Constitution of Mississippi

Constitution of Mississippi
Page one of the original copy of the Constitution
Overview
Jurisdiction	State of Mississippi
Created	November 1, 1890
Date effective	November 1, 1890
Government structure
Branches	3
Chambers	Bicameral
Executive	Governor
Judiciary	Supreme, appeals, chanceries, circuits
History
First legislature	January 5, 1892
First executive	January 20, 1896
Amendments	100
Last amended	November 3, 2020
Citation	The Constitution of the State of Mississippi (PDF), June 2013
Location	William F. Winter Archives and History Building
Commissioned by	Mississippi Legislature
Author(s)	Jackson Convention
Signatories	129 of the 134 delegates
Supersedes	1868 Constitution of Mississippi
Full text
Mississippi Constitution at Wikisource

The Constitution of Mississippi is the primary organizing law for the U.S. state of Mississippi delineating the duties, powers, structures, and functions of the state government. Mississippi's original constitution was adopted at a constitutional convention held at Washington, Mississippi in advance of the western portion of the territory's admission to the Union in 1817. The current state constitution was adopted in 1890 following the reconstruction period. It has been amended and updated 100 times in since its adoption in 1890, with some sections being changed or repealed altogether. The most recent modification to the constitution occurred in November 2020, when Section 140 was amended, and Sections 141-143 were repealed.^{[clarification needed]}

Since becoming a state, Mississippi has had four constitutions. The first one was used until 1832, when the second constitution was created and adopted. It ended property ownership as a prerequisite for voting, which was limited to free white males at the time. The third constitution, adopted in 1868 and ratified the following year, was the only constitution to be approved and ratified by the people of Mississippi at large and bestowed state citizenship to all of Mississippi's residents, for the first time including newly-freed slaves. The fourth constitution was adopted on November 1, 1890, and was created by a convention consisting mostly of Democrats in order to prevent the state's African-American citizens from voting. The provisions preventing them from voting were repealed in 1975, after the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1960s had ruled them to have violated the tenets of the Constitution of the United States.

While the state constitution adopted in 1890 is still in effect today, many of its original tenets and sections have since been modified or repealed; most of these were in response to U.S. Supreme Court rulings such as Harper v. Virginia, that declared most of these sections to have violated the United States Constitution. In the decades since its adoption, several Mississippi governors have advocated replacing the constitution, however, despite heated debates in the legislature in the 1930s and 1950s, such attempts to replace the constitution have so far proved unsuccessful.^[1]