Voting rights, redistricting case tests democracy

PLAINS, GA. (AP) >> Former President Jimmy Carter’s hometown makes a point of celebratingdemocracy. American flagswave outside stores selling old campaign buttons and vintage political posters, and tourists mill around the train depot that served as his 1976 campaignheadquarters.

The rural Georgia county where tinyPlains is locatedis also the site of historic struggles for civil rights, and it could continue to offer lessons on the costly conflicts that may lie ahead nationwide when states redraw voting district lines after the 2020 Census.

Sumter County is embroiled in a court fight over voting rights and redistricting that challenges the composition and credibility of its school board.

In the midst of it is Kelvin Pless, whose election to the board nearly a decade ago shifted control toward an African American majority. Before then, a white-majorityboardhadgovernedthe district where black students constitute an overwhelming majority. It also unleashed what Pless said felt like a “racewar” that returnedcontrol to whites after state lawmakers intervened.

“I don’t like to use the term too much, but I think it was borne out of racism.” said Pless. “It was almost like a very mild version of terrorism.

The board’s white chairman, Michael Busman, said the election changes that reconstituted the board had “nothing to do with race.” Instead, he called it the simplest path to shrinking the nine-member body, which he said was too large and costly for the small school district.

With a population estimated around 30,000, SumterCounty is about53% black and 43% white. Like many other Southern communities, it was run by whites until courts overturned Jim Crow laws and ordered desegregation during the civil rights era.

The county sawlarge-scale civil rightsdemonstrations in the 1960s and drew national attention for imprisoning dozens of African American girls inasqualidstockade for months and charging four other activists with treason. The first students to integrate Sumter’s schools faced violent white mobs. Their buses were pummeled by rocks and eggs, their notebooks ripped to pieces.

Today, the district — with 4,400 students — is 72% black, 14% white and 12% Hispanic. Many white families send children to private or public schools in neighboring countieswithlargerwhite populations.

“I comebacknow, andI see things virtually unchanged. It’s a city that’s still polarized, a school system that remains just as segregated today as it was decades ago,” said Sam Mahone, a veteran of the county’s civil rights movement.

Before entering state and national politics, Carter served on the school board in the 1950s.

Once a majority-black board was seated in 2011, Pless” said agitated white residents crammed meetings in what felt “like a lynch mob.” The local press disparaged the new 6-3 African American majority as the “gang of six,” he said. At least two African American board members during that time say their employers received threatening letters, advocating they be fired.

Then the state legislature downsized the board, redrewits electiondistricts and added two at-large seats. The motivation for the change remains contested, but the effect was clear. The board shifted to a 5-2 white majority, prompting the lawsuit that the American Civil Liberties Union later joined.

Two of the last four board elections were called off by judges, and two were held under the new plan, which a federal district judge ruled last year violated the 1965 Voting Rights Act by “diluting” African American voting strength. The judge also said decades of discrimination had hindered the black community’s ability to exercise electoral power in atlarge elections.

Under the Voting Rights Act, the county’s plan previously would have been cleared in advance by the Justice Department to guarantee it didn’t harm minorities. That process, called “preclearance,” waseffectivelydismantled by a 2013 Supreme Court decision. That allowed Georgia to implement the plan without oversight.

With no more federal preclearance required, expensive court fights like the one inCarter’s county coulderupt nationwide over post-2020 Census redistricting.

“It’s taken four years and probably millions of dollars just to litigate in this one tiny jurisdiction,” said Leah Aden, deputy director of litigation at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. “It’s very concerning that there might be a need for many more of these types of cases across thousands of jurisdictions across our country in the coming years.”