In the heart of Memphis, redistricting push revives civil rights fight
Memphis helped shape the Civil Rights Movement. Now residents face a new fight as Republican lawmakers seek to split the city into GOP‑leaning congressional districts.
MEMPHIS – Gino Barzizza signaled a mixture of disappointment and defiance as he took shelter from a driving rain inside his polling place at Central Christian Church here in this city's Midtown neighborhood.
As Barzizza cast his ballot in Tennessee’s local primary election May 5, his state’s Republican-controlled Legislature prepared to redraw the congressional district he calls home.
His 9th Congressional District includes most of Memphis, one of the largest predominantly Black cities in the nation, and is the state's sole remaining Democratic seat in the U.S. House. Home to the National Civil Rights Museum, the city played a major role in the Civil Rights Movement. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis in 1968.
The Tennessee Legislature’s moves follow a U.S. Supreme Court ruling April 29 that threw out a congressional map Louisiana drew to protect the voting power of Black residents. The court’s 6-3 decision sided with the Trump administration and non-Black voters who challenged the map as relying too heavily on race to sort voters.
“I feel like they’re playing dirty, and we expect it, so that’s just par for the course,” Barzizza said of Republican efforts to redraw his district’s boundaries.
Other Republican-led Southern states are making similar moves after the court’s decision on the landmark 1965 federal Voting Rights Act, hoping to help the GOP keep control of Congress in the November midterm elections.
Just hours after the court’s ruling, Florida’s Legislature approved a new map that could give Republicans control of four more House seats in that state. A day later, Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry issued an executive order delaying his state’s House primary election and calling on the state Legislature to draw new congressional maps. On May 1, Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey called for a special legislative session for reviewing congressional district maps.
“We owe it to Tennesseans to ensure our congressional districts accurately reflect the will of Tennessee voters,” Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee said the same day, adding the Legislature “has a responsibility to review the map and ensure it remains fair, legal, and defensible.”
President Donald Trump has called for more states to follow suit, predicting Republicans could pick up more than 20 House seats in the Nov. 3 midterms.
“We should demand that State Legislatures do what the Supreme Court says must be done," Trump posted May 3 on Truth Social. “That is more important than administrative convenience.”
The next day, Martin Luther King III wrote Tennessee’s Republican leaders to urge them not to undo his father’s work.
“A session launched for the sole purpose of dismantling Congressional District 9 is not normal and is not fair," King wrote. “The resulting disenfranchisement of Black voters would run contrary to everything that my father, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., fought for.”
Memphis in the Civil Rights Movement
Memphis has been an epicenter of the struggle over voting rights for African Americans, and the Civil Rights Movement more broadly, since the 1860s, said Charles McKinney, who teaches history at Rhodes College in Memphis.
King, for example, visited Memphis to support a sanitation workers strike in 1968. That same year here, he delivered his famous “I've Been to the Mountaintop” speech. It happened the night before he was assassinated on a balcony of the Lorraine Motel.
Memphis is also home to the historic Beale Street Baptist Church, built by freed slaves after the Civil War. The church also housed the newspaper that published some of Ida B. Wells' anti-lynching investigations in the late 19th century. That history, McKinney said, has helped Memphis serve as a bellwether for African Americans nationwide.
Meanwhile, Memphis has long been the nation’s second-largest predominantly Black city, trailing Detroit for decades by, at times, a razor-thin margin.
“That’s an extended legacy of gains and losses,” McKinney said. “And so we find ourselves once again in this moment of profound setback, this moment of profound loss, this moment of – literally – the forces of segregation, the forces of racism, the forces of White supremacy and the forces of anti-Blackness [consolidating] in such a way that rolls us back 50-plus years.”
What’s different in this moment is that rather than voting rights advocates going on the offensive to secure stronger protections for the Black community, they are on defense, McKinney said. And the stakes, he said, couldn’t be higher.
“It’s a four-alarm fire here in Memphis,” McKinney said, “and in other states as well.”
‘Cracking’ the congressional district
Those in favor of redistricting the Memphis-area congressional district are considering a strategy called “cracking,” when a community dominated by one political party is split to dilute its voting power, said Brooke Shannon, who teaches political science at the University of Memphis. The same strategy was used in 2022, she said, when Republican lawmakers split Nashville into three districts.
“The point behind this is to ensure Democratic voters will not get representation in Congress because they will be minorities,” Shannon said.
It’s possible the GOP’s strategy could backfire, said Jonathan Cervas, an assistant teaching professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
"The term is ‘dummymandering,’” said Cervas, who specializes in redistricting. “Instead of Democrats winning one district, they might win more than one.”
U.S. Sen. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee has urged the state to “redistrict another Republican seat in Memphis.”
“It's essential to cement @realDonaldTrump's agenda and the Golden Age of America,” the Republican senator wrote last week in a post on X.
Tennessee’s Republican leaders sidestepped questions this week about whether Black voting power could be diluted.
“The governor’s asked us to come into special session to take a look at it, and that’s what we’re going to do,” Senate Majority Leader Jack Johnson, R-Franklin, told The Tennessean on May 4. “We’ll have lots of conversations, I suppose.”
House Speaker Cameron Sexton, R-Crossville, said Tennessee’s redistricting process “will undergo a comprehensive review with all necessary reforms implemented.”
Not all Republicans are on board with the plan, which would put in place new district lines ahead of the state's congressional primaries in August.
“I don’t think that the people in my district would feel that’s a good use of their tax dollars,” state Sen. Paul Bailey, R-Sparta, said last week about holding a special legislative session just for redistricting, particularly after it has just adjourned.
By 9 a.m. on May 5, protesters lined the sidewalk near the state Capitol in Nashville, holding signs that read “No Jim Crow 2.0” and "Lee Sold Out Tennessee.” Some reacted angrily as state lawmakers adopted a slate of rules for the special session, including one allowing them to ban protesters they consider disruptive.
“They should be ashamed for this clearly racist act that they’re about to do,” Odessa Kelly, executive director of Stand Up Nashville and a former Democratic congressional candidate, shouted as she exited the committee room. “But we’re going to show up anyway and let our voices be heard.”
The crowd surged outside to join a Democratic caucus rally on the steps of the Capitol, chanting: “Whose state? Our state!”
U.S. Rep. Steve Cohen, a Democrat who has held the 9th Congressional District seat in Memphis since 2007, said the redistricting effort “puts us back in the Jim Crow era” and “counters everything that was done in the '60s to try to bring African American opportunities to elect representatives of their own choice.”
‘We're not going to stand down’
In Memphis' Midtown, which lies within Tennessee’s 9th Congressional District, voters weren't surprised by the redistricting push, though they also expressed optimism.
“I think we can win it,” Sam Flanagan said. “I think Democrats have an opportunity to go talk to everyone who’s going to be in whatever ridiculous district we’re going to be in and actually start talking to people who would normally be MAGA but are maybe feeling like, 'Hey, Nashville doesn’t understand who we are anymore.’”
Flanagan added: “It’s time that Democrats take the offensive on this. That would surprise the state, if Democrats came out strong in this new district.”
Vanessa Rodley called the GOP effort "predictable,” referring to the Republican supermajority in Tennessee’s Legislature. She also highlighted that numerous GOP state legislators ran unopposed in previous elections.
"But, at the same time, we as a people do have some power,” she said, “and if we got really upset about this and actually showed up, we could actually effect some change.”
LaGina Mitchell-Scott, who is running for Shelby County Commission District 13, expects a court battle if the congressional district is redrawn. As she greeted a steady stream of voters heading to their polling place at Central Christian Church, she noted increased engagement among local voters.
“To make it very clear, we're not going to stand down," she said. "We're going to fight."
Yancey-Bragg and Redmon write for USA TODAY; Wilt reports for The Commercial Appeal, part of the USA TODAY Network, in Memphis.
Contributing: John Beifuss, Chris Day and Brooke Muckerman of The Commercial Appeal; Joey Garrison of USA TODAY; and Vivian Jones of The Tennessean in Nashville