On May 8, the Republican-controlled legislature of Tennessee passed new redistricting maps that divide Memphis’s 63 percent Black population across three white-majority districts. This eliminates the state’s sole Black-majority district.
Republicans in Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Georgia are similarly pushing redistricting maps that would decimate their majority-Black districts.
These moves come on the heels of the Supreme Court’s controversial decision in Louisiana v. Callais, which effectively killed Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. This was the latest in a decades-long effort by the Supreme Court to dismantle the law, reversing a signature accomplishment of the Civil Rights Movement.
This systematic assault against the voting power of Black people is a deliberate attempt to deny them political representation and silence their voices.
Tennessee was admitted to the Union in 1796 but didn’t elect its first Black congressperson, Representative Harold Ford Sr. from Memphis, until 1974 — nearly 10 years after the passage of the Voting Rights Act. That Memphis-based district is the very one now being dismantled.
Without the Voting Rights Act and the racial gerrymandering it was designed to oppose, Ford may not have been elected.
Not because Black people only vote for candidates of color. It’s because people, regardless of race, vote for those they believe understand their problems and work to solve them. While we vote as individuals, the social, political, and economic challenges we face are deeply interwoven with the communities in which we live.
Black people are twice as likely as whites to face food insecurity and more likely to live in “food deserts.” This reality is inextricably tied to the continuing influence of slavery and Jim Crow.
This includes: “redlining,” whereby mortgages and insurance were denied to people in minority-majority neighborhoods; “racial covenants” that prohibited people of color from renting, buying, or occupying specific property; and segregation, which concentrated poverty and restricted social mobility.
These policies functioned for decades to keep Black communities underserved, underinvested, and underdeveloped. They are the foundation of the racial wealth gap that persists today. According to the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, in 2022 the median white household held $284,310 — more than six times the $44,100 held by the median Black household.
The racial wealth gap limits access to education, healthcare, and opportunities as well as food. Larger grocery stores are less willing to open stores in poor areas because they consider them less profitable. This is known as “supermarket redlining”and disproportionately impacts communities of color.
The fact of the matter is that, despite progress on these issues, people of color continue to be impacted by racism, colorism, Islamophobia, and xenophobia in ways that white people are not. Politicians pretending these problems no longer exist will only serve to widen racial inequalities.
Yet this is precisely what will occur if Republicans succeed in splitting the Black vote across multiple white-majority districts.
Right now, the Democrats are largely focused on counter-gerrymandering the Republicans in other states. This may help them win seats, but it won’t help the Black communities across the South that are being disenfranchised.
These political games must end. President John Adams once wrote that the House of Representatives “should be in miniature, an exact portrait of the people at large. It should think, feel, reason, and act like them.”
Gerrymandering, however, inverts this equation. Instead of the House reflecting the people, it reflects the will of the politicians who carve up districts to gain political power. It is a government designed by the politicians for the politicians.
We must put an end to racist and partisan gerrymandering. We must restore the Voting Rights Act. And ultimately, we must ensure that Black communities have the political representation they’ve earned via their blood, sweat, and tears.
Anything less is a betrayal of their struggle as well as the ideals of America’s Founders.
