As Republicans destroyed historic majority black neighborhoods in the South, they were compared to segregationists George Wallace and Bull Connor.
Protesters during a Senate committee meeting during a special session of the state legislature to redraw U.S. Congressional electoral maps, Wednesday, May 6, 2026, in Nashville, Tennessee.
(George Walker IV/AP) In the last speech of his life, delivered at the Mason Temple in Memphis on April 3, 1968, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. radius of the legacy of the student civil rights activists of the early 1960s: “I knew that by sitting, they were truly defending the best of the American dream and returning the entire nation to those great wells of democracy that were dug deep by the Founding Fathers in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. »
The next day, King was assassinated a few blocks away, on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel, a sacred site that today serves as a place of worship. home of the National Civil Rights Museum. Few cities are as closely associated with the civil rights movement of the 1960s as Memphis. And even fewer have such a rich history of struggle and success in realizing the promise of representative democracy.
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It was in Memphis that a year before President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that he was elected a civil rights attorney. Archie Walter Willis Jr. as the first African American representative from the state of Tennessee since Reconstruction. And Memphis is where many of the major election campaigns that followed the VRA’s enactment took place — from the election of dozens of black legislators and local officials to the eventual elevation of Harold Ford Sr. and Harold Ford Jr. to the post of U.S. Representatives from Tennessee’s Ninth Congressional District.
This year, an epic battle for the Democratic primaries is being played out in the Ninth District between U.S. Rep. Steve Cohen, a white former lawmaker who has attracted substantial Black support over the years, and state Rep. Justin Jamal Pearson, who gained national prominence in 2023 when he was one of two Black Democratic lawmakers to be forced out of the legislature by the Republican majority because of their fervent advocacy for gun safety.
The assumption was that the winner of the Democratic primary would prevail in November. But if the Republicans succeed, this hypothesis will no longer hold, because this historic district will be destroyed in a wild-eyed partisan takeover.
Previous gerrymanders had left the Ninth District as Tennessee’s only reliable Democratic seat in the U.S. House of Representatives — and the only congressional district with a majority black population. This was largely due to Voting Rights Act mandates.
But no more. On April 29, the right-wing majority of the American Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in his Louisiana v. Callais decision – a decision that Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law, described as “the culmination of decades of decisions limiting the Voting Rights Act.”
“No one, including the majority of the Court, disputes the impact of the decision: Across the South, voting districts that were drawn to protect black voters, like districts with a majority of voters of color, will be redrawn in an attempt to help Republicans.” explain Chemerinsky. The Republicans who draw up the new congressional maps need not even pretend to be interested in serving democracy, let alone maintaining the legacy of progress toward greater civil rights and voting rights. Chemerinsky noted: “As [Justice Elena] Kagan explained in his dissent Callis“the state has nothing to do but announce a partisan gerrymander.” Therefore, according to her, “a state can (as the majority says) draw districts for political purposes, including for purely partisan purposes – that is, to increase the electoral strength of a party – regardless of their racial effects. »
That’s what they did. Immediately after the Callis In office, Republican governors and legislators in a number of Southern states began redistributing U.S. House of Representatives seats in places like Memphis, black political strongholds whose citizens chose Democrats to represent them for decades.
On Wednesday, with encouragement from President Trump, Tennessee Republicans proposed a new house map which is tearing the ninth district apart. Black voters who once made up the majority in the district could be spread across three majority-white, Republican-leaning districts. If the map is approved, many Memphis voters will find themselves in a new district that stretches 200 miles across rural Tennessee and ends in the mostly white suburbs of Nashville.
This is not what democracy looks like.
Denouncing the new gerrymandering plan as an effort to “make things illegal…legal,” Pearson said, “It’s just wrong. Everybody knows exactly why this is happening. It’s an attack on our majority-black district. It’s an attack on our democracy.”
The 31-year-old lawmaker explained, “Donald Trump just conspired with the MAGA governor of Tennessee to try to take out my district. Pearson concluded: “Our ancestors didn’t organize, march, bleed, and pray so we can shrug our shoulders now.” »
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Cohen said”Trump and his Jim Crow Supreme Court want to ensure control of the GOP for the next century by rigging the game, redrawing the cards, and silencing our voices. Well, Memphis isn’t going down without a fight.” Describing the new maps as an example of “Trump’s corrupt power grab” and arguing that gerrymanding Democratic districts into existence is “the only game possible.” [Republicans] left to maintain their majority” in the House, the outgoing speaker complained that “they don’t care how devastating this is for cities like Memphis or for the entire country.”
Justin Jones, Tennessee State Representativea Nashville Democrat who worked closely with Pearson, succinctly summed up the historic equation this week, when he faced off against one of the most powerful Republicans in the Tennessee House, Majority Leader William Lamberth, as the maps were being debated. “I just wanted to look you in the eye,” Jones said, “and tell you that you will be in the history books with George Wallace and Bull Connor, and that your children will be ashamed of your position by presenting these racist cards.”
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John Nichols John Nichols is the editor-in-chief of The nation. He was previously the magazine’s national affairs correspondent and Washington correspondent. Nichols has written, co-authored or edited more than a dozen books on topics ranging from the history of American socialism and the Democratic Party to analyzes of American and global media systems. His latest, co-written with Senator Bernie Sanders, is the New York Times bestseller It’s okay to be angry at capitalism.
