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The GOP’s “Jim Crow Gerrymander” Rips Up Memphis and America’s Civil Rights Legacy

As Republicans destroy historic Black-majority House districts in the South, they are being compared with segregationists George Wallace and Bull Connor.

Protesters at a Senate committee meeting during a special session of the state legislature to redraw US congressional voting maps, Wednesday, May 6, 2026, in Nashville, Tennessee.

In the last speech of his life, delivered at the Mason Temple in Memphis on April 3, 1968, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke of the legacy of the student civil rights activists of the early 1960s: “I knew that as they were sitting in, they were really standing up for the best in the American dream, and taking the whole nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the Founding Fathers in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.”

The next day, King was assassinated just blocks away, on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel—hallowed ground which now serves as the home of the National Civil Rights Museum. Few cities are so closely associated with the civil rights movement of the 1960s as Memphis. And fewer still have so rich a history of struggle and success in making real the promise of representative democracy.

It was Memphis that, one year before President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, elected civil rights lawyer Archie Walter Willis Jr. as the first African American Tennessee state representative since Reconstruction. And it was in Memphis that many of the great electoral campaigns that followed the enactment of the VRA took place —from the elections of dozens of Black state legislators and local officials to the eventual elevation of Harold Ford Sr. and Harold Ford Jr. as US Representatives from Tennessee’s Ninth Congressional District.

This year, an epic Democratic primary battle has been playing out in the ninth district between US Representative Steve Cohen, a white former state legislator who has attracted substantial Black support over the years, and state Representative Justin Jamal Pearson, who came to national prominence in 2023 when he was one of two Black Democratic legislators to be expelled from the legislature by the Republican majority because of their outspoken advocacy on behalf of gun safety.

The assumption had been that the winner of the Democratic primary would prevail in November. But if........

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