The Supreme Court Delivers Another Victory for the Jim Crow Southernization of America

When I was in junior high, the Klan pamphleted on my hometown’s main square. This was the early 2000s in a small, but not overly rural, town in north central Arkansas. They handed out their tracts to people on foot and in their cars, warning about the threats to White safety and the modern American boogeyman of multiculturalism. At the time, the experience was unsettling. The Klan wasn’t the political powerhouse or terrifying vigilante network it had been in the earlier incarnations we studied in school and watched in movies. But nevertheless, here they were, the KKK. 

If this all feels a bit anachronistic, let’s play a little generational game. My parents told me that the first movie they took me along to as an infant was Mississippi Burning, the 1988 film about the 1964 Neshoba County murders of Civil Rights Era activists James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner. In 1964, my dad was in elementary school. My mother was kindergarten-aged. Just seven years earlier, and roughly fifty miles from my hometown, the 101st  Airborne escorted the Little Rock Nine into Central High. My undergraduate college, also located in my hometown, did not integrate until 1963, just two years before the Voting Rights Act passed. 

In this context, the painful proximity of the Civil Rights Era and the Jim Crow abuses its reforms worked to end should be clear. And so the Roberts Court decision to effectively neuter Section 2 of the VRA, arguing that Louisiana’s second majority-Black congressional district is racially discriminatory—a ruling rooted in a view-from-nowhere, colorblind vision of race—lands as both profoundly unjust and historically illiterate. That it comes at a time when the Trump administration and wider MAGA movement are launching a frontal assault on the multicultural democracy built on the back of the reforms of the 1960s and 1970s, threatens to plunge the country into a Neo-Jim Crow period of rights abuses and anti-democratic discriminations. 

As Amy Howe wrote Wednesday for SCOTUSblog:

In a 36-page opinion, Alito explained that “the Constitution almost never permits the Federal Government or a State to discriminate on the basis of race.” The question before the court, he said, is “whether compliance with the Voting Rights Act should be added to our very short list of compelling interests that can justify racial discrimination.”

As a general rule, Alito wrote, Section 2 of the VRA guarantees voters, including minority voters, an opportunity to cast a vote for their preferred candidate, but that candidate’s chances of success may be affected by the choices that the state is allowed to make when drawing a redistricting map – such as the desire to protect incumbents or increase the number of seats held by a particular political party. And under the Constitution, Alito continued, a violation of Section 2 only occurs when “the circumstances give rise to a strong inference that intentional discrimination occurred” – for example, when there are several possible maps that contain majority-minority districts, but the state “cannot provide a legitimate reason for rejecting all those maps.”

[…]

“In sum,” Alito concluded, “because the Voting Rights Act did not require Louisiana to create an additional majority-minority district, no compelling interest justified the State’s use of race in creating SB8. That map is an unconstitutional gerrymander, and its use would violate the plaintiffs’ constitutional rights.”

I argued last year at The Bulwark that the American South never truly took to liberal democracy, resisting the goals of both Reconstruction and the Civil Rights Era. Across the region, a culture of censorship, anti-LGBQT policies, and draconian law enforcement and prison practices choke the dignity and pluralism that make free, diverse societies truly flourish. Under Trump and the contemporary GOP, a great national Southernization of politics appears underway. The Supreme Court’s decision this week threatens to help strengthen and accelerate this process. Consider what  Justice Kagan wrote in her dissent:

The Voting Rights Act is — or, now more accurately, was— ‘one of the most consequential, efficacious, and amply justified exercises of federal legislative power in our Nation’s history.’ It was born of the literal blood of Union soldiers and civil rights marchers. It ushered in awe-inspiring change, bringing this Nation closer to fulfilling the ideals of democracy and racial equality.

Kagan is right. As a Southerner, I am acutely aware of the blood spilt in the fight for human rights and dignity for Black people in America—the blood of soldiers, of activists and protesters, and of everyday people who had the temerity to exist in a white man’s world. One of the bloodiest racial massacres in our nation’s history took place in the Arkansas Delta, around the town of Elaine. A white mob set upon Black sharecroppers, with some estimates of the death toll reaching into the hundreds. 

Once again, it’s worth stressing just how shallowly this past sits in our soil. Only seven years before I was born—seven years before Mississippi Burning told the story of Neshoba County—one of the last reported Klan lynchings took place in Mobile, Alabama. Michael Donald, a nineteen-year-old, was beaten and hung from a tree by Henry Hays and James Knowles, with additional help from fellow Klansman accomplices. In his book about the murder and subsequent trial, The Lynching: The Epic Courtroom Battle that Brought Down the Klan, journalist Laurence Leamer observes:

There had not been a lynching in America in a quarter century, and no one standing looking at the body had ever seen such a crime, but they had heard about it from family members and read about it in social science books in school. And they believed they knew what had occurred. White men had lynched a black man, and they had done it to send a message of intimidation and terror. This was something they thought would never happen again, and many of the black onlookers wept, others fell to the ground beating their fists against the earth.

If the people of 1981 Mobile felt as if the past was reaching into their civilized present, perhaps it’s in part because they, like us, did not realize how poorly buried racial tyranny and anti-democratic rage are in the South. It’s understandable for everyday people to lose sight of this fact. After all, our own lives are small, narrow things, and it can be hard to remember the past events of a few years ago, much less those that dominated the headlines for previous generations. 

But for the Supreme Court of the United States, this week’s decision is pure arrogance and delusion, at best a form of criminally negligent homicide against the post-1960s multicultural democracy that has been the project of modern America. This country will now have to rediscover the energies that animated Freedom Summer and the March on Washington. If we don’t, the Jim Crow Southernization of America will continue apace. 

Featured image is Samuel Alito in 2017, by JoshEllie1234