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Pamela,
Tennesseans are heading to the polls for early voting in their first elections under new, shamefully redrawn maps.
We’re fighting to make sure voters are ready to make their voices heard this year and beyond, prevent new gerrymanders, and undo injustices like what’s just unfolded in Tennessee.
Here’s a quick recap of how we got here:
At the end of April, the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act — again — in Louisiana v. Callais, removing key protections for fair representation.
Afterwards, anti-democracy lawmakers moved with lightning speed to gut the voting power of Black and brown Americans. Across the South, they drew new maps that ripped representation away from voters of color.
In Tennessee, that meant breaking up Memphis’s U.S. House seat — the state’s only seat where Black voters were free to elect the candidate of their choice.
Now, all of the state’s House districts are majority-white. And Memphis — one of the largest cities in the country with a majority-Black population — has its representation sprawled across multiple districts and won’t have a member of Congress dedicated to fighting for its interests.
One of the Tennessee lawmakers who passed the new map had the gall to claim that it was “not about discrimination or race.”
But another member of the legislature, who fought against the map manipulation, put it plainly: “This is obviously about race. It’s about taking one county that has a majority African American community and decimating it.”
Tennessee is, of course, not alone. The Supreme Court ruling has already endangered what the Institute for Policy Studies estimates to be one-third of the seats held by members of the Congressional Black Caucus — posing a devastating threat to equal representation, and denying voting power to communities of color across the South in a modern-day version of Jim Crow.
But this isn’t inevitable. Last month, Georgia lawmakers hit the brakes on a map-rigging push after seeing their constituents speak out against it. That’s why we need to continue fighting back — mobilizing more voters to contact their legislators, sounding the alarm everywhere fair maps and fair elections are threatened, and working to ban partisan and racial gerrymandering nationwide.
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Thank you,
Redistricting Action HQ
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