CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

GOP Gerrymandering is Erasing the South’s Black Votes

Photograph Source: Longestview – CC0

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........

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