These days Fowler and Barbour are chairmen of their national parties. Last week, they again were puzzling urgently over racial math. In a landmark ruling that may greatly limit the reach of the Voting Rights Act, the Supreme Court declared that race could no longer be the “predominant factor” in drawing congressional districts -or, by implication, any jurisdiction, from school boards to state legislatures. In effect, the court hit the recall button on the spread-sheet of race.
The court’s ruling presents the Democrats with a dilemma. Do they disperse their most loyal voters–blacks–to pick up seats in marginal districts? Or do they try to protect the minority officeholders who’re only recently moved from the back of the bus to the driver’s seat? From 1990 to 1992, the number of minorities in Congress rose, from 45 to 69. Tough and stringy as a Slim Jim, Fowler was nervously equivocal. “This case could result in building better coalitions in our party,” he said, back home in Columbia, S.C. “But it also could cause us a lot of internal tension.” Barbour, broad and squat as a football lineman, sounded relaxed after an evening stroll through his hometown of Yazoo City. “I’m following Napoleon’s adage,” he said with a chuckle. “Never interfere with an enemy when he is in the process of destroying himself.”
This is the unglamorous engine room of American politics: where the gears grind and maps matter. The questions are prosaic yet profound: who gets to vote, and where? Ever since the Constitution decreed that each slave would count as three fifths of a citizen, racial math has been the nation’s paramount political obsession.
To understand the recent history, look no further than the central Georgia district at issue in last week’s court case–and the story of a political family that rose there. In 1963 a young black policeman in Atlanta J. E. (Billy) McKinney, attended the Rev. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial. Two years later he joined King’s Selma-to-Montgomery march, protesting the fiendishly complicated registration laws that disenfranchised blacks in Alabama and across the South. After the Voting Rights Act was signed by LBJ in 1965, Billy got political ambition. With blacks swelling the voter rolls, he won a seat in the Georgia Legislature in 1972.
In 1989 his daughter Cynthia joined him there. The Voting Rights Act had been rewritten in 1982 to include a new goal. Civil-fights shorthand calls it “max black”: maximizing the number of minority officeholders. Educated at Southern Cal and Tufts, Cynthia McKinney joined the committee that would draw new congressional-district lines after the 1990 census. With help from federal lawyers–and from shrewd Republicans happy to squeeze loyally Democratic blacks into a few districts–the committee drew a beaut. On the map (chart) it looked like a leaping hog, snout in Atlanta, tail in Savannah. It was a max-black district, 64 percent African-American, In 1992 Cynthia McKinney herself won the new seat.
Now the court says that McKinney and her colleagues had focused too intently on race. In a 5-4 opinion by Justice Anthony Kennedy, joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, the court said that the district discriminated against whites. Within hours of the decision, Cynthia was back where her father had started, at the Lincoln Memorial. “We’ve experienced a setback,” she declared. “It’s a shame that we are even still arguing about whether we have gone overboard in perfecting our democracy.”
But that’s precisely the argument: whether the country has gone overboard. The fight isn’t settled. Race still can be a factor, the court ruled, just not the “predominant one.” The justices agreed to hear other redistricting cases next term, and may further tinker with the rules. No one knows how legislatures – which must do the line drawing – will respond.
Meanwhile, the political war games have begun. In theory, the decision could spur Republicans to woo black votes more systematically–and honor their oft-stated intention to again be the Party of Lincoln. But that’s probably not in the offing. Instead, Republicans are likely to hunker down and try to maintain the status quo. The GOP now controls 45 of the nation’s 99 state legislative chambers, and probably won’t bring suits to re-draw district lines. “The new districts tremendously helped Republicans,” says Ben Ginsberg, a former general counsel of the Republican National Committee, who helped provide blacks with the computer data and expertise they needed to draw new max-black districts in the first place.
For years, white Democrats in the South have been warning that aggressively race-based redistricting would destroy white moderates in the region. The Bush Justice Department was “abusively strategizing” to accomplish that goal, says John Merritt, an aide to North Carolina Rep. Charlie Rose. There were other factors in the decline of the white Democratic South, the leftward drift of the national Democratic Party chief among them. But redistricting is another crucial, if obscure, reason for the falling off. The overall numbers depress most Democrats. In 1980 there were only two black Democrats in Congress from the “Greater” South (which includes Kentucky and Oklahoma), and 43 Republicans. Today there are 17 black Democrats–but 75 Republicans. The GOP’s Southern ranks could swell further, if more conservative Democrats switch parties. Nine just voted for the GOP’s budget in the House.
By one theory, the court ruling is good news for Democrats, since it moves the party’s most reliable voters, African-Americans, into marginal districts Republicans recently won. But more important than the math is the psychology. They now have the impetus to end the paint-by-race thinking that has ensnarled them for three decades.
But Democrats could stir anger and fear if they abandon “majority black” districts. “We felt under siege even before this,” said Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee of Houston. And then there is Jesse Jackson. The court’s decision was “devastating,” he said, warning national Democrats not to walk away from their commitment to max-black districts. In a carefully worded statement, DNC Chairman Fowler vowed that the party would “redouble its commitment to the vindication of the fundamental purposes of the Voting Rights Act . . .” Key word: “fundamental,” which may not include the contorted districts struck down by the court.
Meanwhile, Jackson complicates the calculations. He could run as an independent for president, and says he’s considering forming a minority-based third party. “That’s an option,” Jackson told NEWSWEEK. “More than half of all African-Americans live in the South. Why not start with that – with us – as a base for a new party?”
So what about the McKinneys? Cynthia’s father was furious, accusing the court of a “racist” riding. But he’s not the one on the front lines. His daughter is. She was calm and careful–and trying to follow in the Democrats’ heyday tradition of interracial coalitions. Yes, bubbas sometimes refuse to shake her hand. “This is Dixie,” she said. But, defiantly, she was not about to say that she couldn’t win, whatever the new shape of her district. “Maybe I’m the test case,” she said. “Let’s see how I do.”
To boost the number of minorities in Congress, some states drew bizarre legislative lines. Now the court has cast doubt on race-conscious districts.
