Mississippi Reapportionment Rejected : Civil rights: ‘Overt racial appeals’ cited. Justice Dept. action may signal tough enforcement of the Voting Rights Act.

The Justice Department on Tuesday rejected reapportionment plans for the Mississippi House and Senate in an action that signals tough enforcement of the Voting Rights Act nationally and in Mississippi threatens to end conservative white control of the Legislature.

In a strongly worded letter, John R. Dunne, assistant attorney general for civil rights, said the Legislature had “avoided the creation of a significant number of compact districts in which black citizens could elect candidates of their choice” and that “support for the submitted plans and opposition to alternative suggestions were sometimes characterized by overt racial appeals.”

Under these circumstances, he said, the department concluded the state had failed to show “that the proposed House and Senate redistricting plans are free of any racially discriminatory purpose.”

Dunne formally objected under provisions of the Voting Rights Act to 30 of 122 House districts and 12 of 52 state Senate districts drawn by the Legislature. Almost all the districts are in heavily black areas.

Dunne’s approach to enforcement suggests that the Justice Department will aggressively apply court rulings calling for the creation of as many black and Latino districts as possible.

“This suggests that the Justice Department will enforce the Voting Rights Act in a more sweeping fashion than it did during the Administration of Ronald Reagan,” said Frank R. Parker, director of the Voting Rights Project of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.

This kind of enforcement also meshes with Republican strategy to encourage the drawing of the maximum number of minority--and consequently heavily Democratic--districts in order to simultaneously create as many overwhelmingly white--and therefore more Republican--districts in surrounding areas as possible.

Parker said the Justice Department objections, if approved by the courts or accepted by the Legislature, will increase the number of blacks in the 122-member House from 20 to at least 30, and in the 52-member state Senate from two to eight or more. Mississippi is about 36% black.

In many of the contested areas, the incumbent lawmakers are conservative whites. If they are replaced by blacks, Parker noted, “there could be a significant change in the ideological composition of the Legislature.”

In Mississippi, Democratic House Speaker Tim Ford, who is very likely to the thrown out of his post next year if the fragile conservative majority is broken by redistricting, said, “I was disappointed that they objected to the redistricting plan because of some concerns in a few areas . . . We still feel that the plan does not discriminate on the basis of race.”

Democratic State Rep. Edward Blackmon, who led the opposition of the House Black Caucus to the Legislature’s plan, declared: “We are absolutely pleased.” He called for a special legislative session to take up redistricting.

Blackmon and others have filed suit against the plan, seeking postponement of filing deadlines to allow the courts time to approve new boundaries.

If Dunne is sustained in the courts, the repercussions are likely to be felt not only in the South, but also in all sections of the country where there are substantial percentages of minority voters.