The civil rights era is collapsing before our eyes
On May 7, amid the din of protesters, Tennessee’s Republican-majority legislature met to vote on a bill that would eliminate the state’s lone majority-Black and Democratic House district, divvying its voters up between three heavily white ones. Outraged, State Representative Justin Jones of Nashville stood in the hallway of the State Capitol and set afire a paper replica of the Confederate battle flag. The words “We will not go back” were printed along the top.
But going back is precisely what the legislature voted to do, as Tennessee became the first of the former Confederate states to create and approve new congressional maps since the Supreme Court’s recent decision to eviscerate the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
A week and a day before the Tennessee vote, the Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice John Roberts, had finally achieved the right’s decades-long goal of nullifying what’s considered the most successful civil rights law in our nation’s ignoble racial history. After upholding unrestrained partisan gerrymandering in other recent decisions, the court now determined that creating congressional maps that sought to ensure political representation for racial minorities violated the Constitution.
For students of history, what Tennessee did on May 7 felt like a premonition. One hundred and fifty years ago, when this nation’s first experiment with interracial democracy began to collapse, Tennessee — a former slave state and the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan — was the first domino to drop. In 1870, the Tennessee legislature rewrote the State Constitution to disenfranchise Black men. As the historian Manisha Sinha writes in “The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic,” Tennessee “provided a template to other Southern states” for how to “overthrow Reconstruction.” Within three decades, Black representation, in Congress and in local and state offices across the former Confederacy, would be wiped out. [Continue reading…]
Tennessee’s Rep. Justin Jones talks to Tim Miller:
Proud to present @StephenM with a proclamation honoring our collaboration on Tennessee’s landmark immigration and public safety legislative package. Great work of the @tnhousegop and @tnsenategop in protecting our citizens, our communities and our tax dollars. Leaders like… pic.twitter.com/1VNluSbVwq
— Speaker Cameron Sexton (@CSexton25) May 18, 2026