Tennessee Republicans redraw maps to erase last Democratic, Black-majority district | Tennessee
Tennessee’s Republican-dominated legislature passed redistricting maps on Thursday, eliminating the state’s Democratic, majority-black congressional district a week after the U.S. supreme court effectively struck down a large section of the Voting Rights Act.
The move splits Tennessee’s ninth congressional district, which includes Memphis, into three pieces, each containing nearly a third of the city’s Black voters. The new maps mean all nine of Tennessee’s congressional districts are Republican-leaning.
The region occupied the southwestern corner of the state closely. Three districts now snake out of the dense core of Memphis; the two cross the Tennessee River and reach the suburbs of Nashville, 200 miles away.
“If the Republicans’ policies are so great, why are we changing course to rig the election?” asked state Rep. Vincent Dixie of Nashville during Thursday’s debate, imploring Republicans to avoid it. “Where is your humanity in this?”
While Democratic lawmakers were speaking, the speaker of the house instructed state troopers to remove some of the audience in the gallery who started shouting.
State Democratic representative Justin Jones described Tennessee house speaker Cameron Sexton as a “grand wizard” and handed a Confederate flag to a Republican lawmaker. Jones proposed an amendment to the bill, which the speaker judged to have been introduced prematurely. Jones described this as a “Jim Crow process.”
The redistricting came eight days after the high court’s groundbreaking Callais v Landry decision, which invalidated parts of the Voting Rights Act that prevented state governments from drawing congressional districts that left Black voters at a political disadvantage.
Despite Donald Trump’s demands that conservative states redistrict by mid-decade, Tennessee had refrained from taking action before the court decision. But Sexton said the redrawing “will ensure that the state’s representation in Washington reflects its conservative values.”
Trump defeated Kamala Harris 64-34 in Tennessee in the 2024 US presidential elections. One-third of Tennessee voters cast ballots for Democratic congressional representatives in 2024. Republicans hold eight of the state’s nine congressional seats.
Testifying before a committee hearing in Tennessee on Wednesday, voting rights advocate Stacey Abrams said the state’s general assembly had been asked to “remove protections that helped bury the abomination of Jim Crow.”
“Democracy is an act, an act that says I will share my power with those with whom I disagree because that is the only way to ensure our common future,” Abrams said. “A slide into authoritarianism, where one party and one race holds sovereignty, is unbecoming of the Volunteer State. Whether the result or the intention, it is wrong. It is unbecoming of a nation that rebels when power is in the hands of the minority – a fact we celebrate 250 years later.”
Justin Pearson, a state representative and Memphis Democrat who is running to replace long-serving congressman Steve Cohen, said little attention is paid to Democratic opposition, characteristic of Tennessee lawmakers. Pearson was one of three Democratic lawmakers expelled from the state legislature in 2023 for presenting a protest over gun legislation.
Pearson called the legislation the most important thing Tennessee lawmakers will do in a generation and said it was done with sloppy debate. About a half hour later, the committee left the hearing room Wednesday to reconvene without the public being present to certify the vote.
“The speakers who came to speak were given three minutes to speak. There was question and answer, and then they were told that was it, even though there were four more bills they could talk about,” Pearson said. “We had to force them to agree to a time limit on the legislation so that we would at least have an opportunity to talk about it, otherwise members of the Republican Party could have asked the question right away.
“There is a mobcratic rule here in our state, and that’s what happened with our deportation.”
Memphis state senator London Lamar called the vote an insult to her city.
“Last legislative session, you didn’t like our school board and you took over,” he said. “You didn’t like our airport authority and you took it over. Now you don’t like the way Memphis votes. You’re going to take that away from us. You can’t believe in local control while depriving Memphis voters of meaningful representation.”
“You cannot claim to respect democracy by changing the rules after candidates have qualified to run,” he added. “You are deliberately creating chaos.”
State Sen. Jeff Yarbro of Nashville Lamar and other Democrats questioned Tennessee Senate Republicans about lawmakers’ underlying intentions on race and partisanship.
Lamar noted that Black voters were almost evenly split among the three districts, with 72 percent of white Democrats in the newly elected eighth district.
“That’s not the way to do partisanship,” Lamar said. “Why does this map we have here today treat Black Democrats of Memphis so differently than white Democrats of Memphis?”
“This proposed map maximizes the ability of Republicans to win nine seats in the upcoming midterm elections,” Johnson replied.
