Tennessee’s only Black-majority House district is gone. Mississippi won’t be far behind – National & International News
Tennessee’s only Black-majority House district is gone. Mississippi won’t be far behind.
In a special session that was emotional for many and at times raucous, Tennessee’s Republican-dominated legislature voted to do away with the state’s only Black-majority congressional voting district. The new map breaks up the seat currently held by Democratic Rep. Steve Cohen (which contains most of Memphis) into three districts snaking hundreds of miles eastward. Tennessee is one of several Republican-led states that have moved to dispose of electoral maps that carved out at least one majority-Black voting district in their states.
This is now legally feasible after the Supreme Court decision in Louisiana v. Callais last week, which declared an essential part of the Voting Rights Act (1965) to be unconstitutional. At a moment when both red and blue states are racing to gerrymander ahead of this years midterms, the Callais decision opened the door for red states to draw up even more starkly partisan maps.
In an interview with the Trump-aligned conservative news outlet The Daily Caller, Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves discussed his own plans to follow suit. Redrawing the Mississippi’s Congressional map ahead for use in this year’s midterms is likely not feasible since the state has already had primary contests. However, Tate has already called a special session of the legislature to consider drawing up a new Congressional map, and also new maps for state legislative districts and state Supreme Court voting districts.
According to the most recent US Census, Mississippi’s residents are 37.7% Black. Out of the four existing House districts, only one (District 2 represented by Bennie Thompson) is majority-Black.
Several authors have commented on the fact that this special session will be held not at Mississippi’s state capitol building. Instead, they will meet at the Old Capitol Museum – the former capitol where Mississippi voted to secede from the Union before the Civil War, and where the state’s Jim Crow laws were ratified as part of the 1890 Constitution. This is ostensibly due to renovations in the House chamber of the new Capitol building, but the optics have raised eyebrows nevertheless.
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