Black politics needs more than better voting maps

In the wake of the Louisiana v. Callais Supreme Court decision in late April, the overwhelming response by mainstream civil rights and voting rights organizations has been to offer the same strategies we always see: voter registration and "get out the vote." The efforts to racially gerrymander maps and redistrict have been happening for decades. Black politicians across the country, at state and federal levels, have made careers fighting for "fair maps." However, the conversations among the Black left, particularly those with abolitionist politics, reveal deep frustrations with how the modern voting rights movement has seemingly abandoned the goal of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s: to improve the material conditions for Black and poor people across the South and the nation.

Rather, the modern voting rights movement has seemingly become a tool to preserve the Black politician's job, particularly the establishment democrat. We now see "Save the Maps" as the policy issue. Not ending poverty, not curbing environmental racism and pollution of Black communities from data centers and industry, not ending the Death Penalty, not decarcerating the criminal legal system, not healthcare for all, not improving maternal healthcare for Black women, not strengthening public education in the face of vouchers and "school choice," not a living minimum wage, and definitely not defunding or reducing police budgets. We are told that without Black politicians in a representative "democracy," we will "go backwards" to the Jim Crow days with no Black representatives. And, without them, all hope is lost.

However, "[e]ven before Callais, the existing models of Black politics were growing stale." Let's be unflinchingly honest: The status quo is, and was, bad enough before any Republican redistricting ever occurs. So what exactly are we trying to hold onto?

Congressman Bennie Thompson penned a June op-ed in Mississippi Today where he likened this moment post-Callais to "a new Civil War" being "fought with maps" and called the Republicans' plans to redistrict an attack on "Black political power." He said: "The Voting Rights Act put more people at the table, allowed more people to participate in the process and provided safeguards that allowed people to advocate for the candidates of their choice."

Let's be clear. Black representatives alone do NOT equal Black political power. This is not a new concept. Kwame Ture (formerly Stokely Carmichael) said in 1967 of "Black Power": "It does not mean merely putting black faces into office. Black visibility is not Black Power. Most of the black politicians around the country today are not examples of Black Power."

The legacy of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s informs us that we must practice radical honesty even in the face of white supremacy and fascism. We, the authors, posit a question at this moment, and ask who have been the biggest beneficiaries of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) and the decades of litigation and enforcement that followed?

We believe that Black elected officials have been the biggest beneficiaries of the Voting Rights Act, not regular Black Americans. While VRA litigation and enforcement increased the number of Black elected officials for decades before the right-wing Court began dismantling the VRA, it has not produced the material improvements needed for Black people across the country, and definitely not in the South. 

We are not claiming that voting isn't important, or downplaying the fact that Republicans are racially motivated in their redistricting plans for Congress, state legislatures, and local governments. That is obvious. Nor do we discount the activists of the 1960s, especially those who made the ultimate sacrifice for the right to vote. Rather, we believe this is an opportunity to reimagine our very systems of government. That is the legacy of Fannie Lou Hamer and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP). However, in the decades since the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, "Black political power" has become equated with electoral politics, "a seat at the table," and a not-so-subtle embrace of tokenism. It has created a system where Black elected officials have replicated everything the white supremacist system of governance has always done, down to neoliberal politics, embracing corporate capitalism, environmental exploitation, and so much more. 

By looking at the sociopolitical realities from the Blackest state in the country, Mississippi, we will analyze the very system of representative "democracy" that the modern voting rights movement is trying to save. We ask where we were and what the goals of the Civil Rights Movement were; discuss what we did by embracing tokenism; interrogate where we are now; and ask where we will go from here? Presently, we have a duty to reimagine and reconsider the entire system and focus on changing the lived realities for Black Americans, particularly Black Southerners, because the existing system has never worked for them.

Where We Were: The Promises of the Civil Rights Movement

Six decades ago, life was significantly harsher for the average Black American, especially those living in the South. The period was defined by segregation of education and housing, a doctrine of "separate but equal" that never was equal, and the daily indignities of the Jim Crow system. All of which amounted to a de jure second-class citizenship. Those conditions led to the prolific movement of the 1960s we know as the Civil Rights Movement. The central goals of the Civil Rights Movement were economic justice and freedom from poverty, full voting power—not simply the legal right to vote, housing equality and dismantling residential segregation, equal education rather than simply desegregated education, criminal legal system and policing reform, labor rights and dignity for workers, closing the racial wealth gap and freedom from structural racism, beyond merely intentional discrimination. After nearly a decade of organizing, protesting, and having members of the movement killed, it was clear to civil rights leaders like Fannie Lou Hamer and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. that civil rights victories had removed legal barriers without fundamentally redistributing economic or political power. In March of 1968, King was quoted: "What does it profit a man to be able to eat at an integrated lunch counter if he doesn't earn enough money to buy a hamburger and a cup of coffee?"

The Civil Rights Movement undeniably transformed American society and the legal status of Black Americans. Its victories were legislative and dismantled the formal system of second-class citizenship that defined Black American life for generations. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited discrimination in employment and public accommodations, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 attacked the mechanisms used to exclude Black citizens from political participation, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968 prohibited racial discrimination in housing. These victories helped more Black Americans have legal protections, plus allowed some to access white institutions, and even enter political offices previously closed off to Black people. 

King's question about the integrated lunch counter still remains instructive nearly sixty years later. Formal access matters, but access without the economic and political power necessary to meaningfully exercise it represents an incomplete form of equality. The question today is no longer simply whether Black Americans may attend the same schools, live in the same neighborhoods, vote in elections, or work in the same institutions. It is whether they have an opportunity to obtain quality experiences and manifestations of those things. By that measure, the Civil Rights Movement achieved extraordinary progress while leaving significant portions of its promise unfulfilled. Reflecting on the movement therefore requires us to distinguish between defeating Jim Crow as a legal system versus achieving genuine equality and restructuring of society that its leaders envisioned.

What We Did: Embracing Tokenism and "A Seat at the Table"

While the Supreme Court and federal courts of today have become the arena for the far-right to dismantle the VRA and all other civil rights protections, our present system—where so many Black elected officials come from single-member winner-take-all majority-Black districts—was a creation of federal courts. Redrawn district maps often came after federal court and Department of Justice (DOJ) interventions. These districts were the solution by the courts to remedy VRA violations. Lani Guinier explained the courts' process: "Once a violation was established, the cure was to subdivide larger, heterogeneous electorates into smaller, homogeneous, majority-Black districts where Black voters could elect candidates of their choice to the governing body." The logic is simple. A Black district with a Black elected official equals no VRA violation. Thus, the strategy post-VRA: "Voting rights activists sought to elect more Black officials, primarily by creating majority-Black single-member districts."

Those days of federal intervention are long gone, though. Looking back, we must be honest and admit that efforts by voting rights activists and lawyers both subtly and not so subtly embraced tokenism and an essentialist belief that Black officials will represent the interests of Black constituents. Lani Guinier's 1991 law review article, "The Triumph of Tokenism: The Voting Rights Act and the Theory of Black Electoral Success," makes this plain. She wrote: "For almost two decades, the conventional civil rights political empowerment agenda of Black activists, lawyers, and scholars has focused on the election of Black representatives. The belief that Black representation is everything has defined litigation strategy under the Voting Rights Act." She coined this concept the "Black electoral success theory:" 

In black electoral success theory, empowerment is obtained through meaningful enfranchisement, which exists where blacks are elected. The theory thus promotes the election of individual black representatives as spokesmodels for political equality. Simply by virtue of election opportunities, black electoral success advances civil rights enforcement, government intervention on behalf of the poor, and black "role-model" development.

Guinier noted that the "Black single-member district strategy … "inescapably closed the door" on the real goal of the civil rights movement, which was to alter the material conditions of the lives of America's subjugated minorities." Instead of focusing on the conditions Black people live in and their ability to dictate their futures, we've settled for essentialist representative politics. "By focusing narrowly on electing Black officeholders, however, the litigation strategy and the theory eventually eclipsed the movement's wide-angled focus on transformative politics."

Litigation to enforce the Voting Rights Act transformed the original goals of broad-based voter participation, reform, and authentic representation into the shorthand of counting elected Black officials. In addition, judicial interpretation of the statute compressed the civil rights movement's capacious conception of political representation, redistribution, and participation into a narrow electoral focus on Black representation.

Elections alone became the threshold for Black concerns; thus, the rhetoric we see from mainstream voting and civil rights organizations instructing the people to register and "get out and vote." "Along with other liberal views about individual rights and democratic self-government, integrationists cheerfully argued that a group has its requisite degree of political power if it is able to elect a fair number of representatives." This line of thinking is vertical and hierarchical. It fails to recognize the impact of white supremacy and pushes the simplistic narrative that if enough Black people enter government, then freedom will come from on high.

Thus, by equating equitable participation in our "democracy" to the number of Black elected officials, we have created a system which benefits representatives more than the people. What does Black representation mean if I'm Black in the Mississippi Delta and have an ample number of Black representatives, but no hospital in my community? Or routinely experience violence and abuse from Black police? And make $7.25 an hour in a state without a minimum wage?

Where We Are Now: Lessons from "A Place Like Mississippi"

Mississippi is the Blackest state in the country. Mississippi is also among the top five states with the most Black state lawmakers. Yet, Mississippi is 48 out of 50 in terms of health outcomes, regularly faces closures of rural hospitals, regularly is one of the poorest states in the country with abject poverty in the poorest counties, has the highest incarceration rate in the nation, has no state minimum wage, has some of the worst maternal health outcomes and rates of death during childbirth for Black women, and many more issues. Mississippi residents also lack the ability for direct democracy, as the state ballot initiative was invalidated in 2021 and never brought back. 

So, again, what does representation mean for a place like Mississippi where direct democracy isn't presently available, and Black officials propose bills to expand the use of the death penalty (legislation that surely would've been used by prosecutors against women who kill their abusers)? Or four Black state senators voted with Republicans to eliminate the income tax? Or Congressman Bennie Thompson's district contains two CoreCivic private prisons and the main industry he accepts donations and lobbying dollars from is the private prison industry? Or two Black legislators joined propaganda trips to Israel with the pro-Israel lobby?

In 1982, Congress amended the VRA to include the right to a meaningful vote. This right simply meant the right for people of color to elect "representatives of choice." Even with the gutting of the VRA, the language of "electing representatives of their choice" still remains. The key word here is choice. How can you elect candidates of your choice if you have no choice? There is a serious problem of uncontested elections across Mississippi. In the 2023 statewide election cycle in Mississippi, 85 percent of all statewide races were uncontested, and more than half of all primaries were uncontested. The majority of Mississippians routinely have zero choice as to who their lawmakers will be. 

Let's look at one small majority-Black community: Lexington, Mississippi, in Holmes County. Holmes County is considered one of the poorest counties in the country, and Census data approximates that 43 percent of the population lives in poverty. In 2024, the Biden DOJ found Constitutional rights violations with Lexington's police force and entire criminal legal system that essentially ran as a debtors' prison. Lexington has virtually all Black officials at every level of local government. Holmes County was a stronghold of the MFDP, and the first Black legislator since Reconstruction, Robert Clark, was elected from this community to the statehouse in 1967. Yet, for Black folks in Lexington, the question remains if meaningful mechanisms for government accountability exist.

Since Lexington police arrest Black residents under state criminal laws, who their state lawmakers are matters. Lexington is in Mississippi House District 47, and that representative is Bryant Clark, the son of Representative Robert Clark. Bryant Clark has not had to run against anyone in a primary or general election since the 2003 Democratic primary when his father retired after 36 years in the state legislature. On the state senate side, Lexington is in Mississippi Senate District 21, and the representative is Bradford Blackmon, the son of two long-serving Black state representatives, Edward and Barbara Blackmon, who collectively served 60 years in the legislature. Mrs. Blackmon was senator for the district twice and last served from 2015 to 2023. The two elder incumbent lawmakers registered for reelection in 2023, and two of their children registered against them, only for the incumbents each to drop out of the race after the registration deadline, thus guaranteeing an uncontested election for their sons.

Voters in Lexington have only had the option to vote for a candidate not part of the two political dynasties since 2015 in the Senate, and not since 2003 in the House. Does a functional "democracy" exist when people within districts have no choice of who to vote for other than one candidate, for decades? And that candidate may be the child of the prior representative? In House District 47, a father and son have held power since 1968. Was this Fannie Lou Hamer's vision of democracy?

We cannot imagine so. Fannie Lou Hamer was first moved to register to vote and enter the movement in 1962 after attending a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) meeting where she learned the people could vote out elected officials. "They were talking about how we could vote out people that we didn't want in office," wrote Keisha N. Blain in Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer's Enduring Message to America. The only mechanism for accountability in our existing representative "democracy," reliant on single-member districts, is to regularly have challengers to incumbent seats.

To be clear, the Black political class is a symptom and byproduct of the white supremacist system, not the cause. The "packing and cracking" of racial gerrymandering, plus the Black majority districts that some of these politicians fought to keep, compounded by a low state legislator salary of $23,500 a year, makes it unlikely challengers will regularly emerge in, particularly rural, areas where people cannot afford to campaign against incumbents just to take on an additional low-paying job.

The Black electoral success theory also magnifies the embrace of an unspoken "talented tenth" ideology which says established Black, mostly male, mostly lawyers, should be the representatives for poor and working class Black people. Fannie Lou Hamer's vision of democracy envisioned a world where a sharecropper was the most qualified person to be a county tax assessor because they understood the realities of the poor and would administer a tax scheme accordingly. Yet, most Black lawmakers seemingly represent the Black bourgeoisie of their state or locality. It's been this way for decades. In After Freedom Summer: How Race Realigned Mississippi Politics, 1965-1986, Chris Danielson explained that the "class of 1979," the first significant group of Black state legislators in Mississippi following the Supreme Court's decision in Connor v. Johnson, were: "all college-educated men and hailed from the black bourgeoisie, with most of them either businessmen or professionals such as lawyers or educators." Manning Marable, in Race, Reform, and Rebellion, detailed that Black politicians "tended to come from the black middle class—doctors, lawyers, entrepreneurs, college professors—and not directly from the black working class or poor." He noted, of Black elected officials, "their ideological outlook and basic political practices tended to align them more with other parvenu élites than with the black working class."

Mississippi shows us every day that you don't even need white people around for white supremacy to thrive. There regularly are Black sheriffs (elected), police (including school resource officers), and corrections officers who violate the rights of Black citizens. What does representation mean if it simply changes the hands that beat you from white to Black? You're still beaten at the end of the day.

Where Will We Go?: Looking Beyond the Maps

After the MFDP crashed the 1964 Democratic National Convention demanding to be seated, they were offered two "at-large" seats by the national Democratic Party as a compromise. As the national party awaited an answer from the MFDP, Congressman Adam Clayton Powell of New York, one of the few Black members of Congress at the time, approached Fannie Lou Hamer and the MFDP to try to convince them to compromise. Congressman Powell first asked Mrs. Hamer if she knew who he was. She confirmed that she in fact knew who he was, and Mrs. Hamer then asked him: "How many bales of cotton have you picked? … How many beatings have you taken?"

Congressman Powell couldn't respond. "The MFDP delegates rejected it after a parade of civil rights leaders and other liberals urged acceptance at an intense meeting." Mrs. Hamer ultimately said: "We didn't come all this way for no two seats since all of us is tired."

Powell embraced "a seat at the table," and he and the Black political establishment of the time couldn't fathom that poor Black sharecroppers from Mississippi wouldn't be content with the scraps from the Democratic Party's table. They had nothing to lose but their chains, and wanted so much more than lip service "representative democracy." The lived realities for Black people in the South should motivate us all to operate with urgency to change circumstances for the people, instead of focusing on representatives and hoping justice and liberation will trickle down once in office. That was never the aim of the Movement. "Rather than a self-limiting movement to assimilate blacks into the councils of government, the original civil rights message endorsed, through the right to vote, broad notions of freedom from hunger, poverty, and discrimination," explains Lani Guinier.

Redistricting is very likely going to happen, and there needs to be a fight against right-wing tyranny, but we also need real policy goals, and morally and ideologically clear officials not beholden to corporate interests. We presently see these tensions arise in elections across the country as progressive candidates, sometimes Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) backed, challenge mainstream moderate, corporate, and AIPAC backed democrats for state and federal offices. Yet, many voting rights groups, seemingly in bed with the Black political elite, have focused on preserving incumbent districts rather than cultivating progressive leadership among the people.

The strategy required moving forward must operate both inside and outside the system. Inside the system, there must be regular challengers at every level of government and an intentional effort to develop candidates who come from communities they seek to represent: the working class, public school educated, women, LGBTQIA+, etc., who hold progressive politics independent of corporate money. We must also go beyond just changing who holds office. We need direct democracy and to ensure citizen ballot initiatives exist everywhere. We must discuss changing the entire structure, possibly to resemble most democratic societies that have a system of proportional representation rather than the winner-take-all districts we have. 

Outside the system, we need robust movements organizing and agitating around substantive policy demands, not simply electoral participation. Movements to address the issues that shape people's realities: police brutality and the surveillance state, healthcare for all, saving rural hospitals, a living minimum wage, quality public education, decarceration, and so much more. These movements exist but need to be amplified far and wide, not drowned out by political campaigns. The movements will demand participatory and direct democracy, along with new state constitutions (as most Southern states' post-Reconstruction constitutions openly embrace White Supremacy). The people can demonstrate what real "democracy" looks like via our own people's assemblies and constitutional conventions with the task of fundamentally reimagining how power is distributed. Electoral politics should be one tool of a broader movement to transform society, not the movement itself. 

The moment post-Callais is a moment of opportunity, not just to save what was gained from VRA litigation and advocacy of decades past. Now we must seek so much more: more justice, more democracy, and more truth-telling. Let's dream and demand so much more than the status quo.