Mississippi ratifies the Thirteenth Amendment - March 16th, 1995

On this day in 1995, Mississippi finally voted to ratify the 13th Amendment–130 years after its passage.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This Day in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.
Hello and welcome to This Day in History Class, a
show that proves it's never too late to make history.
I'm Gay Blusier, and today we're exploring why it took

(00:20):
Mississippi nearly a century and a half to approve the
amendment outlawing slavery. Despite which you might think racism wasn't
the only reason for the delay. Good old bureaucratic incompetence
was in the mix as well. The day was March sixteenth,

(00:45):
nineteen ninety five. The state of Mississippi finally voted to
ratify the thirteenth Amendment, one hundred and thirty years after
its passage. When the amendment to abolish slavery was first
put to vote in eighteen sixty five, Mississippi was one
of four states to reject its ratification. The other three holdouts,

(01:07):
New Jersey, Delaware, and Kentucky later ratified the amendment symbolically,
as did all the other states that joined the Union
after the vote was held. By the close of the
twentieth century, Mississippi was the lone exception, the only state
out of fifty to have never formally consented to abolition.

(01:28):
Shortly after the Confederacy's defeat in the American Civil War,
the Thirteenth Amendment was drafted to abolish slavery throughout the
United States, with one notable exception. The text of the
Amendment reads as follows. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except
as a punishment for crime, whereof the party shall have

(01:49):
been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States or
any place subject to their jurisdiction. Congress passed the amendment
on January thirty first, eighteen sixty five, but in order
for it to be added to the Constitution, it first
had to be ratified by three fourths of the existing states,
which at the time was twenty seven out of thirty six.

(02:13):
Mississippi was always considered a long shot for ratification, as
its economy had been largely dependent on slavery for decades.
Most of the state's enslaved workforce had already been emancipated
by the time of the vote. However, the state's lawmakers
still held a grudge, believing they should have been reimbursed
for the value of the people set free. That racist

(02:36):
sense of entitlement led the Mississippi legislature to vote against
the Thirteenth Amendment that December. However, the amendment still gotten
more than enough votes from the other states to secure
its ratification. As for the other three states that rejected
the amendment, they eventually changed their minds and ratified it,
though some took much longer than others. New Jersey ratify

(03:00):
the amendment in eighteen sixty six, just nine months after
the initial vote. Delaware, on the other hand, didn't get
around to it until nineteen oh one, and Kentucky waited
all the way until nineteen seventy six. That just left
Mississippi as the only state seemingly opposed to the end
of slavery. You might imagine that Kentucky's late vote may

(03:24):
have inspired Mississippi to get its own house in order,
but it was actually a different state that lent a
helping hand. In nineteen ninety four, a clerk in the
Texas Legislature named Gregory Watson discovered that Mississippi still hadn't
ratified the amendment. He then passed along the news to
every black member of the Mississippi legislature, along with a

(03:45):
draft of a resolution that could be quickly adopted to
rectify the matter. Democratic State Senator Hillman Frasier presented the
measure the following year, and though some of his white
colleagues considered the symbolic vote to be a waste of time,
time Fraser insisted, saying, quote, it's never a waste of
time to correct a wrong. In the end, the Mississippi

(04:08):
Senate unanimously approved the resolution, and on March sixteenth, nineteen
ninety five, the State House did the same. That should
have been the end of Mississippi's long journey to ratification,
but it wasn't. That's because, for some unknown reason, state
officials never sent a copy of the resolution to the
federal registrar. As a result, the ratification was never recorded

(04:33):
nor officially signed into law. Mississippi's oversight was ultimately corrected
eighteen years later, thanks to the help of two Mississippi
residents and a Steven Spielberg movie. One of those residents
was doctor Ranjan Batra, a professor in the Department of
Neurobiology and Anatomical Sciences at the University of Mississippi Medical Center.

(04:57):
In November of twenty twelve, Batra went to see the
new movie Lincoln, Steven Spielberg's Oscar nominated biopic about President
Lincoln's efforts to secure the Thirteenth Amendment. Picking up where
the movie left off, Bochra began researching how the Amendment
was implemented after the end of the Civil War. That's
when he discovered that Mississippi's ratification was unofficial in the

(05:20):
eyes of the US government. As an Indian immigrant residing
in the southern state, Bochra felt compelled to try to
help resolve the situation. Speaking to reporters, he later explained, quote,
Mississippi gets a lot of bad press about this type
of stuff, and I just felt that it is something
that should be fixed, and I saw every reason that

(05:41):
could be done. Everyone here would like to put this
part of Mississippi's past behind us and move on into
the twenty first century rather than the nineteenth. During his investigation,
Bochra discussed his findings with Ken Sullivan, a colleague at
UMC and a lifelong resident of Mississippi. After their conversation,

(06:01):
Sullivan took his family to see Lincoln and was similarly
inspired to help correct the state's oversight. He soon got
in touch with Mississippi's then current Secretary of State, Delbert Hoseman,
and within a matter of weeks, the necessary paperwork was
dispatched to Washington. It was a long time coming, but
on February seventh, twenty thirteen, Mississippi's ratification of the thirteenth

(06:25):
Amendment was finally complete, one hundred and forty eight years
behind schedule. I'm Gabe Lousier and hopefully you now know
a little more about history today than you did yesterday.
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(06:49):
if you have any comments or suggestions, you can always
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and thank you for listening. I'll see you back here
again tomorrow for another day in History class.