The Dictatorship
‘Fundamentally, I’m a Southerner;’ how a SCOTUS ruling complicates Black voters’ sense of place
Between 1910 and 1970, an estimated six million Black people left the South, changing the region from a place where almost all Black Americans lived to one where slightly more than half did. Even so, I was born the child, grandchild and great-grandchild of Mississippians who stayed put. And like the frog who reliably croaks for its own pond, I was defensive of Mississippi, defensive of the South and I resented those who suggested we lacked the good sense to leave.
Medgar Eversthe field secretary of the Mississippi NAACP who was assassinated in the driveway of his Jackson, Mississippi, home in 1963, had a deep love for Mississippi and once said, “I don’t know if I’m going to heaven or hell, but I’m going from Jackson.” My father, Melvin DeBerry, has long expressed a more cynical reason for staying: “At least the white man in the South will tell you what he thinks about you.”
I was defensive of Mississippi, defensive of the South and I resented those who suggested we lacked the good sense to leave.
“Y’all need to shut up, boy!”
Dadrius Lanus, a Black man who serves as Louisiana’s Democratic Party executive director, said that’s what state Sen. Jay Morris, a white Republican, said to him May 8 during a redistricting committee hearing at the Louisiana State Capitol. Morris and his party were gleefully redrawing the state’s congressional map in a way that will hinder Black people’s political power and, for good reason, Black people in the room weren’t being quiet about it.
Morris denied using a pejorative, and a Baton Rouge TV station said it only captured him saying, “Y’all need to shut up” as he walked out of the committee room. (The word “boy” is not clearly audible in a video of the exchange posted by the Louisiana Democratic Party.) But Lanus said he heard it directly: “He said, ‘Y’all need to shut up.’ Then, he looked me in my eyes and said, ‘Y’all need to shut up, boy.’”
“Boy” or no “boy,” Morris telling Black people to shut up is offensive, but the greater, more lasting offense is the map itself. (The current proposal strips the state of one of its two majority Black congressional districts.) Rather than acknowledge that, Morris suggested that what’s being said about him is worse than what he is doing to Louisiana’s Black voters.
“The falsehood attributed to me has been very hurtful to me and my family,” Morris told the assembled Louisiana Senate on Monday. According to a news report, Morris then took a long pause “apparently to hold back tears.”
He’s not the victim here. Black voters are. Not only because of him, but also because of the U.S. Supreme Court, which in last month’s disastrous ruling in Louisiana v. Callais gave states permission to dilute Black political power as they see fit.
When I was growing up, my dad’s sister Mary regularly led the choir at our Baptist church in the Black gospel version of “This World Is Not My Home.” The song’s message is one of hope: There’s a heaven after all of this.
Last month’s disastrous Louisiana v. Callais ruling gave permission to the states to dilute Black political power as they see fit.
But since last month’s Supreme Court ruling, I’ve heard it differently. White Southern Republicans are feeling a wind at their backs stronger than any since the federal government abandoned Reconstruction, and that song’s refrain — “I can’t feel at home in this world anymore” — has played on a loop in my head.
But not because I’m hopeful.
I’ve never lived in a South without a Voting Rights Act that restricted white officials’ worst impulses.
And now that I do, home is feeling a lot less so.
These particular Republicans sound like the Redeemersthe white supremacists who rushed to strip Black people of their political positions and political power as soon as Reconstruction was over.
Republicans in Tennessee, by splitting into three a congressional district centered on majority-Black Memphis, have made it next to impossible for Black people in that state to elect someone to Congress. South Carolina may soon redistrict Rep. James Clyburn, the state’s only Black member of the House and a former chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, out of his seat. Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves called the tenure of Rep. Bennie Thompson, the state’s only Democrat and only Black member of its congressional delegation, a “reign of terror.” The Alabama House Speaker said he hopes the “Supreme Court will overturn Amendment 14.”
On April 30, Louisiana’s MAGA Gov. Jeff Landry signed into law a bill Morris drafted that eliminated an office that Calvin Duncan, a Black man, had just been elected to but had not yet been sworn into. The mayor of majority-Black New Orleans, five council members and the district attorney rightly objected, and they called for a special election. The Republican attorney general has threatened to have all those officials forcibly removed and replaced with politicians of Landry’s choosing.
There’s a long list of similar moves being made by white Republican officials across the South. Even if they don’t explicitly say it, “Shut up, y’all” is always implied.
Southern Republicans seem to believe they can be exonerated of accusations of racism by calling what they’re doing an attack not on Black people, but on Democrats. And the Supreme Court has given them cover with its ruling that racial gerrymanders are forbidden but partisan gerrymanders are OK.
Even if they don’t explicitly say it, “Shut up, y’all” is always implied.
But race and party are near proxies for each other in the South and, beyond that, there’s convincing research that “voters’ race is a more reliable predictor than their party of how they will vote in the next election.”
“How do you make that [racial or partisan] distinction in the South?” I asked my uncle, Roy DeBerry, on Wednesday.
“You can’t,” he said.
My 78-year-old uncle has a Ph.D. in political science and government; he’s worked in state and local governments, taught at the college level and served as a university vice president in Mississippi. But even more significantly, he was on the front lines of the Civil Rights Movement at least a year before there was a Voting Rights Act. He and my dad participated in protests in Mississippi, but as a baby-faced teenager, my uncle picketed outside the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City demanding that the integrated Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, and not the all-white Mississippi Democratic Party, be recognized as the real delegation.
The goal then was the same as it is now: a multiracial democracy. The Voting Rights Act, signed into law a year after my uncle picketed on the Atlantic City Boardwalk, made that a possibility. I don’t know to what extent the Voting Rights Act had in ending the Great Migration, but it for sure made life for Black people in the South more tolerable. But now, the Supreme Court has made multiracial democracy harder to accomplish and Black people in the South have to brace themselves for harder times ahead.
“People don’t understand history,” Uncle Roy said during our chat Wednesday. “The Supreme Court has never been your friend.” He noted 1954’s Brown v. Board of Education as an exception but said otherwise change has come “because of people deciding to engage and put the pressure on, get Congress to do what it needs to do and then the Supreme Court sort of lags behind. The same thing is true now. People say, ‘Oh, we’re shocked that the Supreme Court ruled the way it did.’ I’m not shocked at all.”
The Supreme Court has never been your friend. People say, ‘Oh, we’re shocked that the Supreme Court ruled the way it did.’ I’m not shocked at all.
roy deberry
At one point during our conversation, I began a question with “What do you think is next —” but before I could say everything I intended, he interjected: “Struggle.”
“How long that struggle will take to get this thing reversed? I have no idea. But I know one thing: It’s not going to happen automatically. It’s never happened automatically in America.”
Because I’m struggling with my own place in the South, I asked him why, after getting his doctorate from Brandeis, he didn’t stay in the Boston area. Why did he come back home? He began by talking about where he thought he could have the most impact, but eventually he arrived at an answer that’s consistent with what Medgar Evers said: “Fundamentally, I’m a Southerner.”
As am I. As are the Black people who have been raising their voices against the concerted attempts from white Republicans to shut us up and make us feel like the South is not our home.
Jarvis DeBerry is an opinion editor for MS NOW Daily. He was previously editor-in-chief at the Louisiana Illuminator and a columnist and deputy opinion editor at The Times-Picayune.
President Donald Trump faces a serious new hurdle to secure taxpayer funding for his exceedingly controversial proposed White House ballroom after the Senate parliamentarian ruled against a $1 billion provision in a bill to fund his pet project.
The parliamentarian, Elizabeth MacDonough, said over the weekend that Republicans cannot include the ballroom funding provision in a larger partisan bill because it is a technical violation of Senate rules, according to the ranking Democrat on the Senate Budget Committee who released the parliamentarian’s findings.
“A project as complex and large in scale as Trump’s proposed ballroom necessarily involves the coordination of many government agencies which span the jurisdiction of many Senate committees,” MacDonough concluded, according to Sen. Jeff Merkley.
The administration has estimated that $220 million of the $1 billion would go toward building the new ballroom in the East Wing, which was demolished last October to make way for the new structure Trump has envisioned.
The parliamentarian in her ruling said the provision violated the Byrd rule, which is meant to curb extraneous spending in proposed budget reconciliation bills. A violation of the Byrd rule also means the provision would be subject to a 60-vote filibuster threshold, effectively killing it since Democrats are in opposition.
“The president started talking about this thing with $100 billion, then $200 billion, and he was going to pay for it,” Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., said. “And now it’s a billion — or $100 million, $200 million — and now a billion dollars, and he wants the American people to pay for a gilded ballroom when they cannot afford to drive their kids to a soccer game.”
Some Republicans disagreed with the parliamentarian’s interpretation of Senate rules. Ryan Wrasse, a spokesman for Senate Majority Leader John Thune, pushed back against the ruling.
“Redraft. Refine. Resubmit. None of this is abnormal during a Byrd process,” Wrasse wrote on X on Saturday.
It was not immediately clear whether Republicans would be allowed under Senate rules to resubmit the provision — the budget resolution only allows language to originate from the Senate Judiciary Committee.
“As drafted, the provision inappropriately funds activities outside the jurisdiction of the Judiciary Committee,” the ruling reads.
Trump previously said that the ballroom would be privately funded and cost around $400 million. The ballooning cost has provoked open criticism from Republicans, from vulnerable moderates to hardline conservatives, in what could become a potential revolt.
Mychael Schnell and Syedah Asghar
Peggy Helman is a desk associate at MS NOW.
Ahead of an all-day prayer event backed by the White House on Washington’s National Mall Sunday, Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson doubled down on Christianity as a core part of the American identity — over the objections of religious freedom advocates.
“The naysayers who have created this new term ‘Christian Nationalism’ as a pejorative, a derogatory term, are trying to silence the influence and voices of Christians,” Johnson said in an interview with Fox News before the event commemorating the nation’s 250th anniversary. “And I think that’s wildly inappropriate.”
In addition to the speaker, the evangelical-style festival — dubbed the “National Jubilee of Prayer” — featured Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio and several conservative Christian leaders and right-leaning pop-culture figures. They included Franklin Graham, son of the late evangelist Billy Graham, Jonathan Falwell, son of the late Liberty University founder Jerry Falwell, and Sadie Carroway Robertson of “Duck Dynasty” fame.
The White House, in a statement posted to social media Sunday, said “thousands of Americans are gathering on the National Mall TODAY for a powerful day of prayer, praise, and patriotism as we chart the course for America’s next 250 years and rededicate ourselves to ONE NATION UNDER GOD.”
In between returning from his official trip to China and issuing fresh threats to IranPresident Donald Trump wrote on Truth Social. “I HOPE EVERYBODY AT REDEDICATE 250 IS HAVING A GOOD TIME. IF THERE IS ANYTHING I CAN DO TO HELP, JUST HAVE OUR BEAUTIFUL, BOTH INSIDE AND OUT, RACHAEL C.D., GIVE ME A CALL. I’M BACK FROM CHINA!!!,” an apparent reference to Rachel Campos-Duffy, Fox and Friends co-host and wife to Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy.
Hegseth, who has led Christian prayer servicesat the Pentagon during his tenure, recounted a story of President George Washington at Valley Forge in a video message.
“Amid all the bleak nights, the loss and despair, the lack of proper support, George Washington performed a profound act: he prayed,” Hegseth said. “And on this day of ‘Rededicate 250,’ let us follow George Washington’s example. Let us pray as he did. Let us pray without ceasing. Let us pray for our nation on bended knee. And let us ask our lord and savior Jesus Christ as Washington did on that momentous day.”
Speaking passionately at the podium, Southern Baptist Pastor Robert Jeffress told the crowd that “these leaders who loved our country and loved our God would be called Christian Nationalists today, and it is a title they would have gladly embraced. By the way if being a Christian Nationalist means loving Jesus christ and loving America, count me in!”
Americans United for Separation of Church and State, a religious freedom advocacy organization, denounced the event as a “Jubilee of Christian Nationalism.”
“As we approach the 250th anniversary of American independence on July 4 – and President Trump’s Christian Nationalist ‘jubilee’ on May 17 – I urge everyone to celebrate the fundamentally American invention of church-state separation, which promises everyone the freedom to live as themselves and believe as they choose, as long as they don’t harm others,” the organization’s CEO, Rachel Laser, said in a statement. “Church-state separation is what enables us to come together as equals and build a stronger democracy.”
Laser said in an interview with C-SPAN Sunday that the event “should alarm all Americans who are patriotic.” Hailing the separation of church and state as a pillar of American democracy, she slammed the event as a “government-sponsored national church service on the National Mall and it’s extremely problematic. It’s violating our promise.”
“And then I just want to bring us back to something that the founders were focused on that we forget about today, which is that they were avoiding violence, bloody wars, crusades,” Laser added Sunday. “They saw what happens when you don’t have church-state separation. And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that in America we’ve become more and more violent the more we undermine church-state separation in this country.”
The government watchdog group Public Citizen also condemned the event, saying in a statement, “This highly politicized mess is not what Congress envisioned a decade ago in passing legislation creating an official commission for the 250th anniversary.”
Erum Salam is a breaking news reporter for MS NOW, with a focus on how global events and foreign policy shape U.S. politics. She previously was a breaking news reporter for The Guardian.
President Donald Trump signaled Sunday that the U.S. is prepared to resume fighting Iran, threatening that the country had “better get moving, FAST, or there won’t be anything left of them.”
Trump spoke by phone Sunday with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, an Israeli official told MS NOW, as the U.S.-Iran ceasefire was strained further by new strikes in the U.A.E. that sparked a fire at a nuclear power plant.
“For Iran, the Clock is Ticking, and they better get moving, FAST, or there won’t be anything left of them. TIME IS OF THE ESSENCE!,” Trump wrote in social media post.
Trump is expected to meet with his senior national security team on Tuesday in the White House Situation Room to “discuss options for military actions against Iran,” according to reporting by Axiosciting two American officials. MS NOW has not independently confirmed the reporting.
Iran did not take responsibility for the fresh strike in the U.A.E., but a senior Emirati official told MS NOW that the attack was an “unacceptable escalation” and a violation of the ceasefire. The official added that “this is an attack against a nuclear power plant during a ceasefire.”
In a statement, the U.A.E Ministry of Foreign Affairs called the strike an “unprovoked terrorist attack.”
“These attacks constitute a dangerous escalation, an unacceptable act of aggression and a direct threat to the country’s security,” the statement said. “The targeting of peaceful nuclear energy facilities is a flagrant violation of international law, the UN charter and the principles of humanitarian law.”
No increase in radiation has been detected at the plant and no injuries were reported, according to Emirati officials. Two of the three drones that attacked the plant were shot down.
One drone hit an electrical generator outside the inner perimeter of the Barakah Nuclear Power Plant, the Abu Dhabi Media Office said, CNBC reported. The International Atomic Energy Agency said it was following the situation closely and called for “maximum military restraint” near any nuclear power plant.
The U.A.E., a primary target of Iran since the war began, has been attacking in retaliation, according to recent reporting by The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. Emirati officials have not confirmed that they have carried out military strikes.
The U.S. and Israel’s war with Iran has stretched into its 11th week, as domestic gas prices continue to soar amid the double naval blockade in the Strait of Hormuz, a critical oil trade route. Tehran, already crippled by sanctions before the war, faces a worsening economic crisis. Peace talks, mediated by Pakistan, have so far failed with the U.S. remaining firm on its demand that Iran abandon its nuclear program and Iran underscoring its right to enrichment.
Contrary to statements made by Trump administration officials that Iran’s missile stockpile has been destroyed, classified U.S. intelligence assessments of Iran’s military capacity have revealed that it has regained access to key missile sites and launchers.
Julia Jester contributed to this report.
Erum Salam is a breaking news reporter for MS NOW, with a focus on how global events and foreign policy shape U.S. politics. She previously was a breaking news reporter for The Guardian.
David Rohde is the senior national security reporter for MS NOW and a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. Previously he was the senior executive editor for national security and law for NBC News.
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