Over the past two decades, New York City lost close to 200,000 Black residents. A large share of them went South looking for a house they could actually afford. Then, on April 29, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a 6-3 ruling in Louisiana v. Callais that gutted the part of the Voting Rights Act those new Southern residents would need to keep their vote from being drawn out from under them. Priced out of one place, redistricted into a minority of one in the next. Brooklyn City Council Member Sandy Nurse stood at Federal Plaza to say so, and almost nobody in local media connected the two halves.
Nurse, who represents Bushwick on the City Council and has led a veto-proof housing push this session, organized a “Protect the Black Vote” rally at Federal Plaza in Lower Manhattan on May 26. Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, NAACP State Conference president L. Joy Williams, and former Congressional Rep. Jamaal Bowman showed up, along with faith leaders and organizers. Nurse told the New York Amsterdam News, which first covered the event, that she pulled it together after noticing a gap in how the city was responding to what is happening down South. “New York is not immune from these things, if across the country we lose Black voting power,” Nurse said. “So [the rally] really was to bring a lot of political, organizational, and community leaders together, including faith leaders, to start that conversation across New York City. We haven’t really seen the media pick it up locally and make those connections.”
“Gutted the Voting Rights Act” gets thrown around loosely. The case turned on Louisiana’s congressional map. After lower courts found the state’s earlier map likely violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act by packing Black voters into a single district, the legislature drew a second majority-Black district running from Shreveport to Baton Rouge. The Supreme Court struck that second district down as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion reworked the 40-year-old Thornburg v. Gingles framework that has governed these claims, raising the bar so high that voters of color now have to prove “strong evidence of present-day intentional racial discrimination” to win a vote-dilution case. Discrimination from decades ago, which built those maps in the first place, gets “much less weight.” The protection still exists on paper, but it is now very hard to use.
