Letters from an American - A One-Party South

Episode Date: May 14, 2026

Two weeks ago, SCOTUS gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965. These first two weeks have resulted in one-party rule in the South, depriving millions of Black voters from fair representation, as Republicans gerrymander without restraint. We've seen a One-party state South before. After the Civil War, reactionary white southerners use state laws, intimidation, harassment, and violence to prevent Black people from voting. By 1880, the South was solidly Democratic, which it would remain until the 1960s. Wilmington Coup.Get full, free access to Letters from an American here: https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/subscribeYou can also find me: Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/hcrichardson.bsky.socialInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/heathercoxrichardson/?hl=enFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/heathercoxrichardson/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@heathercoxrichardson Get full access to Letters from an American at heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/subscribe

May 13, 2026. Two weeks ago today, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its decision in Louisiana v. Calais, gutting Section 2 of the V. Rights Act of 1965. The Voting Rights Act provided that no state or local government could impose any conditions or procedures on voting that would result in a denial or abridgment of the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color. In the past, the Supreme Court has recognized that the right to vote alone does not necessarily fulfill the aims of the law. It's possible, even easy, to dilute the votes of black Americans to make it impossible for them to elect a candidate they support. Sometimes then, in order to guarantee black representation in government, states have had to create districts that are made up primarily of black Americans. The court has condoned this practice, upholding the idea that in such a case, the state has a compelling reason to draw districts according to race.

In the past, the court saw the creation of majority-minority districts as a way to comply with the voting rights. Act, guaranteeing that black voters can elect the lawmakers they prefer. But in 2024, a non-black voter in Louisiana challenged a new majority-minority district drawn so that the state's congressional delegation might include two black legislators out of the six allocated to the state. Those districts were designed to remedy the fact that although one-third of the people who live in Louisiana are black, the state has never had a black senator, and no congressional district other than the majority black district has elected a black representative. The state hasn't had a black governor since reconstruction.

On April 29th, by a vote of 6 to 3, with the right-wing justices in the majority, the Supreme Court declared Louisiana's construction of a majority-minority district, unconstitutional under the 15th Amendment. It was, they said, an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. And, as the court ruled in Rucho v. Common Cause in 2019, the federal courts have no business addressing partisan gerrymandering. Immediately, Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry declared a state of emergency to stop the state's congressional primary election, which was already underway.

His declaration has thrown the election into chaos, as 45,000 ballots already cast won't be counted, and the ballots already sent out will still include the race that Landry has now postponed. Since then, other Republican-dominated states have rushed to pass mid-decade gerrymanders that will shut Democrats out of power. Tennessee Governor Bill Lee, a Republican, immediately called the Tennessee legislature into emergency special session to get rid of the state's only Democratic member of Congress, the one representing Memphis. 60% of the people who live in Memphis are black. Once back in session, the Tennessee lawmakers repealed their own law that prohibited mid-decade redistricting. Then on May 7th, they cracked Memphis into three districts, diluting black votes by swamping them with voters in white suburbs. The state's

had similarly cracked Nashville in 2022, flipping that seat as well, from Democratic to Republican. Tennessee is a conservative state, and this map ensures that our congressional delegation reflects that, Republican State Senator John Stevens said. This is about allowing Tennessee to maximize its partisan advantage. On May 8th, the Virginia State Supreme Court

voted along partisan lines to strike down a plan Virginia voters had approved to redraw the state's congressional districts temporarily to favor Democrats as a way to counteract the Republicans' partisan gerrymanders in Texas, Florida, Ohio, and other states. The court majority argued that the redistricting measure was invalid because, as Omna Noazz and Ali Schmitz of PBS explained, the Virginia Constitution requires the General Assembly to pass a constitutional amendment twice, once before a legislative election and once after. This should guarantee two different sets of eyes on any such amendment by letting the people elect new lawmakers between the

votes. But when the General Assembly passed the measure the first time, early voting was already underway. Thus, the court said it was not before a scheduled election. On May 11th, a week before elections are due to start there, the Supreme Court cleared the way for Alabama to use a 2023 district map that lower courts ruled unconstitutional because it diluted black voting by spreading black voters across three districts, thus violating Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. In an unsigned one-paragraph order, the Supreme Court sent the case back to the lower courts to re-evaluate in light of the Calais decision. On May 12th, Tennessee House Speaker Cameron Sexton removed all the House Democrats from

standing committees, saying they had behaved in a way aimed at disrupting the democratic and legislative processes as they protested the mid-decade redistricting that broke up Tennessee's only majority black Democratic district. As Tennessee State Representative Justin J. Pearson notes, this decree removed every black elected official in the state legislature from any committee we served on and stripped nearly two million Tennesseans from the representation they deserve in the Tennessee state legislature. On May 13th, today, Georgia Governor Brian Kemp called a special session of the Georgia General Assembly for June 17th to redraw Georgia's congressional maps before the 2028 election. He said it was too late to

to change Georgia's maps for 2026, but that the Calais decision requires Georgia to change its electoral maps. Also today, Louisiana legislators advanced a congressional map eliminating one of the state's two black majority districts. South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster is expected to call for a special session

to eliminate that state's only black majority district and only Democratic seat, and Mississippi Governor, Reeves said Mississippi lawmakers would eliminate the state's only majority black district before 2028. Jim Saxa of Democracy Docket assesses that redistricting could net Republicans between 16 and 18 seats in Congress in 2026, while the Democrats will likely pick up six, at least so far, five in California and one in Utah where a court demanded a redrawing of districts. Many of these redistricting plans are being challenged in the courts, and it remains possible that not all of them will flip.

But G. Eliot Morris of strength and numbers assesses that the Democrats will have to win congressional elections by three to four points in order to win a majority. We are watching in real time the creation of a one-party state in the American South. We have been here before. The actual name of what we know as the Voting Rights Act is an act to enforce the 15th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States and for other purposes. In the wake of the Civil War, Americans tried to create a new nation in which the law treated black men and white men as equals. In 1865, they ratified the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, outlawing enslavement, except as punishment for crimes. In 1868, they adjusted the Constitution again,

guaranteeing that anyone born or naturalized in the United States, except certain indigenous Americans, was a citizen opening up suffrage to black men. In 1870, after Georgia legislators expelled their newly seated black colleagues, Americans defended the right of black men to vote by recognizing that right in the country Constitution. All three of those amendments, the 13th, 14th and 15th, gave Congress the power to enforce

them. In 1870, Congress established the Department of Justice to do just that. Reactionary white southerners had been using state laws and the unwillingness of state judges and juries to protect black Americans from white gangs and unscrupulous employers to keep black people subservient. White men organized as the Ku Klux Klan to terrorize black men and to keep them and their white allies from voting to change that system. In 1870, the federal government stepped in to protect black rights and prosecute members of the Ku Klux Klan. With federal power now behind the constitutional protection of equality, threatening jail

for those who violated the law, white opponents of black voting, changed their argument against it. In 1871, they began to say that they had no problem with black men voting on racial grounds. Their objection to black voting was that black men, just out of enslavement, were poor and uneducated. They were voting for lawmakers who promised them public services, like roads and schools, that could only be paid for with tax levies. Black voters, they said, were ushering in Socialism. Former Confederates declared it their duty to redeem the South from Black rule, by which they meant the Republicans and third parties in which white men and black men worked

together for policies that benefited working men, policies like education and workers' protections. White Democrats argued that because such parties, even if overwhelmingly white, could win only with black votes, they represented black rule. By 1880, the South was solidly democratic, and it would remain so until the mid-1960s as white Southern Democrats worked to silence the voices of Black Americans in the South to cement their own control over the region. In 1890, 14 Southern Congressman wrote a book to explain to their northern colleagues why Democrats have had to control the South. Why the Solid South, or Reconstruction and its results,

insisted that black voters who had supported the Republicans after the Civil War had perverted the government by using it to give themselves services paid for with white tax dollars. Later that year, a new constitution in Mississippi started the process of making sure black people could not vote by requiring educational tests, poll taxes, or a grandfather who had voted.

Eight years later, there was still enough black voting in North Carolina and enough class solidarity with poor whites that voters in Wilmington elected a coalition government of black Republicans and white populists. White Democrats agreed that the coalition had won fairly, but about 2,000 of them nonetheless armed themselves to reform the same. city government. They issued a white declaration of independence and said they would never again be ruled by men of African origin. It was time, they said, for the intelligent citizens of this community, owning 95% of the property and paying taxes in proportion, to end the rule by black men. As they forced the elected officials out of office and took their places, the new Democratic

mayor claimed there was no intimidation used, but as many as 300 African Americans died in the Wilmington coup. In the years to come, white Americans would continue to maintain control of politics through violence. They considered it a public duty to purge society of black Americans, taking photographs of themselves at lynchings. The region white Democrats ruled at the beginning of the 20th century enforced white supremacy with extra-legal violence. That racial domination helped white Americans swallow the South's dramatic inequality. A few wealthy men dominated the region, while most people were poor, Southerners had about half the average per capita income of the rest of the nation. It was this world Congress addressed when after more than 80 years,

in which state legislatures refused to acknowledge the 15th Amendment, it passed the 1965 Voting Rights Act, finally taking seriously the amendments charge to enforce this article by appropriate legislation. In their 2018 book, How Democracies Die, Political Scientists Stephen Levitsky and Daniel Zyblatt noted that democracies depend on members of each party recognizing the legitimacy of their partisan rivals. Even if they disagree with each other, each recognizes the others' members as loyal to the nation and accepts their legitimacy as lawmakers if voters elect them.

Democracy also depends on parties refusing to use the tools of government to destroy the ability of their partisan opponents to win elections. A day after a Pennsylvania man was arrested for making a hit list of 20 Democratic legislators he called communist infiltrators and threatened to shoot. As President Trump calls Democrats traitors, and as southern states destroy the ability of black Democrats to elect representatives, the echoes of the past are deafening. Although the parties have switched sides, the story is the same.

Now, as then, a minority is disfranchising voters because it knows its ideas are unpopular and it cannot win on the merits of its policies. What it can do, though, is to deliver white supremacy to its followers in hopes that it will be enough to make them ignore the economic system that is leading them to ruin. As Joyce White Vance noted tonight in civil discourse, Georgia Senate Minority Leader Harold Jones II reacted to the news of Georgia's special session for redistricting by saying,

If Republicans ever used their power to help Georgians, they wouldn't have to waste time and money redrawing the maps every few years to keep their majorities. June will be our third redistricting since 2021. Republicans need to undo their last gerrymander because it wasn't good enough to keep their waffling political party in power. Most parties would try out some new ideas. Republicans choose to strip political power from black people and undo the progress the South has made in the last 60 years. Let's sum it up for everybody. The biggest block of middle and working class voters are black people. When Republicans strip black people's political power away, it doesn't just

strip one community of power. It strips political power from every single middle and working class person and hands it over to billionaires and big corporations. That's what redistricting means for you. Letters from an American was written and read by Heather Cox Richardson. It was Produced at Soundscape Productions, Dead of Massachusetts. Recorded with music composed by Michael Moss.