By David Hood-Nuño, Evan Garcia and Joseph Ax
BATON ROUGE, Louisiana, May 9 (Reuters) - As a child, Leona Tate was one of the "New Orleans Four," the first Black students to desegregate a public school in the deep South, enduring racial slurs and death threats as armed U.S. Marshals escorted them to class.
On Friday, more than six decades later, Tate told Republican state lawmakers that their proposal to dismantle at least one majority-Black congressional district brought back harrowing memories.
"I
need you to understand what it feels like to stand here, to have walked through that mob as a child, and to now watch elected officials do the same thing that mob was trying to do – just with better suits and a parliamentary procedure," she told a senate committee hearing at the state capitol in Baton Rouge.
For more than eight hours, Black members of Congress, pastors, activists and voters delivered testimony that was at times emotional, angry and deeply personal. Outside the hearing room, protesters cheered them on.
"Let him speak!" they chanted at one point, after Republican committee Chairman Caleb Kleinpeter cut the microphone of a Democratic colleague in the middle of a fiery exchange. Mike McClanahan, president of the state chapter of the NAACP, the country's largest civil rights organization, was forcibly blocked from entering the room by senate security.
The tumultuous hearing reflected the electoral chaos gripping Louisiana after last week's U.S. Supreme Court decision that hollowed out a landmark civil rights law, giving Republicans the chance to draw a new congressional map that erases one or both of the state's two Democratic-held majority-Black districts.
Black voters make up one-third of the electorate in Louisiana and typically support Democrats. Republicans already control the other four districts.
A day after the Supreme Court ruling, Governor Jeff Landry postponed the U.S. House of Representatives primary elections that had been set for May 16, even though tens of thousands of ballots had already been mailed in.
Voters who arrived at early polling locations this week found signs taped to the doors announcing that the House races had been cancelled, while other contests were still ongoing. What happens to votes already cast, and when the primary might be rescheduled, remained unclear.
Questions about the process would have to be resolved by the Louisiana secretary of state, Kleinpeter told reporters after the hearing. "The truth of the matter is the Supreme Court came down and said that the maps are unconstitutional," he said. So "we're going forward with drawing new maps."
A WIDENING POLITICAL BATTLE
Louisiana was the latest front in a national redistricting war that began last year in Texas and gained momentum this week across the U.S. South, including in Tennessee, Alabama and South Carolina, where Republicans responded to the Supreme Court decision by launching similar efforts to eliminate majority-Black districts.
Democrats have embarked on redistricting initiatives of their own, but their ambitions were dealt a serious blow on Friday when the Virginia Supreme Court threw out a new map approved by voters that would likely have flipped four Republican seats. What had been a fairly even partisan race to redraw congressional maps has now swung decisively towards Republicans ahead of November's midterm election, when they will defend their narrow U.S. House majority.
In Baton Rouge, voting rights advocates warned that the abrupt suspension of the House primaries is causing widespread confusion.
"Folks are unsure of what is happening with these ballots, what elections are or are not happening," said Sarah Whittington, the advocacy director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Louisiana, which has sued to block Landry's move. "Invalidating a single part of a ballot and alleging that the rest of it is valid, I think, just undermines the entire faith in the system."
Landry's office did not respond to a request for comment.
Activists and Democratic lawmakers are still urging people to vote, said Democratic U.S. Representative Cleo Fields, whose district was ruled unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court.
"This is about congressional elections today; tomorrow, it'll be state legislatures, it'll be city council, it'll be school boards," he said in an interview.
FIERY WORDS
Inside the hearing room on Friday, many Black leaders hearkened back to the civil rights movement, arguing that the new map would mark a return to state-sponsored racial discrimination.
"Since Reconstruction, Louisiana has elected four African Americans to Congress – and you're looking at all of them," said Fields, sitting alongside U.S. Representative Troy Carter and former U.S. representatives Cedric Richmond and William Jefferson.
The senators on Friday reviewed a range of different plans, including three from Republican state Senator Jay Morris that would likely result in Republicans winning five -- or all six -- of the state's U.S. House districts.
"Neither race nor party affiliation nor voting patterns were considered when this was prepared," Morris said of the map that would likely lead to a clean Republican sweep. But activists and Democratic state senators argued that the outcome would inevitably dilute the political power of Black Louisianans.
"You have a choice in front of you," Tate said. "You can draw a map that reflects who Louisiana actually is: a state where Black voices belong in the halls of Congress. Or you can draw a map that tells my grandchildren, 'Your voices don't count.'"
Some critics warned Republicans that they would eventually pay a price if they moved ahead, either at the ballot box or in the history books.
"This redistricting issue is not just about lines on a map," said Brandon Boutin, a Baptist pastor. "It's about whether democracy is sacred. It's about whether every citizen has equal value in the eyes of the law."
(Reporting by David Hood-Nuño and Evan Garcia in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and Joseph Ax in New York; Editing by Jesse Mesner-Hage and Cynthia Osterman)
