Southern Republicans Are Already Deleting Black Districts |
Southern Republicans Are Already Deleting Black Districts
The Supreme Court’s recent gerrymandering ruling has touched off an instantaneous demolition of Black political power as state lawmakers roll back the Second Reconstruction.
Throughout the American South is an archipelago of majority-Black congressional districts that provide some measure of Black representation in Congress. These districts owe their existence to a combination of basic electoral math, federal court orders, and legislative compromises. If Republicans have their way, all or nearly all of them will be gone in the next few months.
The Supreme Court’s ruling last week in Louisiana v. Callais kicked off a legislative frenzy as Republicans in more than a half-dozen states race to redraw their congressional maps—in some cases, in the middle of ongoing elections. Their goal is to eliminate as many majority-Black districts as mathematically possible, bolstering the GOP’s midterms chances in November and endangering the future of multiracial democracy in the South.
Leading the charge is Louisiana itself. A federal district court had struck down the state’s revised congressional map after the 2020 Census and ordered the state to create a second majority-minority district to comply with Section 2 of the VRA. A group of “non-African American” plaintiffs, as they described themselves, then sued on the grounds that the court-ordered map also amounted to racial gerrymandering and was therefore unconstitutional under the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause. In last week’s 6-3 ruling, the Supreme Court agreed—and gutted Section 2 in response.
It was easy to predict what would happen next. “After today, those districts exist only on sufferance, and probably not for long,” Justice Elena Kagan warned in her dissent. “If other states follow Louisiana’s lead, the minority citizens residing there will no longer have an equal opportunity to elect candidates of........