Anger, confusion as Louisiana Republicans move to erase majority-Black US House district

Written by: David Hood-Nuño, Evan Garcia and Joseph Ax

BATON ROUGE, Louisiana, May 9 (Reuters) – Leona Tate was one of the “New Orleans Four” during her childhood; They were the first Black students to desegregate a public school in the deep South, enduring racial slurs and death threats as armed U.S. marshals escorted them to class.

More than six decades later, Tate on Friday told Republican state lawmakers that their proposal to dissolve at least one majority-black congressional district brought back sad memories.

“I need you to understand what it feels like to stand here, to walk through that mob as a kid and now watch elected officials do the same thing the mob is trying to do — just with better lawsuits and parliamentary procedures,” he told a Senate committee hearing in the state capitol in Baton Rouge.

For more than eight hours, Black members of Congress, pastors, activists and voters delivered testimonies that were at times emotional, angry and deeply personal. Outside the courtroom, protesters cheered them on.

“Let him talk!” They chanted at one point after Republican committee chairman Caleb Kleinpeter cut off a Democratic colleague’s microphone in the middle of a heated argument. Mike McClanahan, president of the state chapter of the NAACP, the nation’s largest civil rights organization, was forcibly prevented from entering the chamber by Senate security.

The tumultuous hearing reflected the election chaos that gripped Louisiana after last week’s U.S. Supreme Court decision that struck down a groundbreaking civil rights law and gave Republicans the chance to draw a new congressional map that erased one or both of the state’s two Democratic-majority districts.

Black voters make up one-third of the electorate in Louisiana and generally support Democrats. ‌Republicans currently control four other districts.

A day after the Supreme Court decision, Governor ⁠Jeff Landry postponed the U.S. House primary elections scheduled for May 16, even though tens of thousands of ballots had been sent by mail.

Voters arriving at early voting sites this week saw signs taped to the doors announcing House races were canceled while other contests continued. It remains unclear what will happen to votes that have already been cast and when the primary election might be rescheduled.

Speaking to reporters after the hearing, Kleinpeter said questions about the process should be resolved by the Louisiana secretary of state. “The fact is that the Supreme Court came and said the maps were unconstitutional,” he said. So “we continue to draw new maps.”

GROWING POLITICAL WAR

Louisiana was the latest front in a national redistricting battle that began last year in Texas and gained momentum this week in the U.S. South, including Tennessee, Alabama and South Carolina; where Republicans responded to the Supreme Court decision by launching similar efforts to eliminate majority-black districts.

Democrats have embarked on redistricting efforts of their own, but their ambitions took a serious blow Friday when the Virginia Supreme Court released a new voter-approved map that could potentially flip four Republican seats. What had been a fairly even partisan race to redraw congressional maps has now tilted decisively toward Republicans ahead of the November midterm elections, in which they will defend their narrow majority in the U.S. House of Representatives.

In Baton Rouge, voting rights advocates warned that the sudden suspension of House primary elections was causing widespread confusion.

“People aren’t sure what’s going on with these votes, what choices are happening or not,” said Sarah Whittington, director of advocacy for the American Civil Liberties Union of Louisiana, which filed a lawsuit to block Landry’s move. “To declare a single section of a ballot invalid and claim the rest is valid, I think, undermines all confidence in the system.”

Landry’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

Democratic U.S. Rep. Cleo Fields, whose district was ruled unconstitutional by the U.S., said activists and Democratic lawmakers are still urging people to vote. Supreme Court.

“This is about congressional elections today; tomorrow there will be state legislatures, there will be city councils, there will be school boards,” he said in an interview.

HOT WORDS

In the courtroom Friday, many Black leaders heeded the civil rights movement, arguing that the new map would mark a return to state-sponsored racial segregation.

“Since Reconstruction, Louisiana has elected four African Americans to Congress, and you’re looking at all of them,” said Fields, sitting alongside U.S. Rep. Troy Carter and former U.S. Reps. Cedric Richmond and William Jefferson.

Senators on Friday considered a number of different plans, including three from Republican state Sen. Jay Morris that would likely result in Republicans winning five or six of the state’s U.S. House districts.

“Neither race, nor party affiliation, nor voting patterns were taken into consideration when preparing this,” Morris said of the map that would likely lead to a clean Republican sweep. But activists and Democratic state senators argued that the outcome would inevitably weaken the political power of Black Louisianans.

“You have a choice before you,” Tate said. “You can draw a map that reflects who Louisiana really is: a state where Black voices belong in the halls of Congress. Or you can draw a map that tells my grandchildren, ‘Your voices don’t count.'”

Some critics have warned Republicans that they will eventually pay a price if they advance at the ballot box or in the history books.

“This redistricting issue isn’t just about lines on the map,” said Baptist pastor Brandon Boutin. “This is about whether democracy is sacred. It’s about whether every citizen has equal value in the eyes of the law.”

(Reporting by David Hood-Nuño and Evan Garcia in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and Joseph Ax in New York; Editing by Jesse Mesner-Hage and Cynthia Osterman)