He was furious, leaning toward the microphone at his plain wooden desk in the committee chamber, slamming his fist on the table, jabbing his finger, and yelling. Illinois state Rep. John Fritchey was chairing a redistricting panel, and he rebuked me for insisting that many of the politicians who made a show of defending Black voting rights were very likely backing maps that would dilute Black communities’ voting power to maximize Democratic majorities in the state Legislature and in the Illinois congressional delegation.
That moment was April 2010. I had come to the Illinois State Capitol to testify on behalf of the Illinois League of Women Voters and the Fair Map Campaign against a watered-down version of redistricting reform that I believed was designed to divert attention from the robust organizing we had been carrying out.
I did not retreat from my assertion.
Recently the Supreme Court issued a landmark ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, striking down a Louisiana congressional map crafted to create a second Black-majority district. In doing so, it fundamentally rewrote the forty-year-old legal standard required to prove racial vote dilution under Section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The response was swift and sharp. Georgia Senator Raphael Warnock condemned the decision as “dragging us back to the dark and ugly days of Jim Crow.”
Once again I feel compelled to offer this uncomfortable clarification: the court’s decision did not invent a new dynamic. It exposed and legitimized a pernicious practice that has been employed by leaders from both major parties at the expense of minority voters. Across the country, those drawing maps have repeatedly prioritized the aim of expanding partisan control over empowering voters. And yes, that frequently means elevating partisan power above Black and minority voter protections under the Voting Rights Act.
A decade after my Springfield testimony, the East St. Louis NAACP in Illinois advanced the claim I had made but in a much more forceful and consequential setting by suing a Democratic Party gerrymander in the 2020 redistricting. In fact, three separate lawsuits challenged the Illinois General Assembly’s newly drawn legislative maps. Republican lawmakers, Latino voters represented by the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, and the East St. Louis Branch of the NAACP each argued—though from very different perspectives and for different reasons—that the maps violated either the Voting Rights Act or the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause. A three-judge federal panel consolidated the cases. What followed was one of the most instructive redistricting trials in recent memory, not for what the plaintiffs established, but for what the defendants admitted under oath.
Under oath, Illinois House staffer Jon Maxson testified that his primary goals in redrawing House Districts 112, 113, and 114 in the Metro East region (the area around East St. Louis) were to “enhance Democratic performance” and shield incumbents from Republican challengers. His Senate counterpart, Joseph Sodowski, testified that his instruction from a state senator was simply “to have a more Democratic district.” The court ultimately ruled against all three sets of plaintiffs, concluding that partisan motivation, not racial targeting, had driven the maps. Crucially, the Black voting-age population in House District 114 (the only district in the region with a track record of electing a Black state representative) declined by 3.67 percent under the new plan, the direct result of Black voters being redistributed to neighboring districts to bolster Democratic margins there.
The NAACP lost. The Democrats’ candor about their own partisan objectives had become their legal defense.
Illinois is not an outlier. And Black voters are not the sole group disenfranchised when partisan power overrides voter interests in drawing electoral maps. In 2022, a Maryland court invalidated a Democratic-drawn congressional map designed to sweep all eight of the state’s seats by gerrymandering the district lines of the state’s only Republican-leaning district. In the same state, a federal judge ordered Baltimore County Council maps redrawn after the ACLU, the NAACP, and other groups filed suit alleging that the newly adopted map was racially discriminatory. In New York, Black and Latino voters on Staten Island filed a suit as recently as October 2025 asserting that the state’s Democratic-drawn congressional map diluted their electoral influence.
Minority voters everywhere have discovered that their electoral power is most secure when it does not depend on the good intentions of whichever party currently controls the statehouse.
But perhaps the most telling development is how, in the days since Callais was decided, Democratic leaders have abandoned any remaining pretense of prioritizing Black voter power over partisan politics. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has already told reporters that Democrats will pursue aggressive gerrymanders in New York, Illinois, Maryland, and Colorado ahead of the 2028 elections. Analysts have consistently observed that gerrymandering, whether driven by Democrats or Republicans, frequently harms Black voters by diluting their voting power through “packing” (concentrating voters in a few districts) or “cracking” (splitting communities across multiple districts).
To be sure, Republicans have engaged in this game longer, in recent years with far less restraint. With President Donald Trump’s active encouragement, Republican-controlled legislatures in Florida, Tennessee, Missouri, North Carolina, and Ohio have already begun redrawing maps in the wake of Callais, with analysts predicting the loss of as many as 19 congressional seats currently held by Black representatives across the South. Florida convened a special legislative session and approved new maps the same day Callais was issued. Louisiana’s governor promptly moved to delay the state’s May 16 primary to permit the Legislature to redraw districts, a move aimed at stripping Black voters of the second Black-majority district they had spent years fighting to obtain in court. Alabama, which had been ordered by the Supreme Court in 2023 to create a second Black-majority district, filed an emergency motion the day after Callais, arguing that the ruling superseded that prior order.
The result in each of these states is unmistakable: Black representation in Congress will be markedly reduced to cement Republican House majorities for a generation. Whatever one might say about the Democratic pattern described above, Southern Republicans have pursued this with a level of clarity and speed that leaves little room for ambiguity about intent.
The real harm of the court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais is that it legitimizes and strengthens a legal architecture that is structurally indifferent to minority voters’ interests—no matter which party draws the maps. In Illinois, a Democratic supermajority can craft maps that reduce Black and Latino political concentration, defend those maps with explicit partisan rationales, and prevail in federal court. Now, a Republican legislature in Louisiana can draw maps that dilute Black political representation and rely on the same legal cover that Illinois Democrats enjoyed. The Voting Rights Act (and the legal frameworks provided by the court) was meant to protect minority rights. But recently it has become, instead, the arena on which partisan armies contend. And the casualties, time and again, are the very communities Section 2 was meant to defend.
Beyond the understandable outrage at the court’s decision, what is needed is a fundamental shift in how we think about the link between partisan power and democratic participation. They are not the same thing, and they have never been. Failing to distinguish between them has cost minority communities dearly, regardless of which party held the pen when the maps were drawn.
The remedy is not mysterious. Independent redistricting commissions, in states that have genuinely adopted them, yield more competitive maps, more representative outcomes, higher voter turnout, and less of the incumbent-protection machinery that insulates those in power from accountability. In 2016, I helped organize a petition drive in which Illinois residents collected more than half a million signatures to place an independent commission on the ballot. Allies of then-Speaker Michael Madigan challenged it in court and succeeded in blocking it. The message from the political class was clear: The public may desire a fair process, but it will be the power brokers who decide how the maps are drawn.
There is a congressional mapmaking fight worth having. But the question isn’t which party gets to draw the maps that shrink our communities. It is whether the process itself can be removed from the hands of those who stand to gain the most from drawing them poorly. This is a fight that should unite voters beyond party lines. Republicans in blue states have watched Democratic legislatures crack and pack their communities to gain a partisan edge. Democrats in red states have witnessed Republicans do the same. And minority voters nationwide have discovered that their electoral power is most secure when it does not depend on the good will of whichever party happens to govern the statehouse.
Black leaders and institutions bear a responsibility that this moment makes harder to ignore. For too long, the rightful defense of Black voting rights has been entangled with the electoral interests of the Democratic Party. That entanglement has not always served Black communities well, as the sworn testimony from the Illinois redistricting trial makes plain. The demand for fair maps, independent commissions, and a process that protects individual and community access to democracy regardless of which party benefits must be made with equal force, whether Democrats or Republicans are in power. It must come from Democrats in Springfield and Baltimore, and from Republicans in Baton Rouge and Montgomery. It must be stated without the caveat that we will hold our opponents accountable, but not our own tribe.
But the responsibility does not stop with Black leaders and institutions. Every voter, every civic organization, every elected official who claims to care about democratic integrity faces a choice this moment compels. The question isn’t whether you oppose gerrymandering when the other party does it. The question is whether you oppose it when your own party does it, when your own incumbents benefit from it, when the maps drawn in your name shrink someone else’s voice.
That standard is higher than what most of our political culture currently demands. Yet it is the only standard that genuinely addresses the problem.
Sen. Warnock is right that something important has been lost in the wake of Callais. He is right that the legal protections Black voters depended on have been seriously weakened by a court seemingly untroubled by the consequences for communities that fought, bled, and died to participate in this democracy. He has reason to be angry. But if the response to Callais becomes an all-out war over gerrymandering, I fear Black voting power could become one of the main casualties. In that case we will not have defended voting rights; we will simply have altered which party is the one violating them.
What the redistricting committee in Springfield did not want to hear in 2010, and what Louisiana v. Callais makes impossible to ignore now, is this: safeguarding access to the democratic process for individuals and communities is a distinct project—and often at odds—with protecting partisan power in government. We can pursue both, but we cannot pretend they are the same. And we cannot tolerate leaders in either party who refuse to hold their own side accountable when the distinction matters most.
The communities whose votes have been treated as instruments of someone else’s political calculus deserve more. And they deserve leaders who will say so aloud … even when someone in the room wants to bang the desk and shout them down.
