A Tour of the Former Confederacy
Recently, my husband and I toured nine former Confederate states, completing a circuit between Texas and the Carolinas and back, the week after the April 29 Louisiana vs. Callais Supreme Court decision. The trip had been planned for months, but the timing was interesting. Not long after we began our eastward trek, I became aware—in real time—of frenzied, almost gleeful actions being taken by legislatures in the very states we were visiting to dilute or eliminate minority districts, under the questionable guise of partisan gain.
The court’s majority opinion, authored by Justice Samuel Alito, held that states do not have to draw majority-minority districts under the Voting Rights Act and, in fact, should not consider race at all when drawing boundaries. By framing race-based remedies as themselves discriminatory, the Court’s conservative supermajority handed Republican-controlled legislatures in the South a legal cover they have eagerly sought to water down Black representation.
They wasted no time using it.
A week after the court’s ruling, we made our way through north Texas and Arkansas into Tennessee, former Confederate states, now governed by Republican-majority legislatures. Each moved swiftly to target their majority-Black congressional districts — weakening Black political power and representation across the region. What unfolded in the weeks that followed was not a cautious, measured response to a complex legal ruling. It was a coordinated rush..
The mechanism is as old as Southern politics itself: racial gerrymandering dressed up as partisan line-drawing. By arguing that the law’s remedies to combat discrimination had themselves become racist, the Callais decision allows states to redraw heavily Black districts that have historically elected Democrats while claiming the designs are based on party interests, not race. In practice, the distinction is almost meaningless in states where Black voters and Democratic voters are largely the same constituency. Regardless of criteria, redistricting to gain political advantage should not be legal.
Tennessee moved first. Both chambers of the Tennessee General Assembly, where Republicans hold supermajorities, approved a new map that targets the Memphis-anchored 9th District. Shelby County, home to Memphis, would be split between three districts, and the new 9th would stretch from Memphis to the Nashville area while hugging the Mississippi border. Under the new lines, the majority-Black city of Memphis was fractured into political irrelevance.
I became aware of Tennessee’s redistricting efforts the day we drove on into North Carolina, still unaware of the coordinated effort taking place across the south. North Carolina had new maps approved in 2025 to favor Republicans, and they chose to take no further action.
A couple of days later, my husband and I were charmed by Charleston’s historic architecture but shamed by the Old Exchange Building grounds where enslaved people had been auctioned to white landowners for more than a hundred years. It was estimated that more than half of enslaved persons entered the country at Charleston. The Charleston Museum—the oldest in the nation—faithfully depicted the Civil War and Reconstruction era, including exhibits making clear the origins of the Ku Klux Clan and Jim Crow laws that followed soon after.
Having just read The First Eight, by James Clyburn, I was particularly interested in how the museum treated those early Black Congressmen. The following day, I realized the South Carolina legislature was in the process of considering elimination of Clyburn’s district. Rep. Jim Clyburn is the most senior Black member of Congress and a figure of national stature. In the end, the legislature left it alone, but I give them no credit for that. It should never have been considered.
From South Carolina, we turned back towards Texas and crossed through Georgia before spending a night in Montgomery, Alabama. It was then I learned that there would be a reenactment of the 1965 Selma to Montgomery March for voting rights the following weekend, called “All Roads Lead to the South.”
We decided to take the route of the 1965 marchers, but in reverse. We drove from Montgomery to Selma, via Highway 80 and visited the National Park Service Interpretive Center halfway. Tracing the steps of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., John Lewis and others by car, as well as walking across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma set the tone for the rest of our trip through Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, then back to Texas. I could no longer naively pretend that southern attitudes toward civil rights for all have changed since Reconstruction. They have not, and I’m disheartened.
Not every effort to undo progress toward equal voting rights has gone unchallenged. A three-judge federal panel blocked Alabama Republicans’ recent redistricting plan, finding that the map unconstitutionally discriminates against Black voters. Unfortunately, several days later, the Supreme Court overruled that decision and signaled that the redrawn maps could be used, effectively eliminating one of only two Black opportunity districts.
The deliberate targeting of districts where Black voters determine electoral outcomes has been vehemently condemned by voting rights advocates and the Congressional Black Caucus, which joined the NAACP in calling for boycotts at public universities in states where Black voting power has been diluted.
The deeper historical irony is inescapable. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed precisely because, as President Lyndon B. Johnson observed at the time, every device of which human ingenuity was capable had been used to deny Black Americans the vote. Six decades later, Supreme Court rulings and Republican-led redistricting efforts are accelerating the erosion of Black representation across the South. The devices have been updated — packed precincts replaced by cracked districts, poll taxes replaced by partisan cover — but the intent, critics argue, is the same.
Callais did not create this conflict. It simply cleared the last legal barrier for a return to Jim Crow era voter discrimination. Former Confederate states, for the most part, are embracing it. And it’s disingenuous to pretend the goal is simply partisan gain.
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