There is a good reason why the words of Raphael Warnock on last week’s supreme court decision to strike down a black-majority congressional district in Louisiana carried weight.
Just five years have passed since Warnock became the first African-American to represent the state of Georgia in the Senate. At the weekend, he described the supreme court’s 6-3 ruling as “a colossal step backwards” for multiracial democracy and as a ruling that will hasten the onset of “21st-century Jim Crow tactics in new clothes”.
It was a stark forecast, resurrecting the ghosts of southern segregation and concerted black-voter repression. It cut through the onslaught of Democratic denunciations of the ruling, which found that Louisiana’s sixth congressional district – described by chief justice John Roberts as a “snake” roving across the state for more than 200 miles – represented a constitutional gerrymander. In recent years, the district had been subject to a series of challenges on behalf of black voters who had argued its voting maps were drawn in ways to dilute, or nullify, the voting power of its demographic constituency.
The practice of “cracking” – carving black-majority districts up into districts that weaken the collective vote of that area – or “packing” – compressing a cohesive voting block into one or two districts to limit the scope of its power – was at the heart of a series of legal challenges that led to the linking of black communities stretching across the state through the most recent redrafting of the sixth district in January 2024. The supreme court found, in the opinion written by Samuel Alito, it represented a racial gerrymandering.
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“This question about intent is on its head misleading and ignores our history,” Warnock said at the weekend.
“We had 100 years after the 15th amendment was passed which on paper gave black people the right to vote, but with supposedly or putatively race-neutral methods the right to vote was denied.”
The decision has prompted a flurry of legislative activity across southern states, in which the de-facto battle for the November midterms has already started. In Alabama, governor Kay Ivey called the state legislature back on Monday to look at potential redrafting of maps in her state.
Alabama attorney general Steve Marshall had last week filed an emergency motion to the supreme court asking it to lift injunctions that block the state from altering its voting map before 2030.
“No longer are we going to embrace this principle that discrimination based on race is an appropriate remedy for plaintiffs to assert,” Marshall said.
“Alabama is a conservative state. We deserve conservative representatives. The south of 2026 is not the same as was developed during the time the Voting Rights Act came about. In fact, in Alabama we have record numbers of participants in our electoral process.”
Marshall’s argument contains echoes of a supreme court ruling from 2013 that represented the first significant reversal of rights enshrined in the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1965. That decision found in favour of a judgment sought by Shelby county, in central Alabama, to remove the need for federal “pre-clearance” before enacting changes to voting laws.
“Since then, we have seen the racial turnout gap get wider and wider, not smaller, and it has grown twice as fast in the states that used to be under section five,” Warnock said.
“We will see a devastating impact as a result of this, and now more than ever we have to stand up and fight for our democracy.”
Nikole Hannah-Jones, a New York Times journalist and creator of the “1619 Project”, has argued the decision represents a “perilous moment” that not only weakens the Voting Rights Act but will also disenfranchise a cohort of white voters in the southern states – irrespective of their party allegiance.
“The supreme court is arguing that racial gerrymandering is unconstitutional but partisan gerrymandering is legitimate while pretending not to understand that in the south, where half of black Americans live, the partisan divide is a racial divide,” she told MS Now over the weekend.
“Nearly all white southerners vote Republican and nearly all black people in the south vote Democrat – and it is not incidental that we have this racial and partisan divide in the former confederate states.”
But Hannah-Jones pointed out the rush to redraft redistricting votes will have the same impact as old voter-suppression tools such as the grandfather clause (which exempted men from requisite literacy tests if they had a right to vote before 1867, thereby effectively limiting the exemption to white men) and poll taxes (requiring voters to pay a fee to vote).
“But what is also true is what the Voting Rights Act overturned were race-neutral policies, so when you are telling your viewers about the grandfather clauses, poll taxes and literacy tests; these were race-neutral because the 15th amendment says you can’t bar someone from voting based on their race. So, what white conservatives did was they figured out how can we pass laws that don’t mention race but have the same impact. Well, that’s what this gerrymandering is doing.”
Some of those laws inadvertently denied the right to vote to poorer white people in the southern states. And new redistricting will potentially nullify the votes of white people in those same states who vote Democrat.
In arguing for the justification for gerrymandering, many Republican advocates point north, to the states across New England where no Republican has been voted to Congress since 2019. Maine’s Susan Collins is the only GOP senator from those six states. Republicans make up roughly 40 per cent of the New England electorate. The legislative redistricting proceeding at pace in the southern states is, they argue, a fair attempt to even the national book in what has been termed a “redistricting arms race”.
A Pew research report found the 119th Congress, which runs until 2027, is the most ethnically diverse ever. Its 66 black members form the largest ever black representation. One of the four black Republican House members, Wesley Hunt, from the Texas 38th district, responded to the outcry over the supreme court decision by asserting that race is irrelevant when it comes to winning elections.
“I’m not here because I’m black. I am here because I’m qualified – representative for congressional District 38, and the American people choose who they want to choose. And the one thing I don’t want to get into is this game of race-bait all day, every day. I am being judged not by the colour of my skin but by the content of my character. I don’t care how many black people are here. I want the most qualified people here.”
But black Republican representation is set to change after the midterms, with all four black Republican congressmen leaving. Three, including Hunt, who left his seat to unsuccessfully seek his party’s Senate nomination, are seeking different offices. The fourth, Burgess Owens of Utah, has opted not to seek re-election. He decided it was pointless after a court-ordered remapping of his district repositioned his seat into a likely Democrat win.
