Black voters are ‘prepared to make noise’ after Republicans quickly pass ‘Jim Crow’ voting maps

Southern states are racing to redraw political boundaries that eliminate majority-Black districts after the Supreme Court gutted critical protections in the Voting Rights Act against racial discrimination, opening the door for a new wave of racial gerrymandering that critics fear is ushering in a new era of Jim Crow.

The Supreme Court “gave them a defibrillator to the heart of Jim Crow,” said Davante Lewis, a member of the Louisiana Public Service Commission.

Black voting rights advocates are scrambling to respond to the speed of the changes across the South, which remains at the heart of a bloody civil rights movement to abolish racist restrictions on the right to vote. But Lewis told reporters Friday that “we’re prepared to make noise.”

Advocates spent decades demanding Republican states comply with Supreme Court rulings and federal protections against segregation and discrimination at the polls. It took less than a week for those same states to blow up their maps after the Supreme Court’s latest ruling.

“Every time Black communities get close to political power, we see this shift. The rules are recalibrated,” said Anneshia Hardy, director of voting rights advocacy group Alabama Values. “We see states across the South reminding the country exactly why those protections exist in the first place.”

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Just one week after the Supreme Court’s monumental decision in Louisiana v Callais, Tennessee on Thursday became the first Southern states to pass a new redistricting map that eliminated a majority-Black district.

The hastily drawn map is among several working their way through state legislatures across the South that are expected to pass congressional boundaries that will wipe out districts representing majority-Black areas that overwhelmingly vote for Democratic candidates.

The Supreme Court’s ruling struck down a Louisiana map that included two majority-Black districts, setting off a mad dash among Republican states in the South — all of which have at least one majority-Black district — to reset the maps in their favor before midterm elections.

In Virginia, the state’s supreme tossed out Democrats’ redistricting plan, which voters approved during a special election last month. In Florida, several lawsuits are challenging the state’s newly drawn partisan gerrymander, even though the state’s constitution bans it.

Republicans in South Carolina are moving to strike down the state’s only Black-majority district and lone Democratic seat, and Alabama officials want to reinstate a map the Supreme Court tossed out just three years ago for illegally diluting Black voting power.

Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act bans voting rules that discriminate based on race. But “the Supreme Court says as long as you’re doing it for ‘pastisan’ reasons, it’s legal,” said Lewis.

The court’s ruling delivered a massive shot in the arm to a gerrymandering arms race demanded by Donald Trump, who called on Republican states to redraw congressional districts before midterm elections by ensuring the GOP can keep a grip on Congress.

But those new maps will instead “rob the political power of Black people in the South,” according to Amir Badat, a voting rights attorney with Fair Fight Action.

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In Tennessee, the newly passed map blows up the state’s only Democratic-leaning district by splitting the city of Memphis, which is more than 60 percent Black, into three separate districts — diluting Black voters’ political power across white Republican-leaning parts of the state.

The map doesn’t return the area to a pre-Voting Rights Act status quo. It eliminates a district that has been in existence for more than 100 years. Memphis has had its own congressional district since 1923.

“This was not the will of the people,” Civic Tennessee Matia Powell told reporters Friday.

“It wasn’t the people who called the governor for a special session,” she said. “It was the president.”

The fast pace of the changes has thrown off voting rights advocates who have campaigned against voter suppression efforts for decades, but it’s not something they haven’t seen before.

“What we’re witnessing is part of a much older, historical pattern,” said Hardy, who traced the latest redistricting race to the so-called Southern Strategy in the wake of the Voting Rights Act’s passage in 1965, when Republicans “weaponized” racial resentment to win over voters after those civil rights victories.

“It has not disappeared. It has evolved,” she said. “History has receipts.”

Tennessee state Rep. Justin Pearson, who is running for the House seat to represent Memphis in Congress, called the rapidly adopted congressional map a “political lynching” that has set the state back 150 years.

“The authoritarianism that has taken over Tennessee and other state houses across our country not only is a threat to democracy, it drains resources that are better used to improve the quality of life for marginalized communities and increase civic education and engagement,” he said in remarks after state lawmakers voted for the new map.

“Instead, Tennessee has become the model for abuse of power in the name of racism and political ideology,” he said. “But we are not powerless.”

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