Court deems Black cultural connections as race, not culture

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 first story in a four-part series.

SHREVEPORT, La. — Three cities. Three Black neighborhoods, 2,000 miles apart. The same story every time.

Dorothy Wiley, now 72, has struggled her entire life against highways threatened in her backyards. It happened no matter where she moved: in New Orleans; Portland, Oregon; and again now in Shreveport. “It seems like people don’t understand that this same kind of stuff is happening in every Black neighborhood in the country,” she said. “The freeway is just one of the methods.”

Wiley has never needed a court to tell her that Black communities separated by hundreds of miles can share a single fate. But this spring, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, in effect, that they cannot.

In its ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, the court held that the Black voters of Louisiana’s new 6th Congressional District were not a community the law could recognize — that what they shared was their race, and not much else. That was not enough to draw them a district of their own, the justices concluded.

But the court did not see layered histories within the narrow, snake-shaped district carved into the center of the state.

The 6th District’s defenders, the ACLU and the Legal Defense Fund, had argued that the Black neighborhoods, towns and regions strung along its lines shared distinct economic and political lives. 

The Lens drove through the 6th District to document those shared fates. Fates told through lives like Dorothy Wiley’s. 

Wiley’s current struggle is in Allendale, one of Shreveport’s oldest Black neighborhoods, a few blocks west of downtown. As a Katrina evacuee 20 years ago, Wiley had barely unpacked in Allendale when she learned the state was planning to run a 3.5-mile stretch of Interstate 49 straight through it. 

Wiley sprang into action. In February 2012, she helped found the group Allendale Strong, which has been fighting the highway ever since. 

Wiley knew exactly what happens when the government sets its sights on your neighborhood for a freeway project. She had watched it happen before.

So had her congressman, U.S. Rep. Cleo Fields. Fields grew up in Baton Rouge and went to McKinley High School, on the city’s historically Black south side — neighborhoods that Interstates 10 and 110 split apart in the 1960s and 1970s, as hundreds of homes and businesses were cleared for the elevated lanes. As a young man, he built his political base at Southern University in Scotlandville, at the freeway’s northern end. 

The 6th District he represented for one short term —until the Supreme Court scuttled it — runs the length of the state, from Baton Rouge to Shreveport. A shared history runs the same length. 

Wiley met Fields at a community meeting; because they had both been briefed through their life’s experiences, they understood the federal government’s historic role in placing freeways through Black communities, she said. Fields understood it the same way she did. Weeks into his term, he held town halls from one end of the map to the other — Baton Rouge, Lafayette, Alexandria, Shreveport — and on the day the Supreme Court struck down the map that created it, he grieved it as his “amazing district, from Shreveport to Baton Rouge and all points in between.”

Earlier this month, Congressional candidates qualified for races within the state’s newly created six districts, including District 6, which flipped from 55% Black to majority white. History tells us that, of the 10 candidates who qualified for District 6, the winner will likely be white: Louisiana has never elected a Black Congressperson from a non-majority-Black district.

Fields opted to seek an open state senate seat instead of seeking a second term in Congress, because he, as a Black man, had little chance of winning, he said on the day of the Callais decision. “If you tell me that I gotta jump a certain height, I could probably do that. If you tell me I gotta run a certain distance, I could probably do that too. But if you tell me that I have to be white to serve in Congress in Louisiana, I can’t do nothing about that.”

MANSFIELD — Mayor Thomas Jones Jr. has spent about 15 years in public service in this DeSoto Parish town of roughly 5,000 — 10 and a half as police chief before he was elected mayor in 2022. In all that time, Mansfield, which is 80% Black, had never received a federal grant. Not one, Jones says. Then Fields took office. Within months, the town landed nearly $2 million in federal money for water and sewer — the first the city had ever gotten.

“Immediately, Cleo made it known that he was going to represent all people in this district,” Jones said. “The first time we ever received federal funding is when Cleo got in … rarely ever did we hear anything from Washington, D.C., here in a rural place like this.” 

Jones understands the argument that the Supreme Court accepted in Callais — that a district running from Baton Rouge to Shreveport joins places with nothing in common — and he does not dispute the premise so much as wave it off. “We do have one thing in common,” he said. “If you’re a minority community, you have needs.” As it turns out, those needs are often unmet. Studies have shown that even when federal infrastructure money is dedicated to repairing aging water systems, white communities were favored in the distribution of that money. On top of repairing the small rural town’s water system, Jones is working on a string of other constituent issues related to federal policy: high-speed Internet and the viability of nearby hospitals, in the face of federal Medicaid adjustments that could affect them. 

He’s witnessed a lifetime of power imbalances, at home and at his school. In 1966, Jones’s father was crushed under a load of lumber at a sawmill — it was a coin flip whether he would walk again. He sued the white-owned lumber company, something Black men in DeSoto Parish simply did not do. Jones’s uncle begged him to drop it, and was barred from the house for even suggesting it. “He told his brother, ‘I don’t care how powerful them people are. I can’t work. What am I gonna do? I can’t take care of my family,’” Jones recalled. His father won — the first Black man anyone could remember suing a white man in the parish and winning — built a brick house, bought a new car, and taught his son to handle the old shotgun by the door. “I tell people all the time: I’m not scared. I’m built for it.”

Jones attended all-Black DeSoto High until 1979, when it was shut down after a federal judge overseeing a 1970 federal desegregation case ordered that the district pair many of its white and Black schools to achieve integration, because nearly a decade of court-designated buses, school zones, and other remedies had only ended up perpetuating “dual systems” that led white students almost entirely to white schools and 83% of Black students to all-Black schools. 

On December 30, 2025, Trump’s Justice Department and the state attorney general’s office successfully moved to dismiss the parish’s decades-old federal desegregation order without a hearing — part of a statewide and national push to clear those cases from the dockets, begun when Landry was attorney general, and revived when Trump took office again in January 2025.

Now it falls to the parish’s Black residents to make sure that the school district does right by their children — without a court order behind them, and, once the new map takes effect, without the congressman who got Mansfield its first federal dollars. 

Unifying issues within the district
Black constituents within the narrow, winding District 6 told The Lens that they were able to speak a cultural shorthand whenever they called Fields’ staff asking for federal guidance with shared local struggles. Struggles against criminal justice system inequities, struggling schools, failing water systems, lack of access to good jobs, banking, healthcare — and freeway construction.

Though Wiley was born in Shreveport, she moved in 1984 to Portland, Oregon, where her mother bought a house near Emanuel Hospital, in the historically Black Albina neighborhood in north Portland.

For years, the state of Oregon talked about running a freeway through Albina. Wiley was at her mother’s house when the men offering a buyout knocked. First they offered $300,000. Her mother said no. Then they came back and offered $600,000. Her mother said no again.

Eventually, the freeway plans were scrapped. But the damage was done. The threat of it emptied out the neighborhood, which racially changed from Black to white. “It was about gentrification. It was never the freeway,” Wiley said. “The freeway still isn’t built.” After Portland, she moved back to Louisiana, to New Orleans, where Wiley and her husband lived in the Tremé neighborhood, just off the elevated Interstate 10 Expressway — the highway that, a generation earlier, had been rammed down the middle of North Claiborne Avenue, one of the country’s oldest Black commercial corridors, taking the leafy boulevard’s oak trees and hundreds of Black-owned businesses with it.

Then came the storm, Katrina. By that time, the Wileys were living in New Orleans East, a low-lying part of the city. As the storm spun over the Gulf of Mexico, they tried to get a rental car to evacuate, but none were left in town. They went back home, boarded up the windows, and joined thousands of other people stuck in the city’s emergency shelter in the Superdome. From Sunday to Thursday, they were there with three grandchildren, one of them a 12-year-old in a wheelchair.

After spending time as Katrina evacuees in San Antonio, she came home to Shreveport and built her house on the hill.

The freeway followed her there.

The freeway also preceded her. For much of her life, it had torn apart her hometown. Allendale was once a neighborhood of 34,000 people, according to research compiled by Allendale Strong from city archives. When Interstate 20 was cut through the Allendale section of Shreveport in the 1960s, it displaced thousands of people and severed the neighborhood from downtown and from its own thriving commercial strip on Texas Avenue, the city’s Black Wall Street.

Today Allendale survives with a fraction of its people, about 5,000 left. It’s an echo of what she saw in Portland. Allendale is emptying in the face of the freeway’s ongoing threat. Lenders are hesitant to write mortgages in a neighborhood the state still intends to pave, she said. 

NATCHITOCHES — When the Callais case went to trial, lawyers defending the district called witnesses like Steven Harris, a 59-year-old pastor with congregations in Natchitoches and Creston, to testify to what the mapmakers’ computers couldn’t show.

“My argument was not necessarily a Black and white thing,” Harris said. “It was about our shared commonality.” 

He pointed to the things a map can’t measure but those within the district instinctively know — the festival circuit, the zydeco bands, the church networks whose bishops preside over congregations from the Gulf to Shreveport. The culture even changes texture from district to district, in ways an outsider would miss: in New Orleans, within Congressional District 2, he said, the food leans on cayenne; up in District 6, through Baton Rouge and Alexandria and Natchitoches, it’s brown gravy.

For Harris, representation has never been abstract, and he has sat on the other side of it — as a school board member, the kind of local seat the Callais decision is set to redraw as well. 

The all-Black subdivision where he lives went 30 years without its roads being overlaid; residents had given up. Working with Kenny Cox — the first Black man to represent the area in the Louisiana House in modern times — Harris helped secure millions to repave the whole neighborhood. But he needed someone who spoke his language. “Now you’ve got Kenny Cox, who understands my plight, understands what we go through in our community,” he said. “We got things done.” Though Republican politicians are now talking about equality for white communities, history shows otherwise, he said. “Equality,” filtered through the powers and purse strings of white America, has long meant less for Black communities. 

Harris is a longtime student of voting rights. In 2024, he was a named plaintiff in a different lawsuit, a successful challenge to the state of Louisiana about a state Senate and House district that, the plaintiffs contended, “packed” Black voters into a small number of majority-Black districts and “cracked” other Black communities across multiple districts, depriving them of the opportunity to form effective voting blocs. 

So, of course, he knows the exact date that the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed. He describes it and its effects the way a preacher would.

“On August 6, 1965, a lion was born that could defend our voting rights,” Harris said. “When he roared, he had authority behind that roar.”

Then came the Callais case. “They pulled his teeth,” he said. “They declawed him. He’s still a lion. He roars like a lion. But they know he has no power to defend himself, nor eat for himself. So what ultimately happens? He dies.”

Tomorrow in Driving District 6: A journey into the heart of Louisiana’s “snake” district reveals that while politicians drew the lines to settle scores, the voters within the voting district are bound by shared struggles. Plus, why some say that Congressman Cleo Fields is the district’s own story in a single life.