Tennessee has one majority-Black congressional district. And the state government is trying to get rid of it. On May 7, the NAACP Tennessee State Conference filed a lawsuit to stop them.
The suit, filed in Tennessee state court, challenges a redistricting plan pushed by Governor Bill Lee that civil rights advocates say is designed to dismantle the only congressional district in the state where Black voters hold the majority of political power.
The NAACP is arguing that the proposed map violates both the Tennessee Constitution and Tennessee state law, and they are asking the court to block it before it takes effect.
The lawsuit comes directly on the heels of the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, in which the Court’s conservative majority made it significantly harder for plaintiffs to challenge maps that dilute minority voting power under the federal Voting Rights Act.
Tennessee’s redistricting push appears to be moving in the window created by that decision. The NAACP is responding by taking the fight to state law instead.
“A democracy without Black representation is not a democracy,” Kristen Clarke, NAACP General Counsel, shared.
Governor Bill Lee has pushed the state legislature to adopt a new congressional map that would redraw district lines in a way that breaks up the concentration of Black voters currently held in Tennessee’s 9th Congressional District, which covers Memphis and the surrounding West Tennessee area.
Advocates say the new map is a textbook case of racial gerrymandering, the practice of drawing district lines to dilute the political power of a specific racial group.
Memphis is the largest majority-Black city in Tennessee and one of the most significant Black population centers in the entire South. It is where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968 while supporting striking sanitation workers.
It is where the Civil Rights Movement made some of its most consequential and costly stands. The idea that Black voters in Memphis and West Tennessee would now be denied a majority district with meaningful political representation is not an abstraction for the people who live there. It is personal.
“This is where the KKK was born and where MLK was assassinated. Black residents were faced with racial violence and legal suppression every single day. And to vote, they were met with poll taxes and literacy tests designed to keep them silent,” Clarke shared. “We’re outraged that the State, rather than seeking a more just and fair system, is seeking to roll Tennessee back to a time when many of us didn’t have equal rights.”
Before filing the lawsuit, the NAACP held two mobilization events in Tennessee this week. The first was a Voting Rights Town Hall at The First Baptist Church Broad in Memphis. The second was a rally at the Tennessee State Capitol Building in Nashville.
Gloria Sweet-Love, President of the Tennessee State Conference of the NAACP, was clear about what is at stake and what the organization intends to do about it.
“The Tennessee State Conference of the NAACP will fight this attempt to silence Black voters through this unlawful redistricting process. There is a long history and contemporary pattern of unfair redistricting practices in rural West Tennessee that have harmed Black political representation. We will stand up to make sure that Black voters retain their voting power.”
Tennessee is not an isolated case. The NAACP has filed redistricting lawsuits in Texas and Missouri, sued the Trump administration multiple times over election-related executive orders, and intervened in lawsuits across multiple states to block what it describes as the Justice Department’s unlawful attempts to collect sensitive voter data.
For Black voters in Tennessee, and Black voters across the country watching this case, the question is the same one it has always been: whether the political system will be made to answer for attempts to silence them, or whether this moment passes quietly into history the way too many others have.
For more information about the NAACP’s voting rights work, visit naacp.org.
