What in the cotton pickin’ hell took so long? Mississippi just got around to ratifying the 13th Amendment and residents there mostly have the film “Lincoln” to thank… Via NYPost reports : Abraham Lincoln’s historic battle to end slavery has finally ended, 148 years after the 13th Amendment was first passed. The landmark event happened earlier this month when Mississippi became the final state to officially ratify the amendment, which ended slavery. The remarkable oversight was found because Dr. Ranjan Batra, an associate professor of neurobiology and anatomical sciences at the University of Mississippi Medical Center, saw Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln” and was inspired by the film’s message. Batra returned home and started researching when each individual state ratified the 13th Amendment and was shocked to learn that Mississippi was the only state that had failed to do so. Batra shared the horrifying discovery with his friend Ken Sullivan, who then went and saw “Lincoln” for himself. “People stood up and applauded at the end of it. That’s the first time I ever saw an audience do that,” Batra told the Clarion-Ledger. “I felt very connected to history.” The strange part for Sullivan was that he remembered when the state ratified the amendment in 1995, when he was a senior in high school. Apparently, state Senator Hillman Frazier introduced a resolution to ratify the amendment in 1995, which unanimously passed both the Mississippi Senate and House, only for the resolution to never become official because then-Secretary of State Dick Molpus never sent a copy of the resolution to the Office of the Federal Register. The state’s mistake was finally corrected on January 30th when the office of current Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann filed the official paperwork. On February 7th the director of the Federal Register, Charles A. Barth, wrote back, “With this action, the State of Mississippi has ratified the 13th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.” “We’re very deliberate in our state. We finally got it right.” Frazier said at the news. Better late than never, we guess… Shutterstock
