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The Constitution of the State of Mississippi, also known as the Mississippi Constitution, is the governing document for the U.S. state of Mississippi. It describes and enumerates the structures and functions of the Mississippian state government and lists the rights and privileges that are held by the state's residents and citizens. It was adopted on November 1, 1890. Throughout its existence as a U.S. state, Mississippi has had four state-level constitutions. The first one was created in 1817, upon Mississippi's ascension from a U.S. territory to that of a U.S. state. It was used until 1832, when the second constitution was created and adopted to end property ownership as a prerequisite for voting, which was limited to white men in the state at the time. The third constitution, adopted in 1868 and ratified the following year, was the first Mississippian constitution to be approved and ratified by the people of the state at large and bestowed state citizenship to all of the state's residents, namely newly freed slaves. The fourth constitution was adopted in November 1890 and was created by a convention consisting mostly of Democrats in order to prevent the state's African Americans from voting. The provisions preventing them from voting were repealed in 1975, after the United States Supreme Court in the 1960s had ruled them to have violated the tenets of the Constitution of the United States. The current Mississippian state constitution has been amended and updated several times in the more than twelve decades since its original adoption in November 1890, with some sections being changed or repealed altogether. The most recent modification to have been made to the state's constitution occurred in June 2013. ==History== A few months before the start of the American Civil War in April 1861, Mississippi, a slave state located in the southern U.S., declared that it had seceded from the United States and joined the newly formed Confederacy, and it subsequently lost its representation in the U.S. Congress. Four years later, with the victory of the Union at the end of the American Civil War and the abolition of slavery via the newly enacted Thirteenth Amendment, a new Mississippian state constitution was created in 1868, to bestow citizenship and civil rights upon newly freed slaves in the state. Mississippi regained its congressional representation after it was fully readmitted back into the United States in February 1870. The 1868 state constitution, which was the third constitution that the State of Mississippi had ever had, lasted in effect for 22 years, until 1890, when, after the Compromise of 1877 and a lengthy campaign of terrorist violence to establish Democrat rule in the state succeeded, a constitutional convention composed mainly of white Democrats created and adopted the fourth and current constitution to specifically disenfranchise, isolate, and marginalize the state's African American population. Unlike the 1868 constitution, the 1890 one did not go to the people of the state at large for their approval and ratification. The convention created, approved, and ratified it all on its own initiative, as was done in the case of the 1817 and 1832 state constitutions. The fourth and current state constitution, created in 1890 for the expressed purpose of discriminating against freed slaves and their descendants, was utilized by the Democrats and the state government, in conjunction with terrorist violence, to marginalize and prohibit black Mississippians from participating in the state's civil society for eight decades. Unlike the 1868 constitution it replaced, the 1890 one was not sent to the people of the state at large for approval and ratification, but rather, was completely approved, adopted, and ratified by the very convention that created it in the first place. Mississippi was not the only U.S. state at the time that created a new constitution specifically for the purpose of disenfranchising their African American voters, other ones did as well, such as South Carolina in December 1895, which, under its Democrat governor, replaced its 1868 state constitution, just as Mississippi had done five years prior.〔 As with Mississippi's current 1890 constitution, the 1895 South Carolinian constitution is still in use today.〔 For the next eight decades after its adoption, the 1890 constitution effectively granted the Democrat-controlled Mississippian state government free rein to prevent most African Americans from voting and casting ballots, in addition to forcing them to attend separate schools, almost always deliberately of substandard quality, forbidding them to marry people of other ethnic groups, or to bear arms for self-defense. In the 1950s and 1960s, following investigations by the United States government, these discriminatory provisions were ruled by the U.S. Supreme Court to have violated the rights guaranteed to American citizens under the tenets of the U.S. Constitution, thus rendering them legally un-enforcable. However, it would take a couple more decades to formally remove them from the state's constitution, which was done when they were finally repealed in the 1970s and 1980s by the state government, nearly a century after they were enacted. There were legislative efforts to replace the Mississippian constitution that was adopted in 1890 with a new one, notably in the 1930s and 1950s, but ultimately, such efforts were not successful. Several state governors and Mississippian politicians have opined in favor of a replacement of the 1890 constitution, on the grounds that it is morally repugnant due to its discriminatory history and contains clauses detrimental to the state's monetary commerce and businesses, enacted by Democrats to prevent private companies from out of state hiring African American workers in Mississippi, vestiges of the segregationist era.〔 However, despite these efforts, the 1890 constitution, with its subsequent modifications and amendments, still remains in effect today.〔〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Constitution of Mississippi」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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