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Tennessee GOP Moves to Decimate Black Voting Power After Supreme Court’s Blessing of Jim Crow

With the Supreme Court blessing racial gerrymandering, Tennessee’s GOP rushed to eliminate the state’s only majority-Black congressional district.

The ink had barely dried on the Supreme Court’s ruling to gut the Voting Rights Act when Republican lawmakers raced to deliver on the barely veiled promises of the court’s decision: the decimation of Black political power and a revival of Jim Crow-era racist voter suppression.

In Tennessee on Thursday, Gov. Lee signed a bill that repealed a half-century-old law prohibiting mid-decade redistricting, and then the overwhelmingly Republican legislature passed new redistricting maps that eliminate the state’s only Black-majority district. The 9th Congressional District, also Tennessee’s only reliable Democratic seat, will be carved into three — purposefully redrawn for each piece to have a white-majority and Republican-leaning electorate. The votes of Memphis’s 63 percent Black population will be diluted to near irrelevance; the entire state will be handed to Republicans.

With the right-wing justices’ blessing, Republican lawmakers can now enact segregationist gerrymandering.

With the right-wing justices’ blessing, Republican lawmakers can now enact segregationist gerrymandering.

No one can act surprised. This was the predicted outcome of the Supreme Court’s Louisiana v. Callais decision, which decimated Section 2 of the embattled Voting Rights Act, a provision that had protected minority voters from redistricting. With the right-wing justices’ blessing, Republican lawmakers can now enact segregationist gerrymandering and reestablish the pre-civil-rights-era status quo ante.

It stands to reason that Republicans are not representing the interests of Black Tennesseans, some 17 percent of the population, overwhelmingly Democrats. These residents only have one representative in Washington, Rep. Steve Cohen — the lone Democrat among the state’s nine congressional seats. That is the seat being eliminated by the new maps passed by Tennessee’s largely white legislature.

The situation is already one in which Black working-class interests are hardly represented — and nor would greater Black representation in the state necessarily ensure the delivery of racial justice and the economic justice it requires.

The point is that Black disenfranchisement both reflects and produces conditions of white supremacist rule, wherein greater anti-Black oppression is assured.

“These maps are racist tools of white supremacy, at the behest of the most powerful white supremacist in the United States of America, Donald J. Trump,” said Democratic state Rep. Justin Pearson at the Tennessee statehouse on Thursday. Pearson, a progressive activist and one of the state’s few Black representatives, is running for a seat in Congress and was neck and neck in polling for his August primary against Cohen, the 76-year-old incumbent. The redrawn maps would likely foreclose his chance to represent South........

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