Voting Districts and Minority Representation

Abstract

In 1872, in the first congressional reapportionment after African-Americans won the right to vote everywhere in the country, white North Carolina Democrats packed blacks into a strangely-shaped, over-populated, predominantly black congressional district in a racially discriminatory and partisan effort to minimize the influence of black Republican voters. Neither this nor any of the myriad of other nineteenth century anti-black racial gerrymanders was challenged in court. 120 years later in 1992, an interracial Democratic coalition in North Carolina, under pressure from the U.S. Department of Justice, drew a congressional map designed to simultaneously enhance the chances of black voters to elect candidates of their choice and preserve the seats of other Democratic members of Congress. This time white voters sued, and a "conservative" Republican majority on the U.S. Supreme Court, ironically basing its decisions on the 14th Amendment, ruled that district lines were unconstitutional if they appeared to track racial population concentrations too closely. Manipulating electoral district boundaries to take in minority neighborhoods, the 5-4 Supreme Court majority asserted, was a violation of "traditional districting principles."

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