This excerpt was first published in Mother Jones magazine and is reprinted by The Lens with permission.
On May 8, hundreds of civil rights protesters, carrying signs that said, “No Jim Crow Maps” and “Hands Off Our Vote,” descended on Baton Rouge to oppose a plan by Louisiana’s Republican-controlled legislature to dismantle one or both of the state’s majority-Black congressional districts. They packed a Senate hearing, occupied three overflow rooms, and spilled into the Capitol’s halls.
Just 10 days earlier, the Supreme Court had destroyed the Voting Rights Act in its Louisiana v. Callais decision, triggering a mad rush to eliminate majority-Black districts across Southern states. The next day, Republican Gov. Jeff Landry, despite 42,000 already-cast ballots, suspended Louisiana’s House primaries to give his party time to push through a new map reducing Black representation in Congress before the 2026 midterms.
Democratic Rep. Cleo Fields was on the front lines of this fight. It was his district, stretching 200 miles from Baton Rouge to Shreveport, that Callais had set the stage for invalidating, with Justice Samuel Alito calling it “an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.”
The Supreme Court’s decision decimating Section 2 of the VRA—which had required that racial minorities have an equal opportunity to meaningfully participate in elections—threatens to return the country to a pre-1965 America, when white supremacy was the law of the land and Congress contained no Black members from the South. “This has sent us back, in my view, over 60 years,” Fields says.
When he appeared before the state Senate that day to testify against the new redistricting plans, he was joined by three other veteran Black politicians. Although Fields, a 63-year-old lawyer, has a reputation as an even-keeled consensus builder, he grew emotional as he spoke.
“To me, it is personal,” he told the Senate committee. “Since Reconstruction, Louisiana has elected four African Americans to Congress. And you’re looking at all of them. Four.” Even though nearly a third of Louisiana’s population is Black.
“You said something very profound,” state Sen. Gary Carter Jr., an African American Democrat from New Orleans, told Fields. “From the 1870s all the way through [the] present, just you four gentlemen—that’s it. And now this body wants to reduce that. ‘We want to cut it. That’s too many.’ How do we not be outraged?”
Before these four men, Louisiana had elected just two Black members of Congress, both during the post-Civil War Reconstruction era, America’s fleeting 12-year experiment with multiracial democracy. One, Fields told the senators, was John Willis Menard, who became the first Black person ever elected to Congress in 1868. The other, Charles Edmund Nash, served just one term, beginning in 1875. A vicious white backlash to Reconstruction made it impossible for him to get reelected amid the disputed presidential contest in 1876, which culminated in federal troops withdrawing from the South and the official end of Reconstruction. After Nash, “Louisiana went 114 years without a single African American in Congress,” Fields later explains in an interview.
During Reconstruction, racial equality was written into the Constitution through the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments. As a result, from 1865 to 1877, roughly 2,000 Black officeholders were elected. That number dropped to virtually zero once Jim Crow’s racist legal regime took hold just a few years later, as the federal government—led by the Supreme Court—abandoned enforcement of the Reconstruction amendments.
Fields came to the state Capitol to warn that history was repeating itself. As his colleague Rep. Troy Carter—Gary Carter Jr.’s uncle—told the legislature: “The question before us is not merely about lines on a map. The question before us is whether we will honor the principle that every citizen deserves equal protection of the law.”
“The question before us is not
merely about lines on a map.
The question before us is whether we will honor
the principle that every citizen
deserves equal protection of the law.”
– U.S. Rep. Troy Carter (D-La.)
Their pleas fell on deaf ears. Three weeks later, GOP legislators approved a map designed to oust Fields, changing his district from a solidly Democratic seat whose population was 53 percent Black to an overwhelmingly white one, in which 65 percent of voters cast ballots for Donald Trump in 2024. Immediately after the new map passed, the self-described “non-African American” litigants who brought the Callais case launched a new lawsuit seeking to eliminate Louisiana’s last majority-Black district, represented by Troy Carter, thus leaving the state with no Black representation in Congress.
Amazingly, Fields has fought this battle before. He was first elected to Congress in 1992, but his district was dismantled in 1996 following the Supreme Court ruling in a racial gerrymandering lawsuit filed on behalf of a group of mostly white voters who charged they had been discriminated against. He returned to Congress nearly 30 years later, only to meet the same fate. His political career epitomizes the rise and fall of Black political power in America’s post-civil rights era—a story that darkly echoes the Supreme Court’s shameful elimination of equal rights for Black Americans in the 19th century.
Fields’ experience in Louisiana last spring was not an anomaly. Other Southern states, including Tennessee and Alabama, also rushed to eliminate majority-Black districts held by Democrats. Thanks to today’s Supreme Court, more than a dozen such seats across the region could be drawn away in time for the 2028 elections, triggering the largest drop in Black congressional representation since the end of Reconstruction.
That’s just the opening act. Up to 140 Black- and Hispanic-majority state legislative districts could also be erased—not to mention seats on city councils, school boards, and some county commissions. Generally, few white voters in the South will cast a ballot for a Black candidate, so losing these districts will effectively wipe out Black power at every level of politics. Black people there will still technically have the right to vote, but no real ability to elect candidates they support and who represent their communities.
Jim Crow lasted for nearly a century. It took the full force of the civil rights movement, from boycotts to marches and laws like the 1965 VRA, to create a Second Reconstruction, meant to redeem the squandered promise of the first. The VRA made America a truly multiracial democracy for the first time in its history. Today, there are more than 10,000 Black elected officials throughout the country, far surpassing the numbers following the Civil War. Yet by destroying the VRA and gutting the 14th and 15th amendments, the Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice John Roberts, has essentially ended the Second Reconstruction. Its logic for shredding the country’s most important civil rights law replicates the worst impulses of the Supreme Court in the 19th century. To truly understand the scope and origins of the disaster that the Roberts court has unleashed, you have to return to one of the darkest periods of our history.
To find out more about what’s happening in Cleo Field’s district now — and what his constituents say that the U.S. Supreme Court missed in its landmark ruling, Callais v. Louisiana, read The Lens’ series, Driving District 6.
Read the rest of this story here, at Mother Jones.
