March 17, 2025

— Hillman Frazier

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See what is before you!

I'm pretty good at imitations if I do say so myself. One of my favorites is Abraham Lincoln.

Actually, not Lincoln exactly, since nobody knows what his voice really sounded like. Instead, I do a mean imitation of Daniel Day Lewis portraying Lincoln in the 2013 movie, Lincoln.

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Man, I get goosebumps just thinking about that scene. You might remember — the movie is about how Lincoln realized that adding the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which is the one that banned slavery, was the absolute requirement for the U.S. to move forward.

Not to give away the plot of a 13-year-old movie about a 160-year-old event, but the Amendment was added, and all of the states ratified it, and ...

Wait, not all of the states ratified it.

Mississippi's legislature voted to approve it, as this was a condition to be readmitted to the union, but then they didn't actually send the ratification to Washington to be recorded.

Apparently, this was due to some Mississippians' anger at not being compensated for the economic loss of no longer having slaves.

Anyway, those people who objected are all dead now, and nobody noticed the fact that it wasn't listed in Washington that Mississippi had ratified the amendment until the 1990s.

That's when Hillman Frazier was elected to the Mississippi state senate.

His initial battles in the legislature had to do with things like recognize the federal Martin Luther King Jr. holiday at a state level. (Mississippians got the day off, but it was officially Robert E. Lee Day in the state.)

Then, in 1994, Frazier went to South Africa as an official representative to monitor the nation's first post-apartheid election.

It was in 1995, however, that he successfully got Mississippi to re-ratify the 13th Amendment, fixing a century-plus blight on the state's reputation. Believe it or not, even by that late date there was some pushback since regardless of whether Mississippi ratified the amendment or not, it was already the law of the land.

Nevertheless, 30 years ago yesterday, March 16, 1995, Mississippi finally cast its ratification vote.

Only, the story wasn't over.

Because, once again: Mississippi ratified the amendment but failed to record it at the National Archives in Washington. (Again!)

Thus, Mississippi continued for another 18 years, officially not having agreed that yes, slavery should be illegal -- 2013, when an Indian-born doctor and professor of Neurobiology and Anatomical sciences at the University of Mississippi Medical Center named Dr. Ranjan Batrawent to see a movie.

That movie? Lincoln, starring Daniel Day-Lewis! (I love it when a story wraps around like this.)

I don't know if Dr. Batra can do a mean Lewis-as-Lincoln like I can, but his curiosity was roused, and he wondered when Mississippi had ratified and recorded its assent to the 13th Amendment -- which you know from having to read to here, it hadn't.

"Everyone here would like to put this part of Mississippi's past behind us and move on into the 21st century rather than the 19th," he later said.

Result: He teamed up with another University of Mississippi colleague, Ken Sullivan, who apparently knew the intricacies of state government a bit better, and who shuttled from the university to the legislature to the Mississippi secretary of state, enlisting her help to finally -- FINALLY! -- file the documentation with the National Archives in Washington, and make things official.

It only took 148 years.

We need a quote, and frankly, the one I have from Hillman is what led me to this entire story to begin with.

It comes from his reply after some other Mississippi legislatures protested spending time on ratification since the amendment was already in force -- having long ago acquired the required 3/4 of the states' votes:

Or else as Lewis-as-Lincoln might put it: "See what is before you! See what is the here and now! That's the hardest thing -- the only thing that accounts!"

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