Mother Jones illustration; Chip Somodevilla/Getty, Bob Parent/Getty, Bettmann/Contributor/Getty
Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.) is the first Black member of Congress elected from South Carolina since Reconstruction, and the only Black Democrat ever elected from the state. He has been elected seventeen times during his thirty-two year career and rose to become the third-ranking Democrat in the US House.
His seat was drawn in 1992 to give Black voters a chance to elect the first Black member of Congress in that state in 100 years. Its last Black member of Congress elected during Reconstruction, George Washington Murray, was ousted from the US House in 1897 after South Carolina passed a new state constitution designed to disenfranchise Black voters.
But if South Carolina Republicans get their way and pass a 7-0 map eliminating Clyburn’s seat, the state’s lone Democratic US House district, and the only one in which Black voters can elect their preferred candidate, will no longer functionally exist. If Clyburn loses his seat, a state that is one-quarter Black will have no Black representation in the US House.
“It’s a comprehensive approach to creating Jim Crow 2.0.”
As Clyburn told reporters last Tuesday before state Republicans redrew the map, “It’s a comprehensive approach to creating Jim Crow 2.0.”
The Palmetto State is not alone. The revival of Jim Crow is happening with alarming speed across the South, following the Supreme Court’s destruction of the Voting Rights Act, with Southern Republicans set to dismantle at least five majority-Black districts in South Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi.
Their efforts began in Tennessee, where Republicans passed a 9-0 map on May 7, eliminating the state’s lone majority-Black district and last Democratic seat. They split the city of Memphis, which is 63 percent Black, into three different districts to dilute Black voting power. They even connected it to one rural county that happened to be the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan and another that still has the Confederate flag on its county seal.
Next came Alabama, where the Roberts Court issued an eleventh-hour decision allowing the state to redraw its voting maps to eliminate one of its majority Black districts. Though the Supreme Court has repeatedly told courts not to change voting laws in the middle of an election, blocking a lower court ruling in 2025 that invalidated a Texas gerrymander 15 weeks before the primary, it allowed Alabama to change its district lines with the primary just a week away. The state quickly put in place a map for the midterms that a federal court panel with two Trump appointees had previously found to be intentionally discriminatory against Black voters.
In Louisiana, which supported the challenge to the Voting Rights Act in Louisiana v. Callais, Gov. Jeff Landry suspended his state’s US House primary, even though 45,000 people had already voted by mail. That allowed GOP lawmakers to pass a new map eliminating one of the state’s majority-Black districts. Much as in Alabama, that map was very similar to one the federal courts previously found violated the Voting Rights Act. Black voters comprise a third of Louisiana’s population, but now they will only be able to elect their preferred candidate in just 1 of the state’s 6 districts. (The map passed the state senate last week and is set to pass the state house this week.)
“We are the most gerrymandered Republican state in the country already.”
Initially, South Carolina’s Republican-controlled Senate rejected an attempt to eliminate Clyburn’s seat. “We are the most gerrymandered Republican state in the country already,” South Carolina Senate GOP Leader Shane Massey said in an impassioned speech last week. But Republican Gov. Henry McMaster caved to pressure from Trump and his MAGA allies and called the legislature back for a special session to revive the all-Republican map.
Mississippi has already held its US House primary. Still, Republican Gov. Tate Reeves has called on the legislature to pass a new map between now and 2027 to oust Rep. Bennie Thompson, the only Democrat and the only Black member of Congress from the state. Thompson earned national prominence as chair of the US House committee investigating the January 6 attacks. Echoing the racist rhetoric white segregationists used to attack Black voting power during Reconstruction, Reeves announced that Thompson’s “reign of terror” would now be over. If Thompson does lose his seat next year, the state with the largest Black population in the country would have no Black representatives in Congress.
In Georgia, Gov. Brian Kemp called a special session of the legislature next month to redraw the US House and state legislative maps for the 2028 election. In what essentially amounts to a lame-duck power grab, the governor’s demand for new maps will likely eliminate multiple majority-Black districts before a Democratic governor could veto them if elected in November. “The special session to redraw Georgia’s legislative districts is a blatant scheme to undermine Black representation in Congress and the state legislature by exploiting the Supreme Court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act,” Democratic US Sen. Jon Ossoff, who is up for reelection this year, said in a statement after Kemp announced his plan.
Overall, a third of the Congressional Black Caucus could lose their seats as a result of this new attack on Black political power. Even before the Supreme Court eviscerated the Voting Rights Act, Republicans had targeted the districts of Black members of Congress, including Al Green and Marc Veasey in Texas, Emanuel Cleaver in Missouri, and Don Davis in North Carolina. This was all part of the unprecedented mid-decade gerrymandering push that began when President Donald Trump pressured Texas lawmakers last year to redraw their maps.
The gerrymandering onslaught following the Callais decision has often been described in partisan terms, with the Supreme Court’s ruling giving Republicans a 10-seat advantage in the redistricting wars. But the impact is broader than just partisan politics. The Voting Rights Act made America a truly multiracial democracy, and with the law now in tatters, the politics of white supremacy, where Black officeholders are wiped off the map with stunning velocity, is once again ascendant.
Justice Samuel Alito wrote in Callais that “the Nation had faced nearly a century of ‘entrenched racial discrimination in voting,’” when the Voting Rights Act was passed, but claimed those days were now over. However, the rush to eliminate Black representation in the wake of his decision shows that just the opposite is true.
