Tennessee GOP Moves to Decimate Black Voting Power After Supreme Court’s Blessing of Jim Crow

Tennessee Governor Bill Lee and the state legislature have implemented new congressional redistricting maps that eliminate the state’s only majority-Black district, following a Supreme Court decision that significantly weakened the Voting Rights Act.

On May 7, 2026, Governor Lee signed a bill repealing a half-century-old law that had previously prohibited mid-decade redistricting. Immediately following this, the Republican-led legislature passed new maps that dismantle the 9th Congressional District, which served as Tennessee’s only Black-majority district and its only reliable Democratic seat.

The new maps carve the 9th District into three separate sections. Each of these redrawn areas is designed to have a white-majority and Republican-leaning electorate. This redistricting effort effectively dilutes the voting power of Memphis, where the population is 63 percent Black.

The elimination of this district removes the primary representation for Black Tennesseans, who make up approximately 17 percent of the state’s population and are overwhelmingly Democratic. Currently, Rep. Steve Cohen is the lone Democrat among the state’s nine congressional seats; the new maps eliminate the seat he holds.

Legal Catalysts and the Voting Rights Act

The redistricting move follows the Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais, which decimated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Section 2 had previously served as a primary legal protection for minority voters against redistricting efforts that diluted their political influence.

Legal experts suggest the Callais ruling provides a shield for partisan gerrymandering that targets racial groups, provided the party does not explicitly describe the maps as targeting those voters. Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School, explained the logic of the ruling to Bolts Magazine.

The more racist you are as a party, the more insulated you are from Voting Rights Act liability under this decision. If there were a party called the Klan party, right now, it would trigger an awful lot of nonwhite opposition based on the party’s platform. But this opinion says, you have to set the party’s platform entirely aside to figure out if there’s been any damage based on race. So the more you can tie the two together, the more insulated you are.Justin Levitt

Levitt concluded that under this legal framework, “the most racist partisan gerrymandering is going to be the most immune from a VRA challenge.”

Political Reactions and Protests

Democratic lawmakers in Tennessee have characterized the maps as a tool of white supremacy. Democratic state Rep. Justin Pearson, a progressive activist running for Congress, spoke at the statehouse on May 7, 2026.

These maps are racist tools of white supremacy, at the behest of the most powerful white supremacist in the United States of America, Donald J. Trump.Justin Pearson

Pearson further described the gerrymandered maps as a “political lynching” and claimed the action “set our state back over 150 years.” The redrawn maps are expected to impact Pearson’s chances of representing South Memphis in Washington, as he had been polling closely with incumbent Rep. Steve Cohen for the August primary.

Other Democratic representatives also protested the vote. State Rep. Justin Jones burned a paper Confederate flag in the statehouse rotunda while surrounded by protesters. During the special session, Jones noted that the statehouse had seen similar periods of Black exclusion following the end of Reconstruction, from the late 1800s until the 1960s.

In contrast, Republican state Rep. Todd Warner entered the statehouse for the May 7 session wearing a large Trump 2024 flag as a cape.

Regional Trends and Legal Challenges

The actions in Tennessee are part of a broader regional trend. Following orders from Donald Trump, Republicans in Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina also called special legislative sessions to push new redistricting maps intended to reduce the number of majority-Black districts.

Pamela Karlan, a law professor at Stanford University and co-director of Stanford’s Supreme Court Litigation Clinic, told Slate that Republican-controlled states lack internal constraints on how they treat Black voters because those voters do not support the party.

Voters have to first build a political movement around this that makes elected officials afraid to do this.Pamela Karlan

Concurrent legal battles are unfolding in other states. On May 8, 2026, the Virginia Supreme Court struck down Democratic redistricting efforts that had been approved by voters in a referendum, a ruling that provides Republicans with a significant electoral advantage in that state.

In Tennessee, the NAACP’s state chapter filed a lawsuit on May 7, 2026, challenging the legality of the new congressional map. This legal action is expected to be the first of several challenges against the redistricting plan.