One hundred and fifty years ago, when this nation’s first experiment with interracial democracy began to collapse, Tennessee — a former slave state and the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan — was the first domino to drop. In 1870, the Tennessee legislature rewrote the State Constitution to disenfranchise Black men. Within three decades, Black representation, in Congress and in local and state offices across the former Confederacy, would be wiped out. Voting and civil rights experts warn that America now sits at a familiar precipice. On May 7, Tennessee’s Republican-majority legislature met to vote on a bill that would eliminate the state’s lone majority-Black and Democratic House district, divvying its voters up between three heavily white ones. Tennessee became the first of the former Confederate states to create and approve new congressional maps since the Supreme Court’s recent decision to eviscerate the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The Voting Rights Act helped transform the South. In 1965, the region had not a single Black representative in the U.S. Congress; today, it has 31. Now, Black representation may once again disappear in the South, where more than half of Black Americans live. This could lead to the largest decimation of Black political power since the fall of Reconstruction. And just like then, what is at stake is no less than American democracy itself.
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