said. “But you know, we’re well past that.”

Baker, who is white, wants state lawmakers to redraw Mississippi’s electoral maps. Most of all, he wants to see them redraw the congressional district currently held by Rep. Bennie Thompson, the state’s lone Democratic and lone Black member of Congress.

Baker believes Thompson’s constituents have seen little improvement in their quality of life since he was first elected in 1992. Yet his political dominance continues in part thanks to the racial sorting of the two major political parties.

“I’m born and raised here in Mississippi, and the fact is, the Black population thinks they’re supposed to vote for the Democratic Party regardless of what it is,” Baker said. “And that’s what they still do in spite of what their situation is.”

Baker said his mother and her side of the family grew up as sharecroppers, instilling a sense that poor white people in the state are now no better off than Black residents with relatives who contended with the legacy of Jim Crow policies.

“And it’s like my mama says, you know, my gosh, all these people out here want money and restitution for being Black, and believe they’re owed because of slavery,” Baker said. “She said, ‘hell, I’ve picked a lot more cotton than anybody that’s living right now.’”

Baker, a retired doctor who previously worked at clinics in Rolling Fork and Yazoo City, is quick to point out that he treated many Black patients in Thompson’s Delta district

“I have seen more and helped more of the Black population than you ever have,” Baker said of critics who call his views racist.

As a doctor, he grew frustrated that the clinics he worked at in the Delta were often starved of resources.

“I’m not going to sit here and say that the state government has done everything,” Baker said. “That’s crap, too. The state itself could do more.”

But Baker mostly blames local officials for misusing federal resources, rather than state officials for starving the area of investment, as local officials argue.

He supports Ron Eller, Thompson’s Republican opponent in the November midterm election, and if Thompson wins, he hopes Republican lawmakers will draw him out of office.

This article was originally published by Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Source: Original Article