Post-Ratification of 13th Amendment By Mississippi
In 1994, with the 27th Amendment already ratified, Watson verified that the Mississippi Legislature had never ratified the 13th Amendment (abolishing slavery). The only official pronouncement of Mississippi lawmakers as to the 13th Amendment was a resolution adopted in 1865 specifically rejecting the 13th Amendment. After Kentucky legislators took belated favorable action in 1976, Mississippi was left standing alone for 19 years as the only state in the Union both before and after Congress proposed the 13th Amendment to have never—even symbolically—gone on record in support of it.
During the summer of 1994, Watson sent letters to all African-American members of the Mississippi Senate and the Mississippi House of Representatives informing them of Mississippi's status as to the 13th Amendment and he enclosed with each letter a draft resolution for the Mississippi Legislature to adopt in order to ceremonially post-ratify the 13th Amendment. In March 1995, Mississippi's Senate Concurrent Resolution No. 547 was adopted, thereby making Mississippi the final state to approve the 13th Amendment, albeit 130 years tardy.
Read more about this topic: Gregory Watson
Famous quotes containing the words amendment and/or mississippi:
“During the Suffragette revolt of 1913 I ... [urged] that what was needed was not the vote, but a constitutional amendment enacting that all representative bodies shall consist of women and men in equal numbers, whether elected or nominated or coopted or registered or picked up in the street like a coroner’s jury. In the case of elected bodies the only way of effecting this is by the Coupled Vote. The representative unit must not be a man or a woman but a man and a woman.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“Mississippi: I told you I was no good with a gun.
Bull: The trouble is Doc, Cole was in front of the gun. The safe place is behind Mississippi when he shoots that thing.”
—Leigh Brackett (1915–1978)