To understand District 6, Felton and Bennett drove 250 miles through the heart of the district, talking to people all along the way. This is the third story in a four-part series.
THE U.S. SUPREME COURT, WASHINGTON, D.C. — At the center of the Supreme Court oral arguments was a single concept: community of interest.
Mapmakers sculpting new voting districts are supposed to keep such a community whole — a population bound tightly enough by a shared industry, a shared watershed, a shared set of troubles that it can speak to one representative with one voice. District 6’s defenders argued its Black residents were exactly that: linked by the I-49 corridor and the Red River, by the same hospitals and regional airports, by the same poverty rates and failing water systems, by the long experience of being the people left out of power in every city the lines passed through.
The court did not see it. The court’s majority aligned with the three-judge panel from the U.S. District Court for Western Louisiana in Shreveport, where the Callais case made its last stop in April 2024 before heading to the Supreme Court.
In a 2-1 decision, the panel for Western Louisiana struck down the idea that the string of Black enclaves in Louisiana could be a community of interest.
But it did find a community of interest elsewhere in Louisiana: the state’s white Cajun population — bound, the court wrote, by Le Grand Dérangement, the British expulsion of the Acadians from Nova Scotia in the 18th century; by the culture the refugees built in the swamps out of their French, their food, their music and their Catholic faith; by the 1921 state constitution that drove French from the schools. The Cajuns in Acadiana constituted a people forged by shared persecution, whose communities deserved representation within the same congressional district. “The unique community of Acadiana, among many others in Louisiana, with a deep connection and awareness of its past, certainly constitutes a community of interest,” the panel wrote.
The Western District’s discussion of Cajun history took up a footnote nearly an entire page long that included the 1921 ban within Louisiana’s constitution that essentially banned Cajun French in schools, requiring only English.
Shared adversity, the Western District court agreed, could bind a people together across a region. A history of persecution could forge a community. Just not, apparently, for Black Louisianans, whose connections and shared struggles were seen not as culture, but race. “Race predominating, (the new map) fails to take into account Louisiana’s diverse, cultural, religious, and social landscape in any meaningful way.”
The Supreme Court’s decision, which echoed the Western District’s key conclusions, was issued this year, on April 29. The following day, Gov. Landry declared an emergency and postponed the state’s May 16 congressional primaries, though roughly 45,000 early ballots had already been cast. Then he called the Legislature back to draw new lines. “The best way to end race-based discrimination is to stop making decisions based on race,” he wrote in the order delaying the vote.
After contentious, jam-packed legislative hearings that stretched into the wee hours of morning, Landry signed a map on May 29 that cut Louisiana’s majority-Black districts from two back to one. It dissolved Rep. Cleo Fields’ seat, scattering the Black neighborhoods once strung into the old 6th into separate districts built around white suburbs and small towns.
The single Black district left standing — Rep. Troy Carter’s, anchored in New Orleans — survived only because the mapmakers reached up the Mississippi River and packed still more Black voters into it. It was the same maneuver the Black plaintiffs in the 2022 Robinson voting-rights lawsuit had sued over when they briefly won a second Black district, the cramming of Black voters into a single seat. The bill’s sponsor, Sen. Jay Morris (R-North Monroe) did not pretend otherwise. “I purposely put more Democrats into District 2,” he said, “to make the remaining districts better performing for Republicans.”
And even that was not enough. Buoyed by their landmark victory, the white voters who had brought the Callais case went back to court, arguing that even one majority-Black seat was one too many. Louisiana’s lone remaining Black district, they contend, now leans too heavily on race to survive the very standard they had just won.
During one of the legislature’s marathon hearings to revise the state’s voting district’s, Sen. Royce Duplessis from New Orleans held up the new legal filing. “Callais, the actual plaintiff that said that the 2024 map was unconstitutional, is now saying that Senate Bill 121 is likely unconstitutional,” he said. .. “Y’all, at the beginning of this process, I would have said that we are building a house on a broken foundation. Now it feels more like quicksand.”
A three-judge panel agreed to take up the Callais plaintiffs’ question in a hearing held in mid-June. Whatever it decides, the arc is plain: a state that was ordered to draw two Black districts may soon end up with none.
CHENEYVILLE — Ronny Green Jr. was 29 and newly laid off from his bank job when he ran for mayor of this Rapides Parish town on the Solomon Northup Trail — the route that traces the journey of the free Black man kidnapped into slavery whose memoir became “12 Years a Slave.” Northup was held on a plantation along Bayou Boeuf just outside town.
Green, now 30, gives the tour himself. Driving across the railroad tracks that split Cheneyville, he narrates without ceremony: “We crossed the tracks now. Growing up, everyone called the far side ‘the white side.’”
It’s like that in many towns in this part of Louisiana. One side white; one side Black. Tracks as a divider.
Green’s work runs in the family. His father was Cheneyville’s police chief; his second cousin Derek Johnson was mayor right before him, and Johnson’s father held the office too; another cousin sits on the city council up in Alexandria. Green is the only one of them who never served in the military, and they give him grief about it. A Black family has had its hands on this small town’s institutions for the better part of a generation, and he is the latest to take them.
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Mayor Ronny Green, Jr.,
“We crossed the tracks now.
Growing up, everyone called
the far side ‘the white side.’”
Cheneyville, La.
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His theory of what comes after the Court’s ruling is generational. “There are kids right now that’s 14, 15, 16, 17 years old that haven’t voted,” he said. “In four more years, they’re going to be ready to go to the polls and vote — or sit out, distracted by all the negativity. I would like them to be able to identify with me, and get them in the voting process. The older people, they’ve been waving the flag for a long time. They’re tired. It’s time for us to take the torch.”
He also believes that his generation will better understand government with someone like him at the helm, who they can identify with.
He was bused out of town as a boy, after the parish — like others around it — closed the Black school in the 1980s rather than integrate it. “Getting up at 5:30, 6 o’clock in the morning,” he said. “They wonder why the Black kids are always tired. You almost think about that as a systematic way of explaining test scores. There’s a multitude of factors. Start with the wake-up.”
In a vacant storefront on Main Street, Green and local artists staged a Black history exhibit last year, anchored by a full-size replica of the wooden crate in which Henry “Box” Brown mailed himself from slavery to Philadelphia in 1849. Though Brown was enslaved in Richmond, Virginia, people in Cheneyville wanted to see the box, a symbol of freedom and perseverance for anyone with enslaved ancestors.
Green’s fight as mayor has been to get his town out of a different kind of box, the one many small, predominantly Black municipalities in Louisiana are stuck in: aging systems and the bad water that comes with them.
Even during Green’s tour of the trail, the fight intrudes — a sewer main has burst at the lift station on Highway 71. Green works the phone between stops on the trail, calling his operator, his contractor, his fire chief, trying to get a crew on it before nightfall. “If they can’t use the restroom tonight,” he said, “there might be an issue.” He has roughly $3 million in the pipeline for the wastewater plant — but that money is mostly federal block grants coming through Baton Rouge. Asked whether he had directly landed any federal money in his first year, he couldn’t name a dollar.
That is the bind the lost seat sharpens. A town like Cheneyville lives on money that flows to it from somewhere else — the water and sewer dollars that reached Mansfield, 100 miles north, only after Fields took office. With fewer open doors in Washington, a town this size is left waiting longer on a state that has rarely been in a hurry for towns like his to fix their water.
For Green, the work is also personal. He brought a young man onto his water crew who, fresh out of high school, had been wrongfully charged with attempted murder over a shooting. Though he was exonerated, he’s left with a record that still surfaces. “I got somewhere you can be useful,” Green told him, and he’s helping him earn his license as a water operator. It is the whole argument of his mayoralty in a single job: a young Black man one headline from the system, pulled back by the only kind of official close enough to do it.
Districts redrawn across the South
What is happening in Louisiana is happening across the South. Tennessee has already erased its only majority-Black district, in Memphis. Georgia, Mississippi and South Carolina decided to scrap redistricting plans, though not before Republicans bent on redrawing South Carolina’s maps took aim at the seat held for 34 years by the veteran Democratic congressman James Clyburn. And in Alabama — where a federal court, after an 11-day trial, found that the Legislature had intentionally discriminated against Black voters — the Supreme Court intervened on June 2 to let the state use the discriminatory map anyway.
Even a trial court’s finding of deliberate intent, the kind of finding that until this year would have been fatal, was not enough to stop the Alabama decision. The court explained itself with a phrase that had appeared nowhere in the Callais opinion itself: it was vindicating, it said, “our colorblind Constitution” — the same Constitution that, earlier in the Callais footnote, was perceived to be in defense of the shared history of the Cajuns.
The Black neighborhoods that the old 6th District gathered up — strung along the river and the interstate, in Shreveport and Baton Rouge and the small towns between — are exactly the places that two centuries of plantations and Jim Crow and highways and disinvestment had left scattered and apart. And every one of them is now suspect for that reason alone, in the eyes of the jurisprudence that struck down District 6.
SHREVEPORT — A few miles from where Dorothy Wiley, a longtime Allendale neighborhood advocate, built her house on the hill after Katrina, Terrance “Tee” Winn, 52, spends his weeks at the Caddo Parish Courthouse, filing writs for men still inside. Winn went into Angola in 1991, with a life sentence for a killing he took part in as a 16-year-old; he came home in 2021, after 30 years and seven months, once the U.S. Supreme Court’s bar on mandatory life-without-parole sentences for juveniles was made retroactive. In the fields of the former plantation that became America’s largest maximum-security prison, he picked crops for 2 cents an hour. He has since testified about that work in Washington, in support of a federal minimum wage for incarcerated workers.
Winn studied legal files in the Angola law library. He also studied the region’s history. Neighborhoods like the one in North Shreveport where he grew up or the ones on the north side of Baton Rouge that bookended the old congressional district have incarceration rates around five times the national average.
To explain that, he doesn’t start with crime statistics. He begins with 1873, when white militias slaughtered Black men defending the Colfax courthouse a few parishes away, and nobody was convicted of murder. He moves to 1898, when Louisiana’s constitutional convention — convened, in the words of one delegate, to establish the supremacy of the white race — stripped Black men of the vote and enshrined the split-jury verdicts that would fill Angola for the next 120 years. He notes that Plessy v. Ferguson, the case that blessed Jim Crow nationwide, came out of New Orleans.
Winn keeps a running ledger of the imbalance. District 2, the state’s other majority-Black district, was only created in 1973, when he was a toddler. “Look at the history of our state. We’ve only had four Black congressmen go to Washington from this state,” he said. For comparison’s sake, he totaled the number of white Congressmen during that time. “Y’all done had 117.”
Tomorrow, in the final part of Driving District 6: As reporter Emmanuel Felton and photographer Gus Bennett finish their 250-mile Louisiana road trip, they meet local residents fighting a 40-year-old highway project and a toxic dump linked to catastrophic cancer rates. Now, with Black voters scattered into majority-white districts, these residents feel isolated — wondering who in Washington will pick up the phone when they call.
