The Supreme Court’s most consequential case on race in the current session concerns whether Louisiana, under the Voting Rights Act, must have not one, but two majority-black congressional districts.
Progressives battling Congress’ current district map — which includes two such districts — are already crying foul, as oral arguments seemed to indicate that a majority of justices are inclined to consider race when drawing district lines — just as they have banned Harvard from considering race in its admissions decisions. For progressives, such a change would, as Politico put it, “undermine” the Voting Rights Act, which ended outright Jim Crow voting disenfranchisement through poll taxes and literacy tests, among other things.
But there’s another goal that once received liberal support and that attracts black majority districts is at odds: residential racial integration. In fact, using race to draw district lines requires black residential concentrations – what used to be called segregated neighborhoods. Only by doing their best to find majority-black neighborhoods to fold into one district can Louisiana achieve the goal set by progressives: two districts likely to elect a second black congressman, in a state whose population is one-third black.
LOUISIANA AG AIMS TO DISMANTLE ‘OFFENSIVE’ VOTE LAW THAT REDIVISIONS RACE
The map of Louisiana’s congressional districts where the Supreme Court is being challenged tells the story. Of the state’s six congressional districts, only one — the Sixth District, which is specifically designated as majority black — is not geographically contiguous. Instead, as the state map shows, it meanders through as many as ten parishes (counties), from central Louisiana, including the capital Baton Rouge, to the far northwest, seeking concentrated groups of black voters so that they make up 54% of the population. Historically, the district was concentrated in one parish, Natchitoches.
Without concentrated black residential neighborhoods, this fear of racial gerrymandering would have been impossible.
It may well be that such concentrations reflect ongoing housing discrimination — but if so, Black residents’ progressive preference to necessarily be represented by a Black member of Congress actually abuses such a practice.
Of course, it overlooks the possibility that black residents have more in common with other members of their local community – black or white – than with others who are geographically distant. Or that significant black minorities in predominantly white districts could become important swing voters.
This is not the first time that progressive policies have promoted residential segregation in the South in the name of providing a dubious benefit to African Americans. Public housing has had and continues to have the same effect in many communities in the Deep South. When the National Housing Act of 1937 was created by the New Deal, it was co-sponsored by Alabama Congressman Henry Steagall, who insisted that the program would serve more than just the major northern cities. Its Jim Crow.
Southern Democrats also saw it as a means to achieve racial segregation in residential areas. For example, in the small town of New Bern, North Carolina, that state’s colonial capital, a racially integrated working-class neighborhood called Long Wharf was declared a slum, demolished, and replaced by an all-white housing project. An all-black project was built in another part of the city.
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It was part of a pattern. FDR himself inaugurated the all-white Techwood Houses in Atlanta; The city’s university halls were reserved for blacks. In Detroit, Eleanor Roosevelt, the quintessential progressive, cut the ribbon on the Frederick Douglass Houses, which were reserved for blacks only. The first lady believed she was doing a good deed by ensuring that blacks would get the benefit of life in the new projects. (It didn’t turn out well, as the Douglas Houses were eventually declared to be so ‘distressed’ that they had to be demolished.)
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In today’s Deep South, public housing remains a redoubt of black concentration: blacks make up 96% of public housing residents in Birmingham, 94% in Atlanta, 92% in East Baton Rouge, and 96% in Clarksdale, Mississippi.
Ironically, these concentrations are crucial in shaping the black-majority congressional districts that progressives so fervently support, even as residents often struggle with high crime and poor maintenance. One bad idea led to another.
