The Washington PostDemocracy Dies in Darkness

Black voting rights under threat in GOP supermajority states, lawmakers say

Black politicians and activists in the South say the Tennessee expulsions are just the tip of the iceberg in a region where White Republicans dominate state politics.

April 28, 2023 at 6:00 a.m. EDT
Tennessee state Rep. Justin Jones (D), standing near wall, speaks in the House chamber in Nashville on April 10 after his reinstatement, which came days after the GOP majority expelled him and fellow Democrat Justin Pearson for a protest. (Cheney Orr/Reuters)
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State Rep. Yvonne Hayes Hinson was standing in front of the Florida House of Representatives, recounting being spat on for sitting at Whites-only lunch counters during the civil rights movement. The 75-year-old was trying to impress on her Republican colleagues how hard she and others had fought for voting rights and how a plan to eliminate a congressional seat held by a Black Democrat would again seriously diminish the political power of Black Floridians.

When she was told her time was up, she continued speaking, and her microphone was cut off. Other Black members of the House shouted in anger that the Black vote was under attack. They chanted “We will not be denied” and sang “We Shall Overcome.” The redistricting map was passed anyway, a year ago Friday.

“They do what they do because they can. Not because there’s a policy or a rule or even a reason, but just because they can,” Hinson said of the Republican supermajority that runs the Florida state House. “I watched every development of the expulsions in Tennessee. I saw the parallels to what happened to us last year instantly. Every civil right accomplished in the ’60s is under attack. Every one.”

The expulsions of Democratic state Reps. Justin Jones and Justin Pearson from the Tennessee House by Republican leaders this month hit a nerve with Black politicians and activists across the South. Conservative White Republicans dominate state-level politics throughout the region, and they are often accused of wielding their power to suppress the will of Black voters, who overwhelmingly back Democrats.

Republican lawmakers have supermajorities which allow them to override governors’ vetoes and pass virtually any piece of legislation without a single Democratic vote in at least one chamber of the state legislatures in all former confederate states except Georgia, Texas and Virginia. In North Carolina and Louisiana, a Democrat in each legislature recently flipped to the GOP, giving Republicans a supermajority to overturn potential vetoes by their Democratic governors.

And even in Georgia and Texas, where Republicans are just shy of supermajorities, they nonetheless control both Houses, both Senates and the governorships. Black politicians and activists say that Republican lawmakers have used racial gerrymandering and voter suppression to secure those majorities and are using their political might to further consolidate power among mostly White Republicans.

This also has meant there has been little movement on issues that matter most to members of the Black community and other groups, issues including gun control, low wages and police violence, said Todd Shaw, a University of South Carolina political science professor who focuses on African American politics.

Jones and Pearson were protesting a lack of legislative action to curb gun violence after a school shooting in Nashville when they clashed with their GOP colleagues.

In Mississippi and Missouri, Republican supermajorities are trying to take control of policing and the prosecution of crime in Black-run cities. In several states, legislatures are limiting how race can be taught in schools, and are banning diversity programs and trainings in colleges. And a number of Black lawmakers lost their seats in recent elections after Republicans redrew their district lines.

“The tactic of expulsion, like excessive registration requirements, purging voter rolls and other tactics we’re seeing today, echo the kind of disenfranchisement that we saw during Reconstruction and its aftermath,” said Ariela Gross, a historian at the University of Southern California who focuses on race, racism and slavery in the Americas. “I see a lot of parallels, unfortunately. It’s chilling.”

Gross and other academics point to the expulsions of Black legislators that took place in the South in 1868, even before white supremacists reasserted their dominance after Reconstruction, the period of political and social reform that followed the Civil War and the dismantling of slavery.

In Mississippi, racial politics were front-and-center during this year’s legislative session, according to activists. State Rep. Trey Lamar, a Republican who represents a mostly rural and White constituency, introduced a bill in January that would give the state control of the policing and judicial duties in a portion of the capital city that included its wealthiest and predominantly White neighborhoods. Proponents said the bill would help clear a judicial backlog in Jackson, the state capital, and put more officers on the streets. Critics argued that it was an attempt to usurp the power of local officials in a city where Black Democrats dominate politics.

“The last time that Black Mississippians had this little power was Jim Crow,” said Oleta Fitzgerald, the director of the Children’s Defense Fund’s Southern Regional Office and a former campaign manager for Mike Espy, a Black Democrat who twice ran against U.S. Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-Miss.).

It was not the first time state Republicans tried to take control of Jackson’s operations. The city and state have been wrestling over control of Jackson’s airport for years, and the city recently fended off an attempt to take over its schools.

A final version of the policing bill, which is set to expand the jurisdiction of the state-run police force to include the entire city of Jackson, was signed into law April 21. The NAACP quickly filed suit, saying the law amounts to “separate and unequal policing” and violates the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause by targeting the majority-Black city.

Similar battles took place this year in Missouri. In February, the Missouri House passed legislation that would allow the governor to appoint special prosecutors in a handful of cities. Initially, the bill specifically targeted St. Louis and its prosecutor, Kim Gardner, who is a Black woman. In March, the same body approved the takeover of the city’s police department, a move that many saw as a rebuke of the leadership of Mayor Tishaura O. Jones, the first Black woman to run the city. Republicans said that this isn’t about the face of St. Louis leadership, but instead the city’s high crime rate. Both bills are before the state Senate.

“The instant we get a Black mayor, the instant we get a Black prosecutor, the instant we almost have a completely Black county board, now they want to step in and be the savior,” said state Rep. LaKeySha Bosley, a Black Democrat who represents parts of St. Louis. “It is problematic, because none of our constituents are asking for that. If they don’t want the mayor, if they don’t want the prosecutor, if they don’t want us as their elected leaders, they can vote us out, just like everybody else in Missouri.”

Bosley says she thinks the expulsions in Tennessee were intended to send a message to Black lawmakers around the country.

“These young Black men were being used to teach all Black lawmakers a lesson,” Bosley said.

Republicans in the Tennessee House of Representatives expelled the two Black Democratic lawmakers for participating in a gun-control protest that halted the body’s proceedings and thus broke the chamber’s rules of decorum. But Black lawmakers immediately cried foul, pointing out that no member of the Tennessee House had ever been removed from elective office for violating the decorum rules. Jones and Pearson have long had contentious relationships with the state’s Republican leadership. Earlier this year, Pearson wore a dashiki for his swearing-in ceremony. House Republicans publicly scolded the new member for his outfit.

After their expulsions, Pearson and Jones were quickly reinstated by the Shelby County Board of Commissioners and the Nashville Metropolitan Council, respectively. On Monday, President Biden welcomed them to the White House.

While the Tennessee lawmakers have gained national fame, Democrats are concerned that their expulsions have signaled a new strategy among Republicans.

On Wednesday, Montana Republicans voted to punish state Rep. Zooey Zephyr, a transgender Democrat who spoke out against the effort there to ban gender-affirming care for minors. Zephyr said that supporters of the bill would have blood on their hands. Republicans say that comment violated the body’s rules of decorum and have barred her from the House for the remainder of the legislative session. She will be able to vote remotely.

As South Carolina state Rep. Marvin Pendarvis (D) watched the Tennessee expulsions, he immediately thought that the same could happen in his state, he said.

“If you look at the profile of Tennessee, it’s strikingly similar to South Carolina in many ways,” said Pendarvis, who is Black. “Similar things happen here in the way some representatives speak to Black legislators — as if we are not their equal.”

Pendarvis and other Black lawmakers say gerrymandering is the key to many of the region’s Republican supermajorities.

During the redistricting that followed the 2020 Census, the first decennial redrawing of district lines since a conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court gutted major sections of the Voting Rights Act, many Black lawmakers in the region saw their districts significantly altered. In the North Carolina and South Carolina legislatures, six Black lawmakers lost their reelection bids in 2022. Black lawmakers’ losses were key to giving Republicans in South Carolina a two-thirds supermajority in the state House for the first time since the 1870s.

Efforts also are underway to enact stricter voter identification laws and other voting requirements, including in Florida and North Carolina.

In South Carolina, the Republican supermajority has been able to “politely ignore” Black lawmakers when they argue against bills such as a recent effort to expand parents’ right to object to how educators in public schools discuss race and other subjects, said Shaw, the University of South Carolina political science professor.

Black lawmakers, at least 21 of whom lost their seats last year in former Confederate states, according to data from the National Conference of State Legislatures, often fight for issues important to other marginalized communities and to liberal White voters. Between gerrymandering and a lack of action on those issues, many Black voters might feel the system is “rigged” against them and see little reason to go to the ballot, Shaw said.

“Voting can seem like a feeble and insufficient exercise. It’s dispiriting,” he said. “Your well-being and happiness as an African American can be directly impacted by these legislative outcomes.”

In South Carolina, the state NAACP filed suit, contending that Republicans drew the state’s congressional and state legislative maps in a way that intentionally diluted the voting power of the Black residents. A federal district court and appeals court have sided with the NAACP, but Republicans have appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

In addition to South Carolina, there are pending lawsuits accusing Republican lawmakers of illegally diluting Black voting power for congressional and state legislative seats in Arkansas, North Carolina, Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama and Florida.

In those lawsuits, Republicans counter that they were not engaged in racial gerrymandering, which is illegal, but in partisan gerrymandering, which federal courts have ruled does not violate the Constitution. In a region where as many as 80 percent of White voters support Republicans and about 90 percent of Black voters support Democrats, it is often difficult to disentangle issues of partisanship and race. Black politicians and activists say the result is all the same.

Cliff Albright, a founder of Black Voters Matter, said the actions of Republicans in South Carolina and across the South send a message to Black voters that their perspective is irrelevant.

“When you get up to that level of supermajority, people don’t feel like they even have to pretend to follow any kind of a semblance of a democratic process,” he said. “At the end of the day, it’s harmful to the Black community in particular, and Black representation, but also the entire state.”

But some are hopeful that the Tennessee expulsions will motivate Black voters to make their voices heard.

Derrick Johnson, the national president of the NAACP, called the Tennessee case a potential “breakthrough moment.”

“I suspect as a result of what’s taking place in Tennessee, you’re going to see a much more emboldened not only African American community but youth community,” Johnson said. “It’s infuriating to them, but it could also be motivating. We are in the midst of a gray area where more people are beginning to recognize the harm a small number of individuals are doing on our communities.”