A group of congressional candidates from across the country is forming a coalition to push back against “racist gerrymandering” in the U.S. Congress — if they win their races in November.
The candidates gathered in Memphis, which they say is becoming the center of the movement against redistricting efforts in majority-Black seats across the country. MLK50: Justice Through Journalism received exclusive access to report on their first in-person learning and strategy sessions.
The group consisted of eight congressional candidates, one U.S. Senate candidate and one former congressional candidate. They came from across the country: California, New Hampshire, Florida, Texas, Alabama and other parts of Tennessee.
Tennessee State Rep. Justin Pearson, who is currently campaigning to represent Tennessee’s newly redrawn District 9 in Congress, invited the group to Memphis, alongside Robb Ryerse, who is currently campaigning to represent Arkansas’ District 3 and the organization Vote Common Good.
Forming the coalition now means the group will already have allies and a platform of causes “for which we are willing to go to the mat for” if elected to Congress, Pearson said. “And voting rights has to be one of those.”
The event wasn’t limited to Democrats: The only criterion for attendance was that they be opposed to gerrymandering, said Lucci Chambless, a Memphis organizer and Ryerse’s campaign manager.
Ryerse’s campaign has struggled to explain to voters how the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to weaken parts of the Voting Rights Act will affect them, Chambless said. Other candidates had the same issue, so they decided to come together to consult with experts, including a law professor and voting rights activists.
The decision to meet in Memphis was intentional: Memphis was just split into three congressional districts by Tennessee Republicans in an attempt to flip the last Democratic seat in the state red. The group met in the fellowship hall at Centenary United Methodist Church, the same room where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. strategized alongside other civil rights leaders on April 3, 1968, a day before his assassination.
“Memphis is ground zero for so many things, for this racist gerrymandering, for these federal task forces, for these ICE operations,” Chambless said. “And Memphis is now, and has always been, primed to lead the revolution.”
Although impacted differently, candidates said voter dilution must stop
While every member of the coalition is committed to ending gerrymandering, not all of their campaigns have been hurt by redistricting battles in their states. Ryerse said his district wasn’t gerrymandered at all. Justin Early, a candidate for Texas’ congressional district 31, said his campaign has actually benefited from redistricting.
Another candidate, Andrew Sneed, who is running to represent Alabama’s 5th district, said the state is feeling the suppression of political power “acutely.” Earlier this month, the U.S. Supreme Court cleared the way for Alabama to use a map that favors Republicans.
“We are all Memphis,” Sneed said.
But despite differences in how their individual campaigns had been impacted, the group agreed that “Memphis stands at the center of a growing national fight over who gets to choose America’s future: voters or politicians,” according to a news release.
“This is at the intersection of a deliberate attempt to diminish Black political power in America,” Ryerse said. “If we don’t understand that, we missed the whole point.”
The candidates heard from Daniel Kiel, a professor at the University of Memphis School of Law, who described the legal history of voting rights and redistricting from the creation of the U.S. Constitution to the present day.
“This is as dire a situation as it could be,” Kiel said. “If what has happened to the districts in Memphis is allowed to stand without rejection either by the people or the courts or by somebody, then really anything goes.”
Early, from Texas, said he was reminded of the adage, “If one of us is not free, none of us are free.”
“The redistricting, while it may have benefited me specifically in my race, it definitely hurt others in Texas, and hurt others here,” Early said. “The process itself, if we are breaking up political power, is not something that I can sit back and say, ‘Hey, it doesn’t really affect me’, because one day it will affect me, or if not, it’s going to affect my children.”
The candidates questioned Kiel on potential strategies they could use in Congress, such as passing national laws to standardize redistricting or prevent gerrymandering. A national ban on political gerrymandering would likely require a constitutional amendment, Kiel said. However, members of Congress do have some power over the U.S. Supreme Court, including by setting its budget and the number of justices.
“The spirit of what’s happening (with gerrymandering) flows directly from history of racial discrimination in voting, but yet the thing that’s happened is so convoluted and subtle that it’s hard to know what is the tool to pick that lock,” Kiel said.
While filing lawsuits and lobbying toward legislation are important, “even before you get to the step of legislation, you get to the step of public education, and that’s kind of where we’re at,” Kiel said. When people understand the impact of political gerrymandering, he said, they’ll see that it conflicts with American values. “Then you start getting people thinking, ‘okay, what do I have to do about it?’”
Attacks on Black voting power part of racist pattern
The group also took a deep dive into the history of Black political power and the backlash against it, including the present-day gutting of the Voting Rights Act.
The Rev. Dr. Michael Waters, founder and lead pastor of the Abundant Life African Methodist Episcopal Church in Dallas, Texas, spoke about how Black Americans’ political power has been under assault — by the Ku Klux Klan, lynch mobs and Jim Crow Laws — ever since slavery, Emancipation and the end of the Civil War. Waters is also a professor and award-winning author of several books about race in the United States. The constant violence against Black Americans means most vote for policies and candidates who they believe will keep them and their families safe, he said.
“This journey (to accumulate political power) has been a resistance to subjugation, a resistance to dehumanization, a resistance to violence, and an imagination of forecasting, a belief, a hope of one day being safe,” Waters said.
When there’s movement toward progress, there’s almost immediately pushback, Waters said. “Black political progress is always met with violence.”
Waters passed around the table slave shackles from Charleston, a second-generation KKK hood, a Confederate flag, photos of lynchings, a photo of the body of Emmett Till and a depiction of the Memphis Massacre. The Rev. Keith Caldwell, who is Centenary’s pastor, noted that the church was burned down during that massacre and had to be rebuilt.
It’s no coincidence that in the South, where slavery was “robust” and where the majority of lynchings and massacres occurred, redistricting is happening to dilute Black voting power today, Waters said.
“It’s the same map. It’s the same story,” he said. “Anyone running for political office in America today to change America must understand the reality of political violence, and there are people who are invested in keeping things going in the opposite direction.”
Bernard Taylor, a candidate for Florida’s 21st congressional district, said he has seen a “constant attack on Black political power in the state of Florida.”
When he heard about the redistricting in Tennessee, “it was a story that was all too familiar.”
Now, he hopes that when the candidates “do win and get into Congress, we have enough allies to actually get things done.”
“I thought it was extremely important to show that there is solidarity amongst a group of people all over the country,” Taylor said. “There’s a group of people that are really taking it upon themselves to stand up for what’s right in this country, to stand up for voting rights in this country, and to stand up to make sure that everyone is represented equally to the best of all.”
Katherine Burgess is the government accountability reporter for MLK50: Justice Through Journalism. Contact her at katherine.burgess@mlk50.com
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