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 second story in a four-part series.
START OF DISTRICT 6, ON THE NORTH SIDE OF BATON ROUGE, La. — During oral arguments at the Supreme Court in 2025, Chief Justice John Roberts described the shape of Louisiana’s 6th District as “a snake that… runs from one side of the state angling up to the other, picking up Black populations as it goes along.”
At first glance, it is easy to see why the district may look wholly unnatural to someone who doesn’t understand the state’s history. The now struck-down district started on the north side of Baton Rouge and ran 250 miles north and west, slashing the state in two. From the neighborhoods just above the state Capitol, it crossed the Mississippi River into the swamps of the Atchafalaya Basin and the heart of Acadiana, where zydeco music pours out of the dance halls and pork and rice is stuffed into casings and sold by the link as boudin. From there it ran up Interstate 49, out of the bayous and rice paddies of South Louisiana and into the red-clay hills and cotton country of the north, where the Catholic churches thin out, the Baptist congregations multiply, and the étouffée gives way to smoked brisket and deep-fried hush puppies.
Like the court’s chief justice, Phillip “Bert” Callais and 11 other white Louisiana voters who challenged the district saw far-flung cities connected by thin ribbons of rural parishes, a map zigzagging precinct by precinct to include Black neighborhoods while leaving white ones in the districts next door. That is the version the Supreme Court accepted when it struck the district down, upending decades of voting rights law.
Of course, because it’s Louisiana, grudges and politics played a role in that long narrow map.
District 6 came into being, as Louisiana’s second Black majority district, because an earlier, 2022 lawsuit filed by Black Louisianans including a retired Southern University chancellor, Press Robinson.
In 1963, when Robinson first registered to vote in Baton Rouge, a white registrar made him interpret a passage of the U.S. Constitution to the registrar’s satisfaction — a test created to keep Black Louisianans off the rolls. He passed. Sixty years later, he became the lead plaintiff in Robinson v. Ardoin, the lawsuit that set all of this in motion.
Originally, after the 2020 census, when states typically redraw political maps to fit population shifts, Louisiana had drawn five majority-white congressional districts and one majority-Black one.
Five districts to one, in a state where Black residents make up nearly a third of the population. The map diluted Black votes, argued Robinson and a group of Black voters who sued in 2022 under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. A federal judge in Baton Rouge upheld their claims and ordered the state to try again.
In January 2024, weeks into Gov. Jeff Landry’s term, the Legislature drew that second district, but not the compact Mississippi River district the Robinson plaintiffs had proposed.
Instead, it was a 250-mile diagonal, drawn in Baton Rouge partly to satisfy the Robinson plaintiffs and partly to settle political scores. The map, championed by Landry, protected two powerful Republican incumbents — Speaker of the House Mike Johnson and Majority Leader Steve Scalise — along with Rep. Julia Letlow of northeast Louisiana.
Using partisan gerrymandering to protect incumbents is legal, the Supreme Court has said. But this map did not protect them all. As payback for the governor, it dismantled the seat of Rep. Garret Graves, who had crossed Landry by endorsing Landry’s opponent in the primary.
“Governor Jeff Landry now wants to say that a federal judge ordered them to create a Black district, and that’s not true,” said Ernest Johnson, the president emeritus of the Louisiana NAACP and an attorney in the Robinson case. “If you read the orders of the court, the court doesn’t order them to draw a Black district. That’s the district that was created by the Louisiana legislature. It didn’t have to be a snake district. It could have been a district out of Baton Rouge that went up to the Monroe area, and it would have been more compact. So it was political gerrymandering — and it should have stood.”
ALEXANDRIA — In Ed Larvadain III’s law office hangs a photograph of his father standing beside Chief Justice Earl Warren, the author of Brown v. Board of Education. Ed Larvadain Jr. finished law school in 1966 and spent the next half-century filing civil rights cases across central Louisiana — suing banks that took Black deposits but wouldn’t hire Black tellers, picketing stores where Black customers could buy clothes but not try them on. He took civil rights cases that originated in the law school at Howard University and got filed down here, working alongside the lawyers who pried Louisiana’s doors open one suit at a time.
His son, 61, now represents Alexandria in the state House, where he watched the map fight unfold from the inside — and where he has seen the results of the Court gutting the very tool, Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, that his father’s generation had used to force open those doors. “That map that you see today, that’s Jeff Landry’s map,” said Ed Larvadain III. “We didn’t want that map. We had a much better map” — a compact district running up the Mississippi River parishes — “but they wouldn’t let it go through, because they wanted to protect (his ally Rep. Julia) Letlow. He intentionally provided a horrible map, and it was challenged. He set us up.”
For Larvadain, the stakes of the lost seat are measured in hospital beds and broadband lines. He was born on the ninth floor of Charity Hospital in New Orleans — one of generations of Black Louisianans delivered in public hospitals that asked nothing about an insurance card. It was the same at Huey P. Long Hospital in Pineville, just across the Red River from his office in Alexandria. Huey P. hospital is where most Black babies in the area were born from the 1940s until it closed. The only question at the door was whether you were sick. Gov. Bobby Jindal shuttered Huey P.; Katrina took Charity. Now, you can’t afford to get sick in Louisiana, Larvadain said. He has watched the safety net he was born into be pulled apart.
The threat to what remains runs through Washington. Louisiana’s rural hospitals — the ones in Natchitoches, Marksville, Bunkie — run on Medicaid and can do little more than stabilize a patient, and even those services are now at risk after the state’s congressional delegation, minus its two Black members, voted for Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill, which slashes the program. Black Louisianans are paid less and are less likely to carry health insurance than their white neighbors, and that gap compounds at the hospital door: thinner margins for the rural hospitals that serve them, and more of those hospitals closing for good.
Statistics show fairness has not yet arrived. In median earnings, Black women who are full-time, year-round workers make 48.7 cents on the dollar for every dollar earned by white men. That’s the worst ratio in the nation. Black men don’t make that much more. Rep. Cleo Fields cited statistics like that while campaigning and followed wages closely while in office, becoming one of the original sponsors of the Raise the Wage Act, which would have gradually raised the minimum wage from $7.25 to $17 by 2030.
Gov. Jeff Landry summed up the state’s position on 60 Minutes in May, as lawmakers redrew the map: “In the United States, we get equal rights. No one gets extra rights.”
“Louisiana was built on the backs of my ancestors. They picked cotton, they picked sugar cane. They built this country. They built this state,” Larvadain said. “Extra rights? No. We just want to be treated fairly.”
Not the map they wanted, but shared histories within it
The district may have been drawn out of political grudges, but Black constituents within the district told The Lens that its boundaries had logic behind them, because of the Black culture within that part of Louisiana. They saw a human geography within the new district: a pattern of dispossession and disinvestment that links all of these places, urban and rural, redrawn onto the landscape generation after generation — by the plantation, by Jim Crow, by the redlining map, by the interstate, and now, they argue, by the court itself.
“The Black struggle is universal,” said Terrance Winn, who spent 30 years in the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola and now runs a prison-reform organization in Shreveport. “Whatever we’re going through, from the north to the south of the boot, we can understand it, because we’re going through the same thing in our city.”
Once the map was drawn, District 6 voters seized the chance to send someone with a sympathetic ear to Washington. That fall, voters from the newly created district elected Cleo Fields. In a sense, Fields is the district’s own story in a single life.
The seventh of 10 children, Fields was four when his father, a dockworker, was killed in a car crash. His mother, Alice, raised the ten of them on what she made as a maid and taking in laundry; an eviction landed the family in South Baton Rouge, on the Black south side the interstate would later cut in two. He has talked about the holes in his shoes, the quarters he didn’t have for school field trips.
“I didn’t know what poor was,” he once said. “In junior high school, it really hit me in the face. That’s when I realized what my mother was going through.” He worked his way to Southern University and its law school, and into politics.
He even held a version of this seat once before, in the 1990s, until the courts called that one a gerrymander and dismantled it — much as they were about to dismantle this one. He’s never served in Congress without a lawsuit about his district in the Supreme Court, he has said.
Nine months before Fields was elected, right after the new map was passed and signed, a group of white voters sued in a case called Callais v. Landry, arguing the district was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander — that the state had discriminated against them by drawing a district where Black voters could elect their candidate of choice. A three-judge panel agreed.
The U.S. Supreme Court let the map stand for the 2024 election, heard arguments in March 2025, then took the rare step of ordering the case reargued on a far larger question: whether the race-conscious remedies at the heart of Section 2 themselves violate the 14th and 15th Amendments. Then, in an unusual move, the justices held the case over to the next term.
In yet another unusual move, the state of Louisiana flipped its stance from defending District 6 to opposing it. In March, the state had been dismissive of the plaintiffs’ position: “(T)heir sole standing theory, based on pure speculation, is that those non-Black Plaintiffs who reside in District 6 will be harmed when Black District 6 Representative Cleo Fields ‘play[s] into racial stereotypes to prioritize’ Black voters over them,” the state had argued. But in August, Louisiana announced that it would no longer defend the map it had championed in March — even though the governor’s political payback and allegiances had elongated it into the snake that the Supreme Court saw as a sign of extreme racial gerrymandering.
The state’s brief explained the switch by saying that the governor had blessed the 2024 map only because he was under undue pressure from federal courts. “Race-based redistricting is fundamentally contrary to our Constitution,” wrote Liz Murrill, Louisiana’s attorney general, as the state aligned with other red states in the South whose leaders hoped to draw new maps eliminating majority Black districts.
When the Supreme Court heard new arguments on the case in October 2025, Rep. Cleo Fields was in the audience. “As I sat and listened to today’s oral arguments in Louisiana v. Callais, I was reminded how much is at stake in our country’s democracy,” he wrote in a press statement. He hoped justice would prevail, he wrote. On April 29, the court finally issued its ruling. Writing for the 6-3 majority, Justice Samuel Alito deemed it a district “slicing through metropolitan areas to scoop up pockets of predominantly Black populations,” joined by nothing but the race of the residents that its lines gathered up. Race had predominated; the district was unconstitutional, the court ordered. Then the court went further, recasting Section 2, the legal standard that had governed voting cases for two generations.
LEBEAU — The history of this place is bolted to a post on Highway 71 now, but it took Augusta Rideau years to get it there.
She had turned 77 by the time the state historical marker went up six months ago in this tiny town, population 249, an hour southeast of Alexandria. More than 400 people came back to Lebeau for the unveiling — from California, from Texas, from Washington — and gathered in the yard of Immaculate Conception Church, the Josephite mission their families built here in north St. Landry Parish in 1897.
The Josephites were a white order out of the Northeast that ran Black missions across the South. They sent the priests. The families did everything else.
When the parish needed land, the landowners met and each wrote on a slip of paper how many acres he was willing to give. They built the church on the largest gift — seven acres from a man named Louis Reynaud. The men cut cypress from the bottom of the bayou, hauled it up by horse and wagon, and put the buildings together themselves, with no contractor and no money to hire one.
As in many places across District 6, the families from Lebeau also pushed for Civil Rights, one step at a time. In 1939, the church opened a high school at a time when school for Black children here stopped at the eighth grade. In 1950, the parish priest, Father Bernard Callaghan, helped a group of men from the congregation organize to register to vote.
On a Monday morning that June, they walked into the St. Landry Parish registrar’s office at the courthouse in Opelousas, led by Alvin Jones, an organizer who was also a professor at Xavier University of Louisiana. White men beat them where they stood — with fists, blackjacks, brass knuckles, and the butt of a revolver. Jones later died of his injuries, but not before a young woman in the congregation, Dolores Labrie, typed his notes, and Jones used them to inform voting-rights workers across the country about what had happened in Opelousas. The next year, an NAACP suit finally pried the registrar’s rolls open.
The marker for Immaculate Conception Catholic Church and School arrived early this year, brown with gold letters. Just below the image of a pelican, the text first describes the parish’s history: Louisiana’s first Josephite parish, it was founded in 1897 with Father Pierre Oscar Lebeau as its first priest and sent priests to Black churches across the South.
The second paragraph explains the parish’s importance: “Having a priest for the large number of Black Catholics already living in the area meant funerals, weddings, baptisms and Sunday Mass. The school started in 1900, adding the high school in 1939. The closest high school that Black people could attend at the time was 30 miles away. … Immaculate Conception Parish has served as an anchor for the community providing both spiritual and educational needs and was always open to all.”
To Rideau, the sign’s very presence symbolized the refusal of one more erasure. “Black people throughout the United States are being erased from part of society,” Rideau said. “And we made sure that forever, Lebeau will be a part of the United States. People will know about Lebeau — the children, grandchildren, and so on. That history won’t be erased.”
The same hands that built the school could not keep it. Often during integration, the buildings that housed white students stayed open while the Black schools closed. That happened here too. Rideau was in one of the last classes of students to graduate from an all-Black high school, Phillis Wheatley. When the schools in the area integrated, the parish closed the high school in 1964. The elementary school held on until 1980. Each school closure scattered the town. “They split the community,” Rideau said. “Some went to Miami, some to Washington, some to Tampa, some to Houston.”
The marker was a lifetime’s work, and not Rideau’s alone. The research behind it belonged to Agatha Bush, a genealogist who, with a teacher and librarian named Myrline Labrie, spent years compiling the binders of parish history the application rested on. Bush died in 2020, at 82, before the marker she made possible was ever unveiled.
The state marker was won without any politician’s help — “we did it all ourselves,” Rideau said, the application went through the lieutenant governor’s tourism office and was decided, finally, by a committee in the LSU history department.
What the foundation wants next is bigger: a place on the National Register of Historic Places, the federal designation that would let Lebeau qualify for the preservation grants Rideau wants for her hometown, “to take care of it.” Those applications run through Washington, a place that she fears will now have fewer representatives interested in Lebeau and the history it represents.
Coming up next in Driving District 6: A Louisiana court recognizes white Cajun history as a “culture,” while dismissing centuries of shared Black history as nothing more than “race.” Plus, one of the state’s youngest mayors tracks down crews to fix the latest busted sewer main while waiting for money to replace it.
