Mississippi Republicans plan to hold a vote to redraw the state’s congressional map in a building central to the legacy of segregation.The special legislative session is scheduled to take place on May 20 in what is now known as the Old Capitol Museum in Jackson, ostensibly due to renovations in the House chamber in the newer Capitol building. But the Old Capitol was the site of Mississippi’s vote to secede from the union over slavery in 1861, as well as the location where lawmakers met to establish the state’s 1890 constitution enshrining Jim Crow segregation against its Black population.“I was a little taken aback with the location of the Old State Capitol,” Democratic state Representative Kabir Karriem, who heads Mississippi’s legislative Black caucus, told The Guardian. “Even though they said that they were doing some remodeling, the optics of it are horrific for 1.2 million Black folks here in the state of Mississippi.”The redistricting vote is only possible because of the Supreme Court’s ruling last week in Louisiana v. Callais, which gutted the 1965 Voting Rights Act set up to protect the voting rights of Black Americans across the South. The Supreme Court ruling removed protections against racial gerrymandering, allowing states like Mississippi to redraw their districts without any protections for Black voters.The chair of the Mississippi Democratic Party, Cheikh Taylor, said the special session was about “power, and making sure Black Mississippians never have enough of it to threaten the people who currently hold it.”“And now they plan to do it in the Old Capitol, the same building where Mississippi voted to secede from the Union over slavery, and where white supremacist delegates crafted the 1890 Constitution that stripped Black citizens of their voting rights and ushered in decades of poll taxes, literacy tests and racial terror,” Taylor, who is also a state representative, said in a statement. “Rep Kabir Karriem is right. It is a slap in the face to the 1.2 million African Americans in this state. It is also a confession. They are returning to the scene of the crime to try and finish the job.”Republican-run states across the country are hastily moving to redraw their districts, not just because of the Supreme Court but also at President Trump’s urging as he attempts to avert a bloodbath for the GOP in November’s midterm elections. Mississippi has the highest percentage of Black people of any state in the U.S., at about 38 percent. Soon, they may not have a single member of Congress working in their interest.