Republicans Target Black Districts in Southern States

Last month, the Supreme Court set fire to the remnants of the Voting Rights Act, the law that made America a true democracy. Now southern Republicans are annihilating Black political power. In Louisiana, which has six congressional representatives, Republicans moved rapidly to eliminate one of the state’s two majority-Black districts. Tennessee Republicans redrew the state’s congressional map to get rid of its only Black-majority district, in Memphis, then stripped Democrats who protested the move of their membership in state house committees. Governor Tate Reeves of Mississippi declared that the “reign of terror” of the state’s lone Black congressman, Bennie Thompson, would soon be over, and announced that he expected lawmakers to draw new districts before the 2027 elections. South Carolina legislators are hard at work to eliminate Representative Jim Clyburn’s plurality-Black district, the only one in the state. More than half of the United States’ Black population lives in the South, so this amounts to an all-out assault on Black political representation in Congress. For many decades after Reconstruction, southern states deprived Black people of the right to vote while counting their bodies toward congressional seats. The 1965 Voting Rights Act effectively invalidated the superficially race-neutral schemes designed to deprive Black people of the vote. No longer able to directly deny the vote, racist lawmakers developed new methods of diminishing Black political power through schemes such as racial gerrymandering. Congress updated the VRA—repeatedly—to address these schemes. The law worked extraordinarily well, leading to dramatic increases in minority representation, a Congress that better reflected the diverse nation it represented, and, in 2008, a Black president.