NPR reports:

A historic drop in representation by Black members of Congress may be on the way after the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark decision Wednesday to further weaken the Voting Rights Act.

Now that the high court’s conservative majority has reinterpreted longstanding provisions against racial discrimination under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, Republican calls for new rounds of map drawing for the House of Representatives have already begun.

How much of that redistricting can be done in time for this fall’s midterm election is unclear, although many states have held or are close to holding congressional primary races.

But in the long run, looking beyond this November, many redistricting experts are expecting Republican-controlled state legislatures in the South to eliminate at least some House districts with sizable racial minority populations currently represented by Black Democrats and that were likely protected under the Supreme Court’s previous interpretation of Section 2 provisions.

From Louisiana and eastward to North Carolina, there are at least 15 House districts now at risk of elimination, according to an NPR analysis conducted earlier this year. (That list grows longer if taking into account newly redrawn districts in Missouri and Texas, which were not included in the analysis.)

Exactly how redistricting will play out with an eroded Voting Rights Act is hard to predict. Some Democratic-led states may jump into the fray and consider undoing certain majority-minority districts to spread out their voters and try to pick up additional seats.

And some GOP-led states may decide to keep some of those districts for partisan reasons, as they can keep large numbers of Democratic-leaning voters packed within those lines.

Losing even a handful of those districts, however, could set up the largest-ever decline in the number of Black representatives on Capitol Hill — breaking a record set around the end of the post-Civil War Reconstruction era by the Congress that began in 1877 with four fewer House districts represented by Black lawmakers than the previous session. [Continue reading…]

Alan Elrod writes:

Only seven years before I was born—seven years before Mississippi Burning told the story of Neshoba County—one of the last reported Klan lynchings took place in Mobile, Alabama. Michael Donald, a nineteen-year-old, was beaten and hung from a tree by Henry Hays and James Knowles, with additional help from fellow Klansman accomplices. In his book about the murder and subsequent trial, The Lynching: The Epic Courtroom Battle that Brought Down the Klan, journalist Laurence Leamer observes:

There had not been a lynching in America in a quarter century, and no one standing looking at the body had ever seen such a crime, but they had heard about it from family members and read about it in social science books in school. And they believed they knew what had occurred. White men had lynched a black man, and they had done it to send a message of intimidation and terror. This was something they thought would never happen again, and many of the black onlookers wept, others fell to the ground beating their fists against the earth.

If the people of 1981 Mobile felt as if the past was reaching into their civilized present, perhaps it’s in part because they, like us, did not realize how poorly buried racial tyranny and anti-democratic rage are in the South. It’s understandable for everyday people to lose sight of this fact. After all, our own lives are small, narrow things, and it can be hard to remember the past events of a few years ago, much less those that dominated the headlines for previous generations.

But for the Supreme Court of the United States, this week’s decision is pure arrogance and delusion, at best a form of criminally negligent homicide against the post-1960s multicultural democracy that has been the project of modern America. This country will now have to rediscover the energies that animated Freedom Summer and the March on Washington. If we don’t, the Jim Crow Southernization of America will continue apace.