Loud enough for Washington to hear

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 last story of a four-part series.

LAFAYETTE — The “I-49 Future Corridor” signs still stand along the north side of town, where the McComb-Veazey neighborhood is hemmed in by a railroad on one side and the Evangeline Thruway on the other. 

The signs have been promising — some might say threatening — a highway for 40 years. 

Tina Shelvin Bingham, 43, a civil engineer and city planner by training, came home to run the community development corporation for McComb-Veazey, the first subdivision in Lafayette where Black families could legally buy land. Her office sits in a small house at 12th and South Magnolia that had been boarded up for two decades. For 20 years, eviction and tax-lien notices papered the door, with nobody inside, until the neighborhood took it over and rebuilt it with Lafayette Habitat for Humanity and architecture students from the University of Louisiana. Next door sits an old filling station, the first gas station in the area. The neighborhood now owns that, too.

The neighborhood’s elders remember the McComb-Veazey area before the Evangeline Thruway took over a stretch of Black-owned businesses. It “was almost like a Black mecca,” Bingham said. There was a hotel and a theater, grocery stores, brickmakers and seamstresses. People grew their own food. When the elders talk about it, she said, they describe a place that needed nothing from the white-owned downtown across the tracks.

For the past 40 years a proposed I-49 connector has hung over what remains. 

Bingham went to the public meetings about the connector as a child, tagging along with parents who did not want it. She attends them now as a professional. The original plans called for the elevated highway to drop to ground level at the edge of downtown, atop a six-foot earthen berm. “How do we access downtown? You’re building a wall right here,” she said. The planning record, as she recalls it, noted that downtown interests found the separation desirable.

Yet again, the threat of construction became a death sentence for a neighborhood.

“Since the interstate was announced, there’s been a severe disinvestment along this entire corridor,” Bingham said. “Houses have been bought, and the properties are sitting vacant. And the community is a little less informed than I’d like — but there’s a lot of reasons why. People got other things to worry about. An interstate that may or may not happen? ‘I don’t know, but I got to pay that electricity, baby. And I got a hole in my roof.’”

What the neighborhood has rarely had is anyone in Washington who would pick up the phone. Bingham has made the trip to lobby for housing money. She and three other Black women got into the offices of two of the state’s congressmen, Clay Higgins and Mike Johnson, and came away with snacks.

“They offered me some Zapp’s and some bottled water,” she said — the snack paid for, an aide noted, with her own taxpayer dollars. She asked for two more.

That, to her, is the case for the second majority-Black congressional district at the center of the Supreme Court fight — the seat now held by U.S. Rep. Cleo Fields, whose field office sits in an old shopping mall not far away from her office on the north side. Without it, she said, her community’s voice is diluted across districts drawn to dissolve it.

She does not flinch from the word “gerrymander,” which the white plaintiffs have made the heart of their case. To her, the map it produced finally connected Black communities that share an interest. 

“We had to gerrymander it to connect the communities that needed to be connected to each other, so that we can start voting in unison,” she said. “If we know that we’re a third of the state’s population, then we should be reflected as a third of the state’s population — not one-sixth.”

Lafayette sits in the heart of Louisiana’s Cajun country, and for years Bingham has fielded a comparison from Cajun coworkers — the same one the Court has been weighing, between Acadian persecution and the Black experience. 

Over the past half-century, Cajuns have become a force in state politics, up to and including the current governor. Edwin Edwards, the first governor of Cajun ancestry, piggybacked off contemporaneous Civil Rights slogans when he ran for governor in the early 1970s, under the slogan “Cajun Power” with a fist that was modeled after the Black Power fist, but held a crawfish.

“I’m not degrading your experience,” Bingham said. “But a lot of us lost our language, we lost our country of origin, we lost our connection to our people.” 

The difference, she said, is that the comparison runs only one way.

“You can be Cajun, you can be white, you can be whatever you want to be,” she said. “Wherever I go, I’m always going to be this Black face.”

Now she’s read the decisions. She sees how judges deem the Cajun experience as one that knitted the Acadiana community together to the point where they can be viewed as a legitimate, legal “community of interest.” But Bingham and her Black face cannot be seen in community with other Black faces across Louisiana because they are considered to share race, not culture.

NEW ROADS — The parish seat of Pointe Coupee, northwest of Baton Rouge, is also split by a railroad track. On one side run the lakefront houses along False River and the old-money Main Street that Monica Battley-Fabre calls “Main Street Mafia.” On the other is the back of town.

“There’s a back of town, where the Black community has been cut off from all economic infrastructure,” said Battley-Fabre, who leads the Pointe Coupee Parish NAACP. “No grocery stores. A food desert.”

Battley-Fabre grew up in that back of town, in a neighborhood of brick houses that the parish let Black families build on a former dump. A brick house was her parents’ American dream; her mother canned potatoes, her father worked a warehouse. 

The neighborhood flooded for more than 20 years before the parish moved anyone. “Ninety-eight percent of the people died of cancer, including my parents,” she said. Her mother was 56. The relocation money came from federal farm funds, to protect nearby farms by creating wetlands to hold potential floodwaters. “You weren’t trying to relocate these people because you were tired of them flooding. If you were tired of them flooding, you wouldn’t have let my parents flood for over 20 years,” Battley-Fabre said.

What happened in Pointe Coupee was part of a national pattern — Black neighborhoods built on landfills, some later declared Superfund sites overseen by the federal Environmental Protection Agency.

Battley-Fabre holds a Ph.D. in education administration and a school-turnaround certification from Harvard University. She teaches in one of Baton Rouge’s poorest zip codes. The Pointe Coupee school system, still nominally under a federal desegregation decree, recently carved a majority-white STEM academy out of a district where Black children make up nearly 80% of enrollment, she said.

A history teacher, she insists the legal story be told exactly. The Voting Rights Act (VRA) never granted Black people the vote; the 15th Amendment did that in 1870, and the nation then let its states violate it for a century. 

The VRA ordered the states to stop. But its teeth have gradually been pulled, for more than a decade now. 

Still, a federal judge in Louisiana saw its strength and demanded that the state draw another majority Black district, in response to the 2022 voting-rights suit brought by Black Louisianans. In response, the state stalled and stalled. It took political payback, wielding what was left of the law, to make the seat real. 

But real it was, and the people in it felt the difference. When they called Washington, someone answered.

What is happening now, Battley-Fabre said, is an old playbook under a new name. In Louisiana, those old ways never seem to change. 

For instance, slavery was never fully abolished by the 13th Amendment, because it included the slavery exception clause, outlawing enslavement “except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.”

So in Louisiana, the state with the highest per-capita incarceration rate in the country, with the blessing of both the federal and the state constitutions, men held on a former plantation named Angola still labor for pennies — a thin distance from chattel slavery — on Louisiana’s roads and levees, in its fields, and inside the state Capitol itself.

The men work in plain view of the lawmakers who write the criminal code that holds them. The Rev. Alexis Anderson, a Baton Rouge activist who advocates within the local courthouse and at the Capitol, says the issues presented by the incarcerated men’s their presence at the seat of state government no longer even seem to register to Louisiana’s  leaders.

“Go to the state Capitol,” she said, “and you will see the grown men who are working as if they were slaves, and how comfortable — and I do mean comfortable — the people in the legislature are with that. They don’t see anything wrong.”

Mass incarceration, she said, is not an accident of policy: “It’s an industry, and it’s the industry that supplies jobs.”

This spring, Anderson was at the Capitol for a hearing on House Bill 323, by Rep. Candace Newell of New Orleans, which would have required correctional facilities to notify families and share a basic report when someone dies in custody. “A bill just so people can get notifications when their loved ones die,” she said. “That’s the level we’re at right now.” The bill failed.

In Washington, the perennial bill to set a minimum wage for prison labor has fizzled again this year. Among its few vocal backers are Louisiana’s two Black congressmen.

The old district began in Baton Rouge, just north of the Capitol in the neighborhoods walled off by Interstate 110. It is also where the next fight is already being organized.

“People think this is just a Louisiana case about one congressional seat,” said Ashley Shelton, president of the Power Coalition for Equity and Justice and a plaintiff in the 2022 voting-rights suit brought by Black Louisianans. “This is actually a case about Black political power.” 

That’s true at every level, she said — from Congress to the legislature to the school board — in every state of the Deep South. In districts where Black people can vote but their districts are drawn so that Black candidates can never win. In states with maps redrawn specifically so that fewer and fewer Black candidates make it into office.

 “If there’s nobody making policy that looks like me, that knows my experience as an American and as a Black woman, then what is citizenship? That’s a question that requires an answer,” Shelton said.

On a recent Wednesday morning in the Allendale section of Shreveport, a dozen neighbors gathered in a circle outside the community center and set off down the block, stopping in front of homes to pray — for the Webber family, who had just buried their mother; for Ms. McDonald, the best candy lady in the neighborhood, now sick; and for the city, that it would choose its neighborhoods over a highway.

Dorothy Wiley, 72, who built her house on a hill in Allendale after Katrina and founded the neighborhood group Allendale Strong to fight the freeway, has prayed on whether to stay or go. After her husband died last August, she got a loan approved and made plans for Houston. She was done. “I would pull up in my yard and say, ‘Lord, I’m sorry — I don’t want to be the light on the hill no more,’” she said. But every time, before she could get out of the car, the phone would ring: somebody new, asking about Allendale Strong, asking about the freeway, asking how to fight.

She stayed. The house is paid off now. She is still on the hill.

“Shreveport,” she likes to remind the city’s leaders, “is only as strong as its weakest neighborhood.”

The same was true of the district. For one election, the 6th had been the single seat through which all of these places could be heard at once — the river towns and the hill towns, Shreveport and Baton Rouge and the small parishes strung between, a line of communities scattered along the spine of highways by two centuries of the plantation, Jim Crow, the redlining map and the federal interstate system. 

Though the Supreme Court called them four cities with nothing in common, the people living in them called it a shared inheritance: the same cancer in the water, the same pennies-an-hour wage in the prison fields, the same sewer lines breaking under the same forgotten streets, the same highways still aimed at their front doors. Apart, those were a hundred separate griefs. Together, in one district, they were finally loud enough for Washington to hear.

Struck down, the seat scatters District 6’s constituents back into districts built around white suburbs and small towns, where each community is left to raise its own voice alone — Cheneyville against its sewage, New Roads against its cancer, Allendale against its freeway. 

When isolated, these local burdens are much easier to wave off. 

It is the lesson Wiley keeps trying to teach her city, but only written at the scale of the country: no government grows stronger by cutting loose its hardest-hit neighborhoods and leaving them to call out one at a time.

For now, Wiley is still Allendale’s light on the hill. Still parked in her yard when the phone rings. Still answering. Still listening.

Photographer Gus Bennett and reporter Emmanuel Felton drove what was once Congressional District 6, to understand the effects of Supreme Court’s Callais decision and to look more closely at how the case moved through the courts. You can read the entire four-part series here.