Rachael Spriggs protests a House committee meeting during a special session of the state legislature to redraw U.S. Congressional voting maps Wednesday, May 6, 2026, in Nashville, TN. George Walker IV/AP
Just a week after the Supreme Court effectively destroyed the key remaining provision of the Voting Rights Act, Tennessee on Thursday became the first Southern state to pass a new redistricting map eliminating a majority-Black district.
The hastily drawn map abolishes the state’s last Democratic district by splitting the city of Memphis, which is more than 60 percent Black, into three districts: all of them predominantly white Republican held seats that stretch hundreds of miles deep into rural areas, effectively silencing the state’s largest Black community. (Memphis has had its own congressional district since 1923.) The map also divided the city of Nashville—which had already been spliced apart during the last redistricting cycle to pick up another GOP seat—into five districts to further dilute the power of minority voters.
The result is both practical and symbolic. It means the place where Martin Luther King Jr. waged his last civil rights campaign and was ultimately assassinated will have no districts in which Black citizens can elect their preferred candidates. Contemporary civil rights leaders, including King’s son, likened it to the return of Jim Crow.
“Do not dismantle the only Congressional district that provides Black voters in Memphis a fair opportunity to have a voice in our democracy.”
“Do not dismantle the only Congressional district that provides Black voters in Memphis a fair opportunity to have a voice in our democracy,” Martin Luther King III wrote to Tennessee legislators. “Do not take this nation back to the days of Jim Crow.”
Tennessee is not alone. Following the Supreme Court’s ruling striking down a second-majority Black congressional district in Louisiana, at least four other Southern states—Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina—are considering passing new redistricting maps before the midterms. This could eliminate anywhere from four to six majority-Black districts represented by Democrats, and significantly hinder Democratic chances of taking back the US House. Voting rights advocates warned that the Louisiana v. Callais decision could lead to the largest drop in Black representation in the South since the end of Reconstruction. The targeting of Black voters is occurring with alarming speed in the wake of the ruling.
“This isn’t coincidental or accidental,” Democratic State Rep. Justin Pearson, who is challenging incumbent Democratic Rep. Steve Cohen in the Memphis-based 9th Congressional District, told my colleague Garrison Hayes. “They’re coming for Black political power in Tennessee, and Mississippi, and Alabama, and Louisiana. We’re seeing the greatest purge of Black power since the era of Reconstruction.”
The conservative majority on the Roberts court has completely overruled its own precedents to engineer this outcome. For years, the court has held that states should not change voting laws in the middle of an election year to avoid voter confusion, based on the so-called Purcell principle, a 2006 Supreme Court case decided on the shadow docket. In December, the Supreme Court reinstated a Texas gerrymander that a lower court found had discriminated against Black and Hispanic voters. They argued that it was too close to the election to stop it, even though the primary was 15 weeks away.
But in the Louisiana case, they struck down the creation of a second-majority Black district just three weeks before the state’s primary, when mail voting had already begun, and 42,000 voters had cast ballots. Moreover, instead of waiting roughly thirty days to certify its decision as is standard practice, the Court put the Callais decision into effect immediately, which buoyed Republican Gov. Jeff Landry’s effort to suspend the state’s House primary to give the legislature time to eliminate one or both of the state’s majority-Black districts.
During oral arguments in the Callais case, Justice Brett Kavanaugh asked Louisiana Solicitor General Ben Aguinaga what would happen if the Court invalidated majority-minority districts and whether “the results would be terrible?” Aguinaga dismissed the concern as “a lot of sky-is-falling rhetoric from the other side in this case.”
Janai Nelson of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, however, predicted that the outcome would be “pretty catastrophic,” since virtually all Black officeholders in the South are elected from majority-Black districts.
Nelson has been proven correct. The Callais decision has been catastrophic in substance and timing. The Court not only dismantled the country’s most important civil rights law, but put its thumb on the scale of the 2026 elections, giving Southern states just enough time to redraw their maps before the midterms. Speaking on Wednesday in Pennsylvania, Chief Justice John Roberts claimed it was wrong to view the justices as “political actors.” But in effect, the conservative justices have turbocharged Trump’s gerrymandering arms race.
Update, May 7: This post has been revised to reflect the passage of Tennessee’s new redistricting map.
