“Bleaching” Black residents from S.C.’s 1st District
Bishop William Barber of the Poor People’s Campaign regularly invokes the fusion movement that allowed formerly enslaved citizens (men, anyway) joined by white allies to vote and win public office in the post-Civil War South. Nineteenth-century Supreme Court rulings backing white backlash to fusion politics set the stage, Politico Magazine reports, for “the American slide toward autocracy.”
The backlash to Barack Obama’s 2008 election provided the jolt of momentum autocrats needed, particularly in the former Confederate states, for resurrecting the not-yet-cold corpse of Jim Crow.
Georgetown University law professor Sheryll Cashin recounts recent history with which Hullabaloo readers are already familiar, plus Alabama’s recent insistence on defying court rulings to preserve white dominance of the state’s congressional delegation:
In 2022, a three-judge district court found that the state’s proposed redistricting map diluted minority votes, in violation of the Voting Rights Act. It ordered Alabama to create a second majority-Black congressional district or “or something quite close to it” so that Black voters would “have an opportunity to elect a representative of their choice.” In a 5-4 ruling, the court in Milligan rejected Alabama’s arguments for a reinterpretation of the Act and ordered it to follow the lower court’s decision.
Instead, this state — where “Heart of Dixie” is still required messaging on all license plates — defied the court with a new map that did not create a realistic possibility for Black voters to elect a second congressperson. That led the annoyed lower court to direct an independent expert to redraw the map. Then Alabama filed an emergency request with the Supreme Court it had just defied, asking it to stay the independent expert’s work while it pursued yet another appeal.
Last month, the court denied this emergency request, clearing the way for a fairer map to be put in place by the 2024 elections.
The same happened with Republicans in North Carolina in 2022. They are rolling out new gerrymanders again in just weeks.
Old times there are not forgotten
In the state where Confederates fired the first shots of the Civil War, South Carolina Republicans are at similar work:
After an eight-day trial, the district court found that the legislature had imposed a racial target of no more than 17 percent African American for the 1st District and cut 62 percent of Black residents of Charleston County — more than 30,000 people — out of the district to meet it. The district court called this a “stark racial gerrymander.” The court found the South Carolina legislature abandoned traditional redistricting principles, instead “bleaching” Black voters from their former district. Those changes, the court concluded, were not required by any population shifts identified by the 2020 Census.
Yet South Carolina argues that the Supreme Court should presume it acted in good faith, for partisan not racial reasons. The court should reject South Carolina’s plea to “disentangle race from politics” because the southern history of race-infused partisanship explains why Blacks were excised, regardless of the legislature’s professed intent.
Tacitly acceptable partisan gerrymanders are Rubin vase illusions southern states expect us to accept on good faith are not racially prohibited districts. Roberts court conservatives may well prefer to see it Republicans’ way. Past courts have set the precedent, Cashin concludes.
As autocracy rises on the constructed divisions that politicians foment, the court has much repair work to do — lest we return to the anti-democratic despotism of 1883.
The jury of nine is still out.