‘This is not democracy’: Voting rights activists shocked by speed of states moving to stifle Black voters
The reaction speed of southern states to the US supreme court’s decision last week in Louisiana v Callais has been breathtaking for voting rights activists.
One week after Callais, Louisiana’s governor has ordered the state’s ongoing congressional election to be set aside while state lawmakers redraw maps to eliminate a Democratic-majority – that is, a Black-majority – seat covering Baton Rouge.
Alabama’s Republican-majority legislature is drafting legislation in a special session that will allow it to set aside the results of a completed primary later this year if courts lift an injunction on its redistricting.
Florida was amid a special redistricting session as the ruling was handed down, passing a congressional map for 28 districts that packs Black and brown voters into four districts on the south Florida coast and Orlando, eliminating every other Democratic majority.
Mississippi will convene two weeks from now in a Confederate-era capitol building that it hasn’t used in 100 years, ostensibly to eliminate the Democratic majority in the one Mississippi district held by a Black representative.
South Carolina’s Republican majority in the statehouse voted on Wednesday to extend its legislative calendar, allowing time to consider whether they should eliminate the state’s sole Democratic-majority, Black-majority district, held by long-serving representative James Clyburn.
And activists watched Tennessee lawmakers vote on Thursday morning to eliminate its one remaining Democratic district around Memphis, a city of about 610,000 people, about two-thirds of whom are Black.
Donald Trump’s demand to tear up political norms has been met by Republican states eager to dust off a segregation-era playbook that maximizes the political power of white voters.
“What’s happening right now is probably the swiftest disenfranchisement of Black folks since Reconstruction, due to disenfranchisement by racist gerrymandering. And they will lie and say that it’s for political purposes,” said the Democratic state representative Justin Pearson of Tennessee, a Memphis legislator running for a congressional district blown into pieces by Republican lawmakers. “They cracked it into three. The district stretches hundreds of miles … it’s completely diluted in thirds almost to the percentage. It’s surgical, how they remove the possibility of Black participation.” [Continue reading…]