Black voters rally against new electoral maps in the US South

Like many Black voters across the South, Asti Robins is furious. And the anger is so powerful, she says, it could shape the outcome of November's midterms.

The cause: new Republican-backed electoral maps that critics say will dilute the voting power of African Americans. There would be a reckoning, Robins predicted. "Black voter turnout will be huge. People are energised."

An environmental campaigner, Robins lives in Louisiana's sixth congressional district, a majority-Black constituency that was redrawn by the state's Republican-controlled legislature.

Louisiana was a bastion of the slaveholding economy before the civil war and Black people still make up 32 per cent of the state's population. It had two majority-Black districts to represent them, out of the state's total of six. Now it has just one.

"Without representation, what is citizenship?" asked Ashley Shelton, founder of Power Coalition, a Louisiana non-profit focused on voting rights and civic engagement. "What is citizenship when my values, my experience of this country as a Black woman aren't reflected in the halls of Congress?"

The boundary change came after a landmark April Supreme Court decision, Louisiana vs Callais, that ruled Robins' district was an "unconstitutional racial gerrymander".

Critics said the ruling gutted the 1965 Voting Rights Act, a central achievement of the civil rights era, which prohibited racial discrimination in voting. Supporters said the US constitution did not allow states to sort voters by race.

Electoral boundaries were traditionally redrawn every 10 years based on the census, but recently Republican- and Democratic-controlled states across the US have been remaking their electoral maps with increasing frequency in a tit-for-tat race to derive maximum partisan advantage. This year the process has been accelerated by President Donald Trump.

Republicans have been the main beneficiaries of the changes and are projected to net about four seats, according to the Cook Political Report.

But with Trump's approval ratings at record lows and Republicans trailing Democrats in the polls, that advantage may not be big enough to preserve the party's House majority in November.

Redistricting has largely been driven by politics. But in the South, race is never far from the surface. Over the past few months, Black communities in Louisiana, Alabama and Tennessee were "cracked", or broken up and combined with larger white populations into new gerrymandered districts that critics say will reduce their ability to elect candidates of their choice.

The process means Cleo Fields, the Black Democratic lawmaker representing Louisiana's sixth district, which is now majority white and overwhelmingly Republican, will soon be out of a job. He is retiring from national politics and will seek a state senate seat instead.

Fields is convinced the gerrymander will backfire. "People are going to show up in greater numbers [in November], particularly African Americans," he said in an interview. "They are determined not to let their voices be silenced."

It is unclear how much impact a Black voter surge in the South will have. The region is deep red: even in 2008, when a rise in Black turnout helped propel Barack Obama into the White House, all but three southern states voted Republican.

Black voters do not always vote Democrat, however. Republicans made big inroads in 2024, when Trump received 15 per cent of their vote, according to Pew Research, compared with 8 per cent in 2020.

But this year Black Democrats, backed by a newly galvanised base, are running across the South in places that were long seen as impregnable Republican strongholds.

Keisha Lance Bottoms, the Black former mayor of Atlanta, is in a close race with Republican Rick Jackson for the governorship of Georgia, an office held by Republicans for the past 23 years. In Mississippi, limited polling has put Scott Colom, a Black state prosecutor running for Senate, within striking distance of Republican incumbent Cindy Hyde-Smith.

Voter apathy has long been a problem in deep southern states such as Louisiana. But Shelton believes that might be changing.

"You're giving people something to stand up for," she said. "You're giving them a reason to say, 'I have to pay attention, I need to understand.'

"The only answer to people taking away your voice and your power is to show up."

For Black community leaders, the gerrymandering evokes dark memories of Jim Crow, the system that enforced racial segregation after the end of Reconstruction in 1877.

Leona Tate personifies the struggle to overcome that legacy. As a six-year-old girl in 1960, she had to be escorted by US federal marshals into her newly desegregated school in New Orleans through a crowd of yelling and cursing white people held back by police.

She remembers not being able to eat in the school cafeteria. "[The white students] were going to either knock the food out of your hand or they was going to spit in it," she said in an interview. "Every school that I went to was the same thing, all the way through high school."

The civil rights movement overcame the worst excesses of Jim Crow. But with redistricting, Tate says its gains are threatened. "I see a regression," she said. "It feels like they're just trying to erase all people of colour."

In its April ruling, the Supreme Court's conservative majority argued that the US had fundamentally changed since the 1960s when Black voters were blocked from voting by literacy tests and other obstacles. The legacy of that unequal treatment, the justices said, was no longer enough to justify drawing electoral districts along racial lines.

Fields agrees that the lot of African Americans has indeed improved. "But have we overcome all of the vices of discrimination? Absolutely not," he said. "They need to walk in my shoes one or two days . . . just come and live my experience."

Critics said the court's ruling marked the culmination of years of legal efforts to unpick the VRA, a law that Justice Elena Kagan said in her dissent was "born of the literal blood of Union soldiers and civil rights marchers".

Conservatives insist that most of the VRA remains intact. But detractors say that in purely practical terms the court's ruling makes it much harder to challenge electoral maps that diminish Black voting power.

Louisiana was quick to enforce the judgment. Jay Morris, a Louisiana state senator, was one of the architects of the state's new map, which he has admitted was "drawn to maximise Republican advantage".

In an interview, Morris accused Democrats of doing the same. There were some blue states in the north-east where "30 or 40 per cent of the population votes Republican", yet "there are zero Congress members from the Republican Party" being elected there, he said.

Morris said there was nothing undemocratic about the way Louisiana had changed its map. "That's how democracy is defined -- majority rules," he added. "And we're a majority-Republican state."

Robins said the dissolution of the sixth district was a "gut-punch", both for herself and her relatives. Her family hails from Alsen, a small community just outside Baton Rouge settled by former slaves who fought on the Union side during the civil war. The childhood summers she spent there, among the chickens, cows and pecan trees, were idyllic. But in recent years, it has become a tougher place to live.

The community sits at the northern end of a heavily industrialised corridor along the Mississippi River nicknamed "Cancer Alley". It is hemmed in by a massive Exxon polymer plant and a sprawling landfill site. Locals complain of respiratory problems. "The smell will burn your nose," Robins said.

Residents often felt overlooked. That changed in 2024, she said, with the creation of the new sixth district, of which Alsen was a part. The community felt newly hopeful. "We were sending a hometown guy from Baton Rouge to Congress," Robins said. "People thought their voice would be heard on the federal level."

Then came the Supreme Court decision and the new map. Robins said she felt deceived. "The state sends six representatives to Congress and this now means that only one of them [will] care about people who look like me -- the descendants of slaves," she said. "It felt like we'd taken two steps forward and been pushed back six."