As Republicans across the South race to redraw congressional lines ahead of the midterms, Black Democrats warn that another sweeping challenge to Black political power is on the horizon: the erosion of representation at the local level.
Last month’s Supreme Court decision gutting the Voting Rights Act has kicked off the South’s political landscape being rewritten in real time. But the rush to redraw House lines ahead of November is only the beginning of the process, Black Democrats say, with a potentially yearslong effort to erase other majority Black districts in state and local politics coming soon.
“Congress is just one level, but it’s state legislatures, it’s county commissions, it’s city councils that’s a part of the conversation,” said Cliff Albright, co-founder of Black Voters Matter.
Members of the Congressional Black Caucus in Washington fear that roughly a third of its members could ultimately see their seats erased. But those numbers could be larger in Southern state legislatures; a report from Albright’s organization and Fair Fight Action issued before the Supreme Court’s sweeping decision in Louisiana v. Callais estimated that just under half of the roughly 270 majority Black legislative districts in chambers across 10 Southern states could be eliminated.
“The entire South is on fire,” North Carolina state Sen. Natalie Murdock said in an interview.
Murdock — who said she represents a district roughly 20 miles from where her ancestors were enslaved and whose grandmother was the first in her family to vote thanks to the VRA — said the ruling represented a dire threat for her community.
“People are expecting overt violence and clubs and fire hoses and pitbulls,” she said. “You don’t need that when you have the current Supreme Court that we have, when you have legislative bodies that do not want Black people to have representation.”
The result, legislators said, could be existential: Eliminating local Black political power and erasing the next generation of leadership threatens to stall progress across the board, they said, undermining equity in economic stability, education and health care.
“State legislatures control budgets. They decide where infrastructure dollars go, which schools get prioritized, how health care dollars are distributed, what economic development projects are funded and which communities are viewed as worthy of investment,” said Florida state Sen. Shevrin Jones.
“History shows us that communities without strong political representation often end up fighting harder for basic investments that other communities receive more easily, whether it’s hospital access, public transportation, environmental protections, affordable housing, or broadband expansion,” he added.
Several Southern states have already moved to eliminate majority Black congressional seats, as control of the House in November hangs in the balance. And while few have yet taken concrete steps to change legislatures — where Democrats are uniformly already in the minority across the South — ahead of the midterms, Republican leaders indicated that it would be coming down the road.
Georgia’s GOP Gov. Brian Kemp on Wednesday called a legislative special session to redraw congressional and state legislative lines for 2028. And Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves, also a Republican, said he expects state lawmakers to redraw legislative and state Supreme Court lines between now and the off-year elections in 2027.
“Today is not the end of the redistricting process — it is just the beginning!“ Reeves said in a Wednesday statement.
Even without any changes to maps, Democrats already have limited political power. But the shift to strike out Democratic-leaning, majority-Black seats can still have a critical effect on Black communities that often face significantly less funding and public investment than predominantly white neighborhoods. The loss of representation eliminates firsthand experiences, lawmakers said, and will only exacerbate the issues.
“The importance of Black representation isn’t just on its face beneficial. It is because the policies and the perspectives that Black elected officials bring are completely different than what our white Republican colleagues could ever understand,” said Tennessee state Rep. Justin Pearson.
Pearson was primarying Democratic Rep. Steve Cohen, who is white, in a majority Black congressional district based in Memphis. That district was broken up by GOP legislators, and while Pearson said he would run for the new, much redder seat, he now faces a steep climb to Washington should he win the primary.
The latest Supreme Court ruling risks returning the South to post-Reconstruction, Jim Crow-era levels of representation in local government, said Louisiana state Rep. Edmond Jordan, part of what he called a “systematic effort” to remove Black elected officials.
“In 1868 we had 42 African American legislators in this body. By 1898 they were down to two, and by 1900 they were down to zero,” said Jordan, the chair of his state’s Legislative Black Caucus. “We made great strides in a very short time, but I’ve told people before: We went from 42 to zero, don’t think that we can’t go from where we are now at 37 to zero.”
Black legislators said they are working to find ways to fight back — including litigation and stalling tactics in legislatures — and are still urging voters to cast their ballots in the upcoming elections.
But the fight has also exposed a growing generational divide, with younger Black Democrats in particular demanding the party pivot to the offensive — leading major protests and demanding the party start its own redistricting efforts in solidly blue states.
“We have to do all of the things, it actually isn’t just one strategy,” said Pearson, who like other Tennessee Democrats was recently stripped of his committee assignments for leading protests on the chamber floor.
“You’ve got to do the protesting,” he continued. “Organizing voters, registering voters, and turning them out is all of our job in addition to going to court. When democracy is dying, it’s going to require supporting each of those pillars of strategy, and not demonizing any of those pillars.”
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