On March 24, the Supreme Court will hear a Louisiana Black redistricting case with nationwide impacts for voting rights.
The consolidated cases Louisiana v. Callais and Robinson v. Callais began as challenges to the congressional map that the state legislature adopted in 2024, after the Fifth Circuit federal district court ruled that a prior map drawn in 2022 likely violated Section 2 of the federal Voting Rights Act (VRA) of 1965, which prohibits voting practices that discriminate on the basis of race.
These cases come on the heels of the historic Allen v. Milligan case in Alabama, where the Supreme Court upheld Section 2 in the face of vote dilution through redistricting of majority-minority Black areas.
The road to the Supreme Court
Black voters make up Louisiana’s largest minority group, comprising one-third of the state’s population across six districts and making it the nation’s second-Blackest state.
The plaintiffs are asking for a map with two districts, to reflect the one-third share across that six.
Of those districts, however, only one from the legislature’s 2022 map “represented a majority of Black voters, truly providing those voters with an opportunity to elect candidates that they believed would actually represent their interests,” said Victoria Wenger, counsel at NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF), which was among the plaintiffs filing the cases.
At a preliminary injunction hearing [before the Middle District of Louisiana] that year — “essentially, a mini trial” — “we were able to prove that Section 2 of the VRA was violated, and the court enjoined the legislature to draw a new map,” she continued. “They didn’t pass a new fair map … and while Milligan was still pending, the Supreme Court put our case on pause so that in 2022, a map with only one majority Black district was in place for our congressional elections.”
In 2023, after the Milligan decision affirming the VRA, the Fifth Circuit gave the state until January 2024 to draw a new map; the legislature, under a newly elected Republican supermajority, drew one with two majority Black districts.
“A group of self-identified non-African American voters then filed a lawsuit against this new map, saying it was a racial gerrymander in violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment, which essentially says that you cant have a map that is prioritizing people based off of their race and foregoing other criteria, whether that’s the shape of the district or the communities it represents,” said Wegner.
On March 24, the NAACP LDF and its co-plaintiffs are now taking the case to the Supreme Court on the grounds that, while race was considered in redrawing the maps per federal VRA requirements, there was no gerrymandering because “it was no more predominant than politics or other logical considerations” like local Red River or I-49 highway boundaries, she explained, adding that “the Supreme Court has created an exception where even if they find race is predominant, state legislatures can still prioritize race if they have good reason to believe they have to to comply with the VRA.”
‘A boot on the neck of Black voters’
“We talk about voter suppression and voter apathy, but like I like to remind people: If we know our vote does not matter because the district is so gerrymandered, why should we participate in the political system?” said Davante Lewis, public service commissioner for Louisiana’s District 3.
“If you can control the game, you can control the outcome, and what we have seen now are efforts to ensure that the game is rigged,” he continued. If you would have asked us in January 2021, when we started this process, whether we would have two minority majority districts, we would have said probably not … but we advocated, we agitated, we litigated, and now we have results.”
Ashley Shelton — executive director of Power Coalition for Equity & Justice, an advocate and litigant in this process — said that since 2021, “one of the really powerful levers that we’ve used to keep pushing forward were listening sessions we held across the state, where we had unprecedented participation in legislative hearings and redistricting sessions.”
“In our first session, we heard from a young woman who was the student government president at Dillard University, and she told the legislature that our young people are leaving the state in droves because they cannot trust them to do the right thing,” Shelton explained. “If Black voters thought they could elect a candidate of choice, we know it would impact voter turnout, and there were many arguments throughout this fight where the lawyers said that wasn’t true.”
In November 2023, the first election [to involve the new district maps in Louisiana and Alabama, Black voter turnout increased by two points in Louisiana and by five in Alabama.
“Now, 60 years after the civil rights movement, here we are, still marching, still fighting, still litigating, because while some things have changed, the struggle for voting rights is far from over,” said Alanah Odoms, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union-Louisiana (ACLU-LA), and the first Black woman to lead the organization.
“Voter suppression in Louisiana is like putting a boot on the neck of Black voters, and we’re simply asking for that boot to be removed, in accordance with the Constitution and section two of the Voting Rights Act,” she continued. “The Act pertains to every state in the nation, so what the court decides, as to whether it has power, determines how elections will be handled and how districts will be drawn nationwide.”
“This could create a cascade effect where states could start ignoring population changes suggesting that the country is becoming blacker and browner, to try to maintain districts that largely elect candidates of choice for White voters,” Odoms added. “But we won at the federal court level already … an overturning of decades-long precedent would be quite shocking. We feel very confident about the Supreme Court’s ruling.”
