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The Magnolia Flag 1861-94
"Go, Mississippi"
Official State Song
Words and Music by Houston Davis
Verse:States
may sing their songs of praise
With waving flags and hip-hoo-rays,
Let cymbals crash and let bells ring
Cause here's one song I'm proud to sing.
Choruses:
Go, Mississippi, keep rolling along,
Go, Mississippi, you cannot go wrong,
Go, Mississippi, we're singing your song,
M-I-S-S-I-S-S-I-P-P-I
Go, Mississippi, you're on the right track,
Go, Mississippi, and this is a fact,
Go, Mississippi, you'll never look back,
M-I-S-S-I-S-S-I-P-P-I
Go, Mississippi, straight down the line,
Go, Mississippi, ev'rything's fine,
Go, Mississippi, it's your state and mine,
M-I-S-S-I-S-S-I-P-P-I
Go, Mississippi, continue to roll,
Go, Mississippi, the top is the goal,
Go, Mississippi, you'll have and you'll hold,
M-I-S-S-I-S-S-I-P-P-I
Go, Mississippi, get up and go,
Go, Mississippi, let the world know,
That our Mississippi is leading the show,
M-I-S-S-I-S-S-I-P-P-I
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NOTE -- The new legislative redistricting
plan for the House has 789 split precincts -- up from 409 currently.
The new Senate plan has 127 split precincts, up from the current 30.
New
districts are confusing mess
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number of partial precincts bound to cause problems. |
Mississippi
legislators rammed through their new districts last week with
deceptive speed. Within about 48 hours of the new maps being
unveiled, they were approved and sent on their way to the U.S.
Justice Department for approval.
The haste must have been designed to keep the public from
looking at the lines too closely.
Fuller examination reveals what a confusing mess lawmakers
have created in their efforts to protect incumbents,
particularly Democrats.
Understandably, some of this was out of the control of the
line-drawers in their efforts to comply with federal law that
requires political bodies to adopt new voting districts after
each census.
The U.S. Justice Department has dictated that there can be no
erosion in the number of districts with black voting
majorities. Given that Mississippi's population has shifted in
the past 10 years, with the predominantly black Delta losing
population to other areas of the state, the legislative
redistricting committees were forced to do a lot of
gerrymandering in order to meet this mandate.
Once you start gerrymandering, the process snowballs. When you
start picking up pockets of black voters willy-nilly to meet
some racial target, the adjacent districts get skewed too.
The end result is a crazy patchwork quilt, with some districts
so bizarrely shaped - hopping here and there over multiple
counties - that they defy description.
In the new House map, there are seven districts that include
parts of five counties, and four districts that include parts
of six counties. One of those "lucky" four is
currently represented by Democrat May Whittington of Schlater.
Ten years ago, the last time the Legislature redistricted,
there were only three House districts that covered parts of
five counties and none with six.
One of the worst aspects of the new lines is the confusion
that's sure to abound around election time because of the
soaring number of split precincts.
The current House districts split 409 precincts - bad enough.
The new map ups that number to 789. In the Senate, the number
of partial precincts more than quadruples, from 30 presently
to 127.
Once you lay the hodge-podge legislative grids on top of all
the other district offices that will be on the ballot in 2003
- county supervisors, justice court judges and constables,
transportation and public service commissioners, and county
school boards in some areas - it will be a minor miracle if
election workers can keep it all straight. All over the state
there will be subprecincts with only a handful of voters in
them. Voters, already confused about who represents them, are
going to be more puzzled than ever.
The Justice Department may approve the new maps because they
technically meet the feds' main criteria of not diluting black
voting strength. Someone should challenge the plans, though,
for the massive confusion they are doomed to create.
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| ©Greenwood
Commonwealth 2002 |
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