Redistricting concerns Black officials
More than 30 years ago, Robert Reives Sr. marched into a meeting of his county government in Sanford, N.C., with a demand: Create a predominantly Black district in the county, which was 23% Black at the time but had no Black representation, or face a lawsuit under the Voting Rights Act.
The county commission refused, and Reives prepared to sue. But after the county settled and redrew its districts, he was elected in 1990 as Lee County’s first Black commissioner, a post he has held comfortably ever since.
Until this year. Republicans, newly in power and in control of the redrawing of county maps, extended the district to the northeast, adding more rural and suburban white voters to the mostly rural district southwest of Raleigh, effectively diluting the influence of its Black voters. Reives, who is still the county’s only Black commissioner, fears he will now lose his seat.
“They all have the same objective,” he said in an interview, referring to local Republican officials. “To get me out of the seat.”
Reives is one of a growing number of Black elected officials — ranging from members of Congress to county commissioners — who have been drawn out of their districts, placed in newly competitive districts or bundled into new districts where they must vie against incumbents from their own party.
Almost all of the affected lawmakers are Democrats, and most of the mapmakers are white Republicans. The GOP is currently seeking to widen its advantage in states including North Carolina, Ohio, Georgia and Texas.
This year’s redistricting cycle is the first since the Supreme Court struck down the heart of the Voting Rights Act in 2013 and allowed jurisdictions with a history of voting discrimination to pass election laws and draw political maps without approval from the Justice Department.
“Let’s call it a five-alarm fire,” G.K. Butterfield, a Black congressman from North Carolina, said of the current round of congressional redistricting.
He is retiring next year after Republicans removed Pitt County, which is about 35% Black, from his district.
“I just didn’t see it coming,” he said in an interview. “I did not believe that they would go to that extreme.”
A former chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, Butterfield said fellow Black members of Congress were increasingly worried about the new Republican-drawn maps. “We are all rattled,” he said. In addition to Butterfield, four Black state senators in North Carolina, five Black members of the state House of Representatives and several Black county officials have had their districts altered in ways that could cost them their seats. Nearly 24 hours after the maps were passed, civil-rights groups sued the state.
Across the country, the precise number of elected officials of color who have had their districts changed in such ways is difficult to pinpoint. The New York Times identified more than two dozen of these officials, but there are probably significantly more in county and municipal districts. And whose seats are vulnerable or safe depends on a variety of factors, including the political environment at the time of elections.
But the number of Black legislators being drawn out of their districts outpaces that of recent redistricting cycles, when voting-rights groups frequently found themselves in court trying to preserve existing majority-minority districts as often as they sought to create new ones.
“Without a doubt it’s worse than it was in any recent decade,” said Leah Aden, a deputy director of litigation at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Inc. “We have so much to contend with, and it’s all happening very quickly.”
Republicans, who have vastly more control over redistricting nationally than Democrats do, defend their maps as legal and fair, giving a range of reasons.
Kirk Smith, the Republican chairman of Lee County’s board of commissioners, said that “to say only a person of a certain racial or ethnic group can represent only a person of the same racial or ethnic group has all the trappings of ethnocentric racism.”
In North Carolina and elsewhere, Republicans say that their new maps are race-blind, meaning officials used no racial data in designing the maps and therefore could not have drawn racially discriminatory districts because they had no idea where communities of color were.
“During the 2011 redistricting process, legislators considered race when drawing districts,” Ralph Hise, a Republican state senator in North Carolina, said in a statement.
Through a spokesperson, he declined to answer specific questions, citing pending litigation.
His statement continued: “We were then sued for considering race and ordered to draw new districts. So during this process, legislators did not use any racial data when drawing districts, and we’re now being sued for not considering race.”
Efforts to curb racial gerrymandering have been hampered by a 2019 Supreme Court decision, which ruled that partisan gerrymandering could not be challenged in federal court.
Although the court did leave intact Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits racial gerrymandering, it offered no concrete guidance on how to distinguish between a partisan gerrymander and a racial gerrymander when the result was both, such as in heavily Democratic Black communities.
Given that certain demographic groups have aligned tightly with political parties — 90% of Black voters in Georgia voted Democratic in 2020, for example — officials drawing gerrymandered maps could simply argue that politics were at play, not race.
Worries are also spreading through Ohio’s state legislative Black caucus, which includes 19 state representatives and senators and which is one of the oldest Black caucuses in the nation.
Last month, Republicans in Ohio passed a gerrymandered map that locked in supermajorities in both chambers of the legislature, meaning that Republicans would control more than two-thirds of seats even though former President Donald Trump won just 53% of Ohio voters in 2020.
At least four Black members of the state legislature had their districts altered or were drawn into another district. State Rep. Juanita Brent, the vice president of the state legislative Black caucus, who has represented parts of Cleveland since 2019, was moved into a neighboring district.
“Putting Black Democrats against each other, or downsizing the amount of districts that people could run in, or moving people into a totally different district,” Brent said in an interview, “is trying to actually dilute the amount of representation that we have.”