In April, the Supreme Court struck down a redrawn congressional map in Louisiana in favor of a prior one that packed several Black-majority cities into a single district.
The challenge to the redrawn map was based on the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which protected the right to vote for Black Americans in states with a history of discrimination. The April Supreme Court ruling in Louisiana v. Callais held that there was no justification for the state to use race in redrawing the congressional map, making it an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.
However, this ruling is likely to reduce representation for Louisiana Black voters after the 2026 midterm elections by returning the state to a 2022 congressional map that a federal court had ruled likely violated the Voting Rights Act. This and other rulings in recent years may result in losses of representation for Black voters that are similar to the end of Reconstruction protections after the Civil War.
“It very likely that the outcome of the Supreme Court's systematic dismantling of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and its subsequent expansions will mean a significant loss in the number of Black congressmembers from the South, and possibly the losses of other Congressmembers of color,” said Gregory Downs, professor and chair of history in the College of Letters and Science at UC Davis.
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the end of Reconstruction
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was written to undo the many ways Black Americans were prevented from voting after the dismantling of Reconstruction, a period during which numerous federal laws were passed that empowered formerly enslaved Black Americans. When federal troops left southern states in the 1870s, those states passed Jim Crow laws that enforced segregation and legal means to disenfranchise Black Americans.
The end of Reconstruction led to decades without a Black member of Congress elected from a southern state. After George Henry White from North Carolina left office in 1901, it would not be until 1973 that Barbara Jordan from Texas and Andrew Young from Georgia would represent southern states in Congress.
Redistricting has been central to challenges to the Voting Rights Act in recent years. The Act made it mandatory that states with a history of discrimination receive “preclearance” from the Department of Justice or a court before changing voting rules — which includes congressional districts. The 2013 Supreme Court decision in the case Shelby County v. Holder ended this requirement.
Louisiana v. Callais and racial gerrymandering
The ruling in Louisiana v. Callais makes it much more difficult to challenge a gerrymander on the basis of racial discrimination, which would violate the Voting Rights Act. A gerrymander, or gerrymandering, is the intentional manipulation of district lines for partisan gain.
“Republicans in the South have reached back to the Jim Crow practices of stacking Black voters into one or two districts and to spread Black voters across many districts so that they aren't able to be a forceful weight in any of them,” said Downs.
Louisiana’s 2022 congressional map included only one Black-majority district with Black voters distributed among the other five districts. The newer map added one Black-majority district, but the Supreme Court held that because the Voting Rights Act did not require Louisiana to create an additional majority-minority district, no compelling interest justified the state’s use of race in creating the new map.
Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act allowed, and sometimes required, the creation of majority-minority districts. One estimate put the number of majority-minority districts at 148, which is 34% of the nation's 435 U.S. House districts.
“It's very likely that not only will there be more Republicans holding seats in southern states they did not before,” said Downs. “We're almost definitely going to see a notable reduction in southern Black Congress members and the impact of that on political life is going to be significant.”
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