By Antonio Ray Harvey | California Black Media
On May 7, Justin Jones, a Nashville lawmaker and Oakland native, set set fire to a paper replica of the Confederate flag in the Tennessee State Capitol rotunda to protest a Republican-led congressional redistricting plan passed during a special legislative session.
The Tennessee Legislature special session was held amid growing national outrage over voting rights and representation following the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision that critics say further weakens protections under the Voting Rights Act and makes it more difficult to challenge racially discriminatory district maps.’
A few days later, Jones, a graduate of Fisk University, a historically Black college and university (HBCU) in Nashville, was locked standing arm-in-arm, shoulder-to-shoulder with members of the California Legislative Black Caucus (CLBC) singing the civil rights movement anthem “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me ‘Round” in the California State Capitol.
Jones, who represents Tennessee’s 52nd District, returned to California to sound the alarm about how the maps alter the political balance by eliminating Tennessee’s last remaining Democratic-leaning U.S. House seat. The plan also sliced up Memphis’s majority-Black and Democratic population into three districts.
“The only way we defeat this new confederacy is with a united front of the United States. What happens in Tennessee is connected to what happens in California. What happens in the South is connected to what happens in Sacramento.”
CLBC chair Sen. Akilah Weber Pierson (D-San Diego) and Sen. Lola Smallwood-Cuevas (D-Los Angeles) joined Assemblymembers Mia Bonta (D-Alameda), Sade Elhawary (D-Los Angeles), Mike Gipson (D-Carson), and Tina McKinnor (D-Inglewood) at the event.
Assemblymembers Gail Pellerin (D-Santa Cruz), from the California Women’s Caucus, and Chris Ward (D-San Diego), from the LGBTQ Legislative Caucus, stood in solidarity with the CLBC.
On May 14, the California State Assembly passed Assembly Joint Resolution (AJR) 31 with an overwhelming bipartisan majority vote of 60-11. The legislation was referred to the Senate.
AJR 31, authored by Assemblymember Isaac Bryan (D-Ladera Heights) and co-authored by Bonta, calls on the U.S. Congress to enact legislation that restores and strengthens the full protections of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and pass the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.
“For the first hundred years of California’s existence, states across this country used poll taxes, literacy tests, and gerrymandering maps to keep Black and Brown people out of the ballot box,” Bonta said. “The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was supposed to be the end of that here. On April 29, the Supreme Court decided it wasn’t.”
David Trujillo, the executive director of ACLU California Action, the legislative and advocacy arm of the ACLU in California, one of the speakers at the gathering, explained that the strategy to prevent Black people from voting has now taken a new form.
“Make no mistake, the forces that supported poll taxes and who beat Americans trying to register to vote in the last century are the same forces today celebrating voter ID laws and the dismantling of Section 2 of the Civil Rights Act,” said Trujillo. “Their tactics have changed, but their racist goals remain the same.”
Jones noted that his grandparents fled Jim Crow laws in the South and relocated to Oakland, which Bonta represents. He grew up Hercules, a town in Contra Costa County on the East Bay.
Jones told California Black Media (CBM) that the changing of maps directly affects constituents in his Nashville district by changing which U.S. Congressperson represents them in Washington, D.C.
At his May Budget Revision presentation on May 14, Gov. Gavin Newsom described to CBM that Republican-led redistricting efforts across the country, particularly those that eliminate majority-Black districts, as “Jim Crow 2.0” and “stone-cold racism.”
Newsom denounced the Supreme Court’s Louisiana v. Callais decision, specifically condemning Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry for his recent moves to eliminate Black representation in the state.
“It’s sick. Stone cold racism at a scale I never thought I would see in my life — Never have seen in my lifetime,” Newsom told CBM during the Q&A portion of his presentation. “It’s all bringing us back to a pre-1960s world. It’s jaw-dropping what is happening.”
Landry suspended the state’s primary election after the Supreme Court’s ruling. On May 14, the Louisiana State Senate passed a map, Senate Bill 121, 27-10, that eliminates the state’s second majority-Black congressional district. The bill has advanced to the Louisiana House of Representatives.
Approximately 45,000 early and absentee ballots already cast in the congressional primary will be discarded, with Landry directing affected citizens to recast their votes in November, with runoffs, if necessary, set for Dec. 12.
In Tennessee, the Supreme Court’s ruling paves the way for Tennessee Republicans to dismantle the state’s only majority-Black congressional district in Memphis, which is 63% Black.
Jones said the Tennessee legislature “is not going to stop” at the state level. When the lawmakers reconvene in January, “they are coming after our state legislative districts next as they have at the federal level.”
“What I want to be clear about is that we’re seeing the largest Black political representation since the end of Reconstruction, and one-third of the Congressional Black Caucus can lose their seats as well as Black lawmakers in state houses,” he said.