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.
The Court also moved fast. On May 5, days after the decision, the justices granted Louisiana’s request to finalize the opinion immediately, skipping the usual 32-day waiting period so the new lines could take effect before the state’s primaries. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented, writing that the ruling “has spawned chaos in the State of Louisiana.” Alito called her objection “baseless and insulting.” The day after the expedited order, the Court denied a request from Black voters to reverse it, with no explanation.
The American Civil Liberties Union, which litigated the case, did not hedge. “This decision is a profound betrayal of the civil rights movement’s legacy,” said Sophia Lin Lakin, director of the ACLU Voting Rights Project. Alanah Odoms, executive director of the ACLU of Louisiana, called it “a devastating blow to Black and brown Louisiana voters.” The decision does not stay in Louisiana. It is a green light for any state that wants to redraw its lines and dilute Black voting power, because the legal shield that used to stop them has been narrowed to a sliver.
An analysis from Fair Fight Action and Black Voters Matter projected that across 10 Southern states, Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas, the ruling puts 191 Democratic-held state legislative seats at risk, most of them held by Black lawmakers. By that count, the number of state legislative districts where Black or Hispanic voters make up a majority could fall from 342 to 202. Black-majority districts alone could drop from 273 to 146, a loss of 127. The same maps could hand Republicans 19 additional safe congressional seats. It is already happening. In Tennessee, lawmakers passed a map carving up the state’s lone majority-Black congressional district shortly after the ruling came down.
The number Nurse cites is documented. The city’s Black population has fallen by close to 200,000 over the past two decades, roughly 9 percent, according to Census figures reported by Vital City. Black residents went from about one in four New Yorkers in 2000 to about one in five today. The losses are concentrated in the neighborhoods you would guess: Bedford-Stuyvesant lost around 22,000 Black residents between 2010 and 2020 while gaining roughly 30,000 white residents, and Harlem lost nearly 11,000 Black residents while gaining about 18,000 white ones. Brooklyn alone shed nearly 70,000 Black residents over the decade, per CBS News New York.
The officials in charge are blunt about why they are leaving. “I’m concerned about my teacher and McDonald’s worker. They are being priced out of the city,” Mayor Eric Adams said of the exodus. State Senator Cordell Cleare of Harlem warned against the city’s own pattern: “We build a whole lot, and we build our own displacement.” Ownership splits the same way. Vital City reports that 34 percent of Black households in the city own their homes, against 67 percent of white New Yorkers. Many of the families leaving are trading a rent they cannot make in Bed-Stuy for a mortgage they can carry in Atlanta, Houston, or Charlotte, a reversal of the Great Migration their grandparents made in the other direction.
Leaving an unaffordable city to own a home somewhere cheaper now carries a cost that is easy to miss: the new state’s courts have just made that vote easier to erase. Jasmine Gripper, co-director of the New York Working Families Party, described how the rally came together. “We took assignments about who we were going to reach out to and needed to be there,” she told the Amsterdam News. “[We] wanted to bring attention to what was happening in the South, particularly around all the egregious redistricting things that are about to take place in order to erode people’s access to the ballots and the polls.”
Nurse put it bluntly. “We’ve seen a loss of almost 200,000 Black New Yorkers over the last 10 years,” she said. “They’re [often] going to the South in a place where they are going to lose representation under a very specific and clear white nationalist project.” The two facts under her framing are documented: the people left, and the protection they would have relied on in their new home was narrowed by the Supreme Court weeks later.
The primary sources are public. You can read the Brennan Center’s breakdown of exactly what Louisiana v. Callais changed about Section 2, and the Black Voters Matter page tracking which Southern states are moving to redraw their maps and how to push back. If you have family or friends who left New York for one of those 10 states, the most useful thing you can send them is their own state’s voter registration and redistricting deadlines, because the lines are being redrawn now, not in some future cycle. And Sandy Nurse’s City Council office takes constituent comment from Bushwick residents who want the city to keep making the connection she says local media missed.
Featured image: Joe Ravi / CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
