In 1972, Dr. Press Robinson Sr. decided to run for the school board in East Baton Rouge Parish, Louisiana. A chemistry professor at Southern University, Robinson was married with two sons and had grown frustrated with the lack of resources schools provided to Black children like his. He remembers the campaign as frustrating. No Black candidate had ever been elected to a seat, and the school board was chosen by wards — huge stretches of the parish with more white residents than Black. Robinson spent a lot of the election season getting doors slammed in his face by white people. He lost, then ran again in 1976 and lost again by an even wider margin.

Robinson came to see the problem as structural. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 had a provision, Section 2, prohibiting electoral practices that discriminated on the basis of race. He felt his predicament was a clear example: There was no way for him to win in a district that was still grudgingly desegregating. Robinson took the school board to court in 1974, arguing that the parish should be divided into single-member districts so Black candidates had a chance to win. This move, along with pressure from state legislators, led to change, and in 1980, Robinson ran successfully for one of three newly created seats.

“I really felt optimistic,” he tells me of that time. But nearly 50 years later, Robinson is in the same fight. Now a gentle-spoken 88-year-old widower, Robinson was a plaintiff in the case that led to Louisiana v. Callais, the Supreme Court decision that gutted Section 2 and green-lit an ongoing gerrymandering blitz. “I still have some recuperation to do,” Robinson says when I ask him how he’s feeling on a recent morning. “Maybe one or two more weeks.” It takes me a moment to realize he’s talking about an unplanned hernia surgery and not the recent Supreme Court decision.

The human costs of Callais are both overwhelming and underrated. As a legal precedent, the decision allows legislatures to redraw their congressional districts to ensure that few, or none, have more Black voters than white. In the South,........

© Daily Intelligencer