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By upholding Alabama’s gerrymandered districts, SCOTUS is laying the groundwork for ending voting rights and political power for Black people.

By April England-Albright, Cliff Albright & LaTosha Brown, The Guardian

In Tuesday, the US supreme court in its Merrill v Milligan decision, upheld Alabama’s racially gerrymandered congressional map, which see Black people represented in only 14% of congressional districts, despite making up about 27% of Alabama’s population. This ruling is reminiscent of the holding in the supreme court’s 1857 Dred Scott decision that Black people “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect”. Even though the two cases addressed two different situations, the overall disregard of the rights of Black people in America by the highest court in the country is the same.

And just as the Dred Scott decision laid the groundwork for similar rulings that led to the continuation of white political power at the expense of Black political power, so too does the Miller case lay the groundwork for ending voting rights and political power for Black people in this country and a path towards white political power at all levels of government.

The Supreme Court is still on the side of Jim Crow

Some reading this will gasp and accuse us of misusing an explosive pre-reconstruction case to make a racially charged argument. But the reality is that the conservative gang of justices, under the leadership of Chief Justice John Roberts, had already joined its pre-1954 brethren who had indoctrinated Jim Crow policies and the disenfranchisement of Black voters.

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Racial Justice and Civil Rights