A federal court in Tennessee dismissed a lawsuit by the state NAACP and others alleging that unconstitutional racial gerrymandering was at play in Tennessee’s redrawing of its U.S. House and state Senate voter district maps.
The lawsuit, filed in 2023 in the U.S. District Court for Middle Tennessee in Nashville, argued that district boundaries reshaped in 2022 by a GOP supermajority in the Tennessee legislature were unconstitutional and intentionally racially discriminated against Black and minority voters.
The complaint contended that the 2022 maps, which divided up Democratic-leaning Nashville in Davidson County into three congressional districts, helping Republicans to flip a seat and giving them control of eight of the state’s nine congressional seats, were intentionally drawn to dilute the voting power of Black and other minority voters.
The plaintiffs, who included the Tennessee NAACP, the African American Clergy Collective of Tennessee, the Equity Alliance, and the League of Women Voters of Tennessee, also challenged state Senate District 31 in majority-Black Shelby County in Memphis, using similar arguments and noting that the white voting age population increased under the new maps, according to The Associated Press.
The complaint said the newly drawn districts in Davidson and Shelby Counties “dilute the votes of Black voters and other voters of color by ‘cracking’ and ‘packing’ these communities to minimize their electoral voices.”
Tennessee’s non-white population ranges between 16 percent and 19 percent and is low enough that only one congressional district must be drawn as majority-minority to comply with federal law, Tennessee Lookout reported.
The NAACP’s complaint said that according to the 2020 census, voters of color make up approximately 26.5 percent of the voting-age population of Tennessee, with 15.1 percent Black and 5.7 percent Hispanic. Davidson County and Shelby County, it said, “have historically been among the state’s most racially and ethnically diverse counties” and became more diverse from 2010 to 2020, “while Tennessee’s Black and POC population grew at a higher rate than the state’s overall population.”
The new state redistricting plans adopted by Tennessee’s Legislature and signed into law by Gov. William B. Lee on February 6, 2022, “do not reflect these changing demographics and are intentionally designed to diminish the voting rights and electoral power of Tennessee’s ethnic and racial minorities,” the plaintiffs argued.
In its ruling last week, a three-judge panel, made up of two Trump appointees and one Obama appointee, said the complaint “alleges facts that are consistent with a racial gerrymander. … But the facts are also consistent with a political gerrymander,” which is lawful.
“The Complaint alleges that minority voters prefer Democratic candidates,” the opinion stated. “It also alleges that the changes (by a Republican-controlled legislature) flipped a congressional seat long held by a Democratic representative and shored up a state senate seat that a Republican senator barely won in a recent election. In light of this partisanship explanation for the changes, the Complaint fails to allege ‘more than the mere possibility’ of racial discrimination.”
The judges’ opinion cited the plaintiffs’ complaint that U.S. Rep. Jim Cooper, Tennessee District 5’s longstanding representative, chose not to run in 2022 because the “gerrymandering” had left “no way” for him to win.
“To show that race predominated in the redistricting plan, the Complaint relies on allegations that the changes had a racially disparate impact and violated traditional redistricting criteria. But the Complaint also pleads allegations suggesting that race and politics are highly correlated. And it does not allege any additional facts that would plausibly rule out the possibility that politics (rather than race) drove the redistricting.
…So the Complaint must plausibly allege a circumstantial case of racism. The Challengers attempt to do so both with claims about the way that the legislature created the maps and with claims about other laws passed near the same time. Yet these allegations do not suffice to plausibly rebut the more straightforward ‘explanation’: naked partisanship.”
“I will say that I am greatly, greatly disappointed,” former state Sen. Brenda Gilmore, who is a party to the case, said after the ruling, reported the Nashville Banner. “I think it has caused significant harm to people of color in particular, where it has diluted our voting power and made it very, very challenging for us to even run for … the national offices.”
All was not lost for the plaintiffs, who filed their complaint prior to an important Supreme Court decision in Alexander v. South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP in May, a 6-3 ruling that overturned a lower court’s finding that South Carolina had engaged in gerrymandering of Black voters, and remanded the case back to the district court.
Because the Supreme Court’s ruling in the South Carolina case was not in force at the time Tennessee plaintiffs filed their suit, the federal judges in the Tennessee case said the plaintiffs may refile their lawsuit in the next 30 days, but they would have to “plausibly disentangle race from politics,” noting that “the Supreme Court recently made clear that plaintiffs who claim that a legislature relied on race ‘must rule out the possibility that politics drove the districting process’ whenever race and politics are highly correlated.’”
The judges also rejected the state’s request to dismiss the complaint on the ground that the plaintiffs waited too long to sue. But they dismissed Tennessee’s governor from the lawsuit on sovereign immunity grounds.
As it stands now, the maps currently in use by Tennessee are likely to remain in place until 2032, when the next redistricting process is likely to occur.
