The 1965 Voting Rights Act was the crowning achievement of the civil rights movement. By ending the electoral system of racial apartheid across the South, the VRA finally guaranteed that millions of African Americans could exercise the one right that helps them protect every other right. A key way that the law did so was by mandating the creation of majority-minority districts to ensure that non-white voters living in areas with strongly racially polarized voting could elect their preferred candidates. Nonetheless, as we celebrate the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. on Monday, the rights of black voters are seriously threatened.
Alabama was the epicenter for the battle over civil rights, starting with the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955 and culminating with the marches from Selma to Montgomery for voting rights in 1965. Those marches saw participants brutally beaten by a law enforcement regime determined to maintain white supremacy. In one form or another, those attacks continue to this day: Rep. John Lewis, a legendary civil rights leader who nearly lost his life while marching for voting rights in Alabama, was just subject to a vituperative assault by President-elect Donald Trump, who remarkably claimed that Lewis was “all talk.”
And despite the successes of the Voting Rights Act, Alabama still offers a potent example of how black voting power is still under siege. Following the 2010 census, white Republicans controlled the congressional redistricting process across nearly the entire South, and they aimed to draw districts that complied with the VRA as minimally as possible. In multiple states, Republicans even drew racial gerrymanders that went so far that courts ruled them unconstitutional. Alabama’s population is roughly two-sevenths African American, but white Republicans drew a congressional map that elected just a single black representative out of seven, as shown on the above map in the center (see here for a larger version).
As the map on the left demonstrates, it was easily possible for Alabama to draw a second majority-minority district to allow black voters to elect their candidate preference, resulting in a congressional delegation that proportionally reflects the state’s racial balance. Alabama is not alone in this regard, as nearly every Southern state could have drawn another congressional district to elect black and Hispanic voters’ candidate preference. America requires major electoral reforms to increase representation of communities of color when a mere 22 percent of House members nationally are not white, compared to 38 percent of the country’s population overall.
Unfortunately, even our current inadequate levels of non-white representation is imperiled thanks to the fact that Republicans under Trump now wield more power than at any point since the 1920s. Chief Justice John Roberts has long crusaded against the VRA itself, and if future Trump appointees shift the Supreme Court far to the right, Roberts could further dismantle the law. Trump’s attorney general nominee, Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, has called the VRA “intrusive,” and has a long history of opposing voting rights. As the map on the right illustrates, white Republicans could easily eliminate Alabama’s sole black representative if the VRA’s requirement of majority-minority districts did not exist.
While we give praise to Dr. King’s legacy, it is more threatened now than at any point since his murder 49 years ago. It’s paramount that the Voting Rights Act and the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause receive proper enforcement so that we can protect and expand the voting rights of people of color.
Under Alabama’s existing Republican-drawn congressional gerrymander shown at the top of this story in the center, Hillary Clinton carried the black-majority 7th District by 70-29, yet Trump won the remaining six districts with no less than 64 percent of the vote in each. This gaping partisan disparity makes it impossible for black voters to elect their candidate choice in more than one district, since race and party overwhelmingly align in Alabama.
That overlap between race and party preference is not entirely complete, though. Our proposed nonpartisan map would create two districts with narrow white pluralities, but enough white voters would consistently side with black voters such that black voters could elect their candidates of choice—namely, black Democrats.
Under our hypothetical map on the left, the Birmingham and Tuscaloosa-based 7th District would have favored Clinton by 58-40 and the rural Black Belt and Montgomery-based 2nd would have given her a 53-45 edge. In fact, longtime Republican Sen. Richard Shelby even lost both districts to a token Democratic opponent by 58-42 and 53-47 respectively. Consequently, both districts would have ensured black voters could elect their preferred candidates.
The map shown on the right is also hypothetical, in a dreadful way. It has seven majority-white districts, all of which favored Mitt Romney in 2012 by at least a 19-point margin. This map splits the Black Belt between five districts, which is almost precisely what conservative whites did prior to 1992, when the Voting Rights Act finally forced Alabama to draw a majority-black district. If Republicans succeed in further dismantling the Voting Rights Act, they could eliminate roughly a dozen majority-minority congressional districts across the South, ensuring that states like Alabama send all-white congressional delegations to Congress for the first time in decades.
So when Republicans offer their typically hollow encomiums to Martin Luther King, remember that we stand on the precipice of seeing one of King’s greatest achievements eviscerated at the hands of the GOP.