Just a week after the Supreme Court effectively destroyed the key remaining provision of the Voting Rights Act, Tennessee on Thursday is set to become the first Southern state to pass a new redistricting map eliminating a majority-Black district.

The hastily drawn map abolishes the state’s last Democratic district by splitting the city of Memphis, which is more than 60 percent Black, into three districts: all of them predominantly white Republican held seats that stretch hundreds of miles deep into rural areas, effectively silencing the state’s largest Black community. (Memphis has had its own congressional district since 1923.) The map also divided the city of Nashville—which had already been spliced apart during the last redistricting cycle to pick up another GOP seat—into five districts to further dilute the power of minority voters.

The result is both practical and symbolic. It means the place where Martin Luther King Jr. waged his last civil rights campaign and was ultimately assassinated will have no districts in which Black citizens can elect their preferred candidates. Contemporary civil rights leaders, including King’s son, likened it to the return of Jim Crow.

“Do not dismantle the only Congressional district that........

© Mother Jones