Louisiana’s 6th district traces the Voting Rights Act fight : NPR

BATON ROUGE, La. — Three mornings a week, usually before 7, a half dozen or so seniors finish exercising at a community gym and commandeer a hallway lined with plastic chairs.

“We call ourselves the old men down the hall,” says 88-year-old retired chemistry professor Press Robinson.

The men drink coffee, eat donuts and talk. When the group of retirees met a few Fridays ago, the conversation turned to a decision by the U.S. Supreme Court two days before, which declared their home congressional district an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.

The landmark ruling in Louisiana v. Callais gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, with experts saying it is now practically impossible to challenge racial discrimination in redistricting.

“They’ve just killed the Voting Rights Act,” Robinson says. “It has no teeth at all.”

So with the high court’s blessing, Louisiana Republican lawmakers are now racing to redraw the congressional map. The state Senate is set to advance a map Thursday that would eliminate one of the state’s two majority-Black, Democratic-held districts ahead of the midterms.

The dismantling of that district, which stretches in a Z-shape across the state from Baton Rouge to Shreveport, is not only the latest salvo in the war over redistricting. The district lines also trace the battle over the landmark voting rights law that continued long after it passed in 1965.

For 91-year-old James Verrett, a retired history teacher, the recent Supreme Court ruling was a gut punch. Verrett participated in the struggle to pass the VRA. When he returned home from military service overseas, only to find Louisiana still treated him as a second-class citizen, Verrett joined protests for voting rights.

“I’ve been beaten with billy sticks, dogs and tear gas,” Verrett says. “We moved forward. But now the Supreme Court and the state courts are making it back up to where it was.”

When Robinson and Verrett were young men, few Black Southerners were registered to vote. Robinson became the first in his family to register in 1955, only after he managed to pass a test to interpret archaic lines from the Constitution.

Ten years later, the Voting Rights Act prohibited these arbitrary barriers, but the law did not immediately result in a swell of Black elected officials.

Slow progress toward Black representation

By the mid-1970s, in East Baton Rouge Parish, the school board still had no Black members.

“Kids were still getting books that were third, fourth generation, with names of white students all over them,” Robinson says.

Determined to change that, Robinson reached for Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.

“It was the keystone,” he says. “Because that provided the legal background for us to go into court and argue these issues.”

A court ruled the parish wards illegally diluted Black voting power, ordering the creation of majority-Black districts. In 1980, Robinson was elected to one of them.

“Now there was a voice, somebody who understood what Black parents and students wanted, felt, needed,” he said.

The VRA results in a proliferation of majority-Black districts

When the Voting Rights Act came up for renewal in 1982, Congress strengthened the law. By 1992, the number of majority-Black congressional districts nearly doubled nationwide, mostly in the South. Membership in the Congressional Black Caucus surged.

“And it was because of that one act, the Voting Rights Act,” says Cleo Fields, who was first elected at age 29 to a new majority-Black seat based in Baton Rouge. Fields looked so young, with his big wire glasses and thin mustache, that some staff confused him for a House page.

The new district lines were almost immediately challenged in court.

“The day I got to Congress, there was a lawsuit just waiting on me,” Fields says. “So I served with that cloud over my head.”

Still, Fields got to work. He secured a grant for Southern University, a historically Black college in his district. It was just a few million dollars, but at that time it was the school’s biggest federal award ever. It showed, Fields thought, how much representation in Congress matters.

But in 1996, a federal court ruled the district, a 250-mile-long zig-zag across the state, was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.

“People throughout that district — the Delta, Shreveport, Monroe, Baton Rouge — they had felt a sense of inclusion and the district was wiped away,” he says.

With the district dismantled, Fields left Congress after just two terms.

Another lawsuit challenging Louisiana’s districts

Nearly three decades went by, and in Louisiana, where Black residents account for roughly a third of the population, one congressional district out of six remained where Black voters could elect a candidate of their choice.

That was until Robinson, the retired professor, decided to go to court one last time, filing another federal lawsuit in 2022 under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. This time, Robinson argued that Louisiana’s congressional map diluted Black voting power.

A federal court agreed, ordering a second majority-Black district. And former Congressman Fields, who arrived in Washington a young man, won election to return to Congress, now in his 60s.

“I had the chance to do it as a kid, and now I had a chance to do it as a grown man,” Fields says.

Once again, a lawsuit challenging the district was filed. And once again — two weeks ago — a court struck down Louisiana’s map. This time, the final decision came from the U.S. Supreme Court, with sweeping implications not just for Louisiana, but the entire country.

At the state Capitol, Republicans rushed to eliminate at least one of the majority-Black districts. During hours of public comments on proposed maps, tensions flared between lawmakers. Chants of protests opposing the redraw in the hall outside the room bled through the doors.

With mail ballots for primary elections already out and early in-person voting set to begin, Republican Gov. Jeff Landry on April 29 halted the House primaries, so the maps could be redrawn.

“The best way to end race-based discrimination is to stop making decisions based on race,” Landry wrote in the executive order.

On the heels of a nationwide redistricting war spurred by President Trump to maintain a GOP majority in the House, Louisiana is one of several Republican-led Southern states now slashing districts no longer protected by the VRA.

Louisiana lawmakers considered removing both majority-Black districts, but decided against it, for fear that a map designed to elect six Republicans could backfire, making the districts too competitive for Republican incumbents like House Speaker Mike Johnson or Majority Leader Steve Scalise. The courts have allowed states to gerrymander districts based on politics, but not race.

The proposed map will maintain one majority-Black district that stretches from New Orleans along the Mississippi River to include mostly Black neighborhoods in East Baton Rouge Parish.

The Senate is expected to advance the map on Thursday, and the House could vote on the plan next week.

How Louisiana illustrates the long push for voting rights

Redistricting experts say this latest Supreme Court decision could result in the largest drop in Black representation in Congress since Reconstruction, when Jim Crow-era restrictions and racial violence reversed modest gains in the numbers of Black House members.

Louisiana first elected Black members of the House and Senate after the Civil War, though they were never seated. The state’s first Black member of Congress served from 1875 to 1877. Louisiana did not elect another until 1990.

“I look at pictures at the number of Blacks who were in Congress, and then after Reconstruction, they were all wiped out,” Fields says.

Fields has also been thinking of Homer Plessy, the Black shoemaker who challenged Louisiana’s segregation laws in a case that ultimately reached the Supreme Court. The suit resulted in a landmark Supreme Court decision, Plessy v. Ferguson, establishing the Jim Crow-era separate but equal doctrine.

“I now feel what Homer was going through on that railcar in New Orleans,” Fields says. “But the good news in all of that, that case was overturned. It was years later, but it was overturned.”

Robinson, whose case resulted in this latest landmark case from Louisiana, says he feels less optimistic now than when he registered to vote some 70 years ago.

“Here I was, just registered, and I had a voice for the first time ever. I thought it had been won,” he says. “It has now been stripped away.”

But Robinson says what he knows now is the fight for equality and justice is everlasting.