Throughout the American South is an archipelago of majority-Black congressional districts that provide some measure of Black representation in Congress. These districts owe their existence to a combination of basic electoral math, federal court orders, and legislative compromises. If Republicans have their way, all or nearly all of them will be gone in the next few months.
The Supreme Court’s ruling last week in Louisiana v. Callais kicked off a legislative frenzy as Republicans in more than a half-dozen states race to redraw their congressional maps—in some cases, in the middle of ongoing elections. Their goal is to eliminate as many majority-Black districts as mathematically possible, bolstering the GOP’s midterms chances in November and endangering the future of multiracial democracy in the South.
Leading the charge is Louisiana itself. A federal district court had struck down the state’s revised congressional map after the 2020 Census and ordered the state to create a second majority-minority district to comply with Section 2 of the VRA. A group of “non-African American” plaintiffs, as they described themselves, then sued on the grounds that the court-ordered map also amounted to racial gerrymandering and was therefore unconstitutional under the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause. In last week’s 6-3 ruling, the Supreme Court agreed—and gutted Section 2 in response.
It was easy to predict what would happen next. “After today, those districts exist only on sufferance, and probably not for long,” Justice Elena Kagan warned in her dissent. “If other states follow Louisiana’s lead, the minority citizens residing there will no longer have an equal opportunity to elect candidates of their choice. And minority representation in government institutions will sharply decline.”
Early voting was already underway in Louisiana’s congressional primaries when the ruling was released, with more than 40,000 ballots reportedly already cast by mail. That did not stop Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry from issuing an executive order to halt the state’s elections so that state lawmakers could draw a new map that eliminates at least one of the majority-Black districts.
A group of Louisiana voters filed a lawsuit last week to resume the election, but have not yet succeeded at having the executive order stayed by a court. The Supreme Court, for its part, does not seem interested in delaying the inevitable. Earlier this week, the justices voted to immediately issue the court’s mandate for the lower courts instead of waiting the usual month, drawing a rare dissent from Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.
“Not content to have decided the law, it now takes steps to influence its implementation,” she wrote, referring to the internal rule that governs this specific process. “The court’s decision to buck our usual practice under Rule 45.3 and issue the judgment forthwith is tantamount to an approval of Louisiana’s rush to pause the ongoing election in order to pass a new map.”
Justice Samuel Alito, the author of Callais, issued a separate statement joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch to attack Jackson’s dissent. He claimed, among other things, that her preference for “unthinking compliance” with the court’s usual rule itself would create the “appearance of partiality” on “behalf of those who may find it politically advantageous to have the election occur under the unconstitutional map.” The irony of making this argument to ensure a state could racially gerrymander Black voters out of electoral power eluded Alito.
The court’s swiftness in issuing the Callais mandate is a clear signal to every Southern state to wipe out majority-Black districts as quickly as possible ahead of this year’s midterms. Louisiana Republicans are reportedly planning to keep at least one of its majority-Black districts intact, likely because eliminating both districts would make it easier for Democrats to contest some of the majority-white seats.
Alabama, which also has two majority-Black districts, also took steps to unwind one of them this week. The second district was created after a federal court upheld a racial-gerrymandering challenge in Allen v. Milligan. The Supreme Court upheld the current revised map in 2022 by ruling that the court’s order was lawful under existing precedent a the time. Since the Callais decision changed that precedent, Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall asked the lower court to lift an injunction prohibiting the state from changing its maps again until the next census in four years.
Other Southern states are going all-in on erasing majority-Black districts. In Tennessee, lawmakers released a new congressional map on Wednesday that would gerrymander the state’s ninth congressional district out of existence by splitting Memphis between three majority-white districts. State Speaker Cameron Sexton, a Republican, told reporters that the new map will “reduce the risk of future legal challenges while promoting sound and strategic conservatism.”
In South Carolina, Republicans are also considering steps to eliminate the state’s sole majority-Black district. Representative Jim Clyburn, a member of the House Democratic leadership team, currently holds that seat. A redistricting vote would require two-thirds approval from the South Carolina state legislature, but it may not succeed if some state lawmakers conclude that erasing Clyburn’s safe seat would make it possible for Democrats to compete in neighboring ones.
The only Southern state under Republican control that ruled out new maps for 2026 is Georgia, which is scheduled to hold its primary elections on May 19. Governor Brian Kemp told reporters last week that the court’s ruling came too late this year for a new redistricting process. At the same time, he suggested that new maps could be drafted in time for the 2028 cycle. Georgia has four majority-Black districts that could be imperiled; Democrats also currently hold a majority-white district in the northwest Atlanta suburbs.
Four other Southern states—Texas, Florida, Missouri, and North Carolina—already redrew their map at President Donald Trump’s behest. Some of them, most notably Florida and Texas, could find it difficult to squeeze more Republican-only seats out of the state’s urban areas. But with the Voting Rights Act now fully moribund, it is possible that they could renew their efforts for 2028 as well.
This is not the end of Black political power in the South altogether. The most democratic outlets for Southern voters will now be the Electoral College and the U.S. Senate—two features of the American constitutional order that have long been criticized for stifling the popular will. Their influence will also be felt in statewide races where they can’t simply be gerrymandered out of relevance, particularly in states like Georgia and North Carolina.
Even so, the GOP’s racial-gerrymandering campaign is a tragic milestone in America’s racial history. Not since Reconstruction ended in the 1870s amid white-supremacist terrorism and voter suppression has Black electoral influence declined so suddenly in the American South. The House of Representatives is often regarded as the “People’s House” for its egalitarian design. If Republicans complete their racial-gerrymandering campaign, it will lose any claim to honestly representing the American people as a whole.