Many view this year’s gerrymandering battles as merely another skirmish between Democrats and Republicans for control of the U.S. House of Representatives. But for some southern Black Democrats, it’s the latest saga in a sad story as old as time.

A central question during the decades-long struggle that led to the Civil War was whether northern white people would risk limb and life to challenge the peculiar institution of African slavery. After that war was won, those same northern white people were ambivalent about troubling themselves to ensure that southern white people didn’t effectively re-enslave the ex-enslaved people via terrorism and various restrictions on their right to vote, earn a living, and move around freely. That was true even in the ranks of the Republican Party, which largely abandoned federally enforced Reconstruction of the South in 1876 in order to win a contested presidential election. The creation of the full Jim Crow system of institutionalized white supremacy in the South proceeded over the next several decades with little or no interference from outside the region.

The abandonment of southern Black people continued even as progressive Democrats gradually became interested (in theory at least) in their plight. New Dealers and their progeny recognized the incredible injustices being meted out by their Democratic allies south of the Mason-Dixon Line but depended too much on southern white support to do anything about it. It took a southern-generated civil-rights movement, and a brutal southern reaction to it, to arouse the conscience of the nation. But even then the leadership of both major parties fretted over white “backlash,” and Republicans gradually and then eagerly became the “white man’s party.” In fits and starts Democrats lost political power in the South and could really only do anything constructive for southern Black people via federally enacted voting-rights and social-services legislation, giving a racial tinge to every conflict in Washington over “big........

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