Blasting Off to Planet Geek

For most of U.S. history, political parties have crafted districts designed to benefit their own interests. The term itself is named after Elbridge Gerry, the governor of Massachusetts, who in 1812 authorized a bizarre state senate district that looked like a salamander. Since the early 19th century, through the redistricting process that follows each new Census, voters have been packed into districts that would elect candidates from the party in power. Sometimes state officials in bipartisan states reached deals so that each side could enjoy the benefits of safe seats.

But partisan gerrymandering took on a distinct racial character in the South, where Democrats dominated. Liberal Democrats viewed redistricting reform as essential to advancing civil rights. Although their primary focus was the South, northern states such as New York and Illinois also maintained districts at the state and federal level that favored rural areas, bolstering conservative power.

By the 1950s, prominent northern Democratic politicians were calling for systematic change. The United States had been transformed by urbanization and industrialization, they argued, yet state legislatures kept district boundaries untouched. “The popular character of the House has been destroyed,” argued Minnesota Rep. Eugene McCarthy in 1952, “by the failure of the state legislatures to provide for Congressional districts of approximately the same population and by the practice of electing Congressmen at large.”

In 1958, then-Sen. John F. Kennedy wrote a New York Times column titled “Shame of the Cities” in which he said: “Of all the discriminations against the urban areas, the most fundamental and the most blatant is political: the apportionment of representation in our Legislatures and (to a lesser extent) in Congress has been either deliberately rigged or shamefully ignored so as to deny the cities and their voters that full and proportionate voice in government to which they are entitled. … At one time, in a then largely rural nation, legislative strength was heavily weighted in favor of rural areas. Though times have changed, many Legislatures have not.” A liberal coalition that included the AFL-CIO, the Americans for Democratic Action, the League of Women Voters, and the American Civil Liberties Union championed reform.

But the conservative coalition of Southern Democratic committee chairmen and Midwestern Republicans who had controlled the chambers since the 1938 midterm elections blocked any legislative progress. In the U.S. House, some of the most notorious conservative Southern barons of the committee system counted on being reelected from districts with sparse numbers of voters, most of whom had little appetite for the civil rights movement that was shaking the region.

The responsibility for action ultimately fell to the federal courts. Chief Justice Warren had come to believe that equitable apportionment could have saved the nation “acute racial troubles” by assuring that every person’s vote carried equal weight. Although Black southerners had generally been disenfranchised under the Jim Crow system imposed after Reconstruction, those who had been able to register to vote were often at a disadvantage because of where they lived. Moreover, if the struggle for voting rights legislation was successful, the composition of districts would work against the political progress that would otherwise be made.

Within the Supreme Court, there had been strong opposition to intervening in anything connected to elections. The federal courts were wary of what Justice Felix Frankfurter famously called the “political thicket.” Because the Constitution left elections to the states, earlier justices had concluded that the court had no authority to step in. They also doubted whether the judiciary could define a clear, workable standard for the states to follow. If he and his colleagues attempted to resolve these thorny issues, warned Justice John Marshall Harlan II, Americans might even begin scrutinizing the “political backgrounds or ideologies” of the Supreme Court justices themselves.

But the pressure from the civil rights movement continued to mount. A coalition in Tennessee argued that the state had failed to reapportion seats for the lower chamber of the state legislature, the General Assembly, since 1901. Not only did the state constitution require reapportionment every 10 years, but demographic changes had also rendered the old district lines inequitable. Their lawyers argued that the districts violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment which deemed that states had to treat people the same way. Laws that discriminated on the basis of race were thus unconstitutional.

In 1962, the Supreme Court ruled in Baker v. Carr that the courts could make decisions about these issues and legitimated the claims of the plaintiffs about the violation of the equal protection clause. Tennessee’s apportionment scheme violated the 14th Amendment because it diluted the vote of urban residents. Justice William Brennan, writing for the majority (which included Warren as well as Justices Hugo Black, William O. Douglas, Tom C. Clark, and Potter Stewart), held that such disparities constituted a denial of equal protection. The court remanded the case, sending it back to the lower court for a final decision. Even so, the ruling became a landmark because it established that the court could intervene in apportionment disputes when citizens were denied equal protection under the 14th Amendment. Within months, over 30 suits were filed. “The rush through the door unlocked by Baker v. Carr,” observed one expert, “has been staggering.”

Baker v. Carr energized supporters of civil rights to demand more. Soon after the decision, the court’s chief opponent of federal intervention, Felix Frankfurter, retired following a stroke. Then-President Kennedy appointed Secretary of Labor Arthur Goldberg to the court, a justice far more sympathetic to Baker v. Carr. The impact was immediate. A Georgia businessman, James O. Sanders, sued the state to overturn its county unit system, which systematically undermined Black political representation. A federal court agreed, declaring that the system could not be justified in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision. Jimmy Carter, then a peanut farmer and former Navy engineer running for a seat in the state legislature, later recalled the decision and its aftermath as a turning point in Southern politics: “This was the major news item to be read and discussed at our peanut warehouse, at church, at Lions Club meetings, and in the small county newspapers.”

The next case shifted the focus from state legislatures to the federal government, centering on districts for the U.S. House of Representatives. In Wesberry v. Sanders (1964), the court ruled that Georgia’s congressional districts were unconstitutional. Plaintiffs from the 5th District argued that their district had nearly the population of the state’s smallest, the 9th, yet both elected only one representative. This diluted the votes of 5th District residents. In a 6-3 decision, the Warren Court held that congressional districts must be drawn to be roughly equal in population so that each person’s vote carried the same weight. According to the majority, led by Justice Black, “It would defeat the principle solemnly embodied in the Great Compromise—equal representation in the House for equal numbers of people—for us to hold that, within the States, legislatures may draw the lines of congressional districts in such a way as to give some voters a greater voice in choosing a Congressman than others.”

Baker v. Carr legitimized judicial intervention in apportionment. Wesberry v. Sanders extended the “one-man, one vote” principle to districts for the U.S. House. In another 1964 case, Reynolds v. Sims, the court ruled that both chambers of state legislatures had to be determined according to population.

The revolution in judicial thinking meshed with the landmark legislation passed by the Democratic Congress in 1965, signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson, that committed the federal government to ensuring that states did not violate the 15th Amendment, the Reconstruction amendment that protected the right of all (male) citizens to vote. As Black registration rapidly increased in the South after 1965, reapportioned districts that were drawn in response to the Supreme Court decisions ensured that the new votes would be treated the same way as white votes in rural communities.

Democrats also blocked efforts by congressional conservatives such as Virginia Democrat William Tuck, who attempted to pass legislation stripping the courts of their ability to intervene in apportionment cases. Although the measure won support in the House, it failed in the Senate.  Liberals likewise blocked a proposed constitutional amendment from Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen that would have reversed the court decision’s rulings on state government. The American Jewish Congress opposed Dirksen’s proposal, arguing that the effort to reverse the Court’s decisions was an attack on “democratic principle.” Ultimately, Dirksen was defeated.

In 1969, in Allen v. State Board of Elections, the Supreme Court ruled that vote dilution fell within the scope of the Voting Rights Act. Under this interpretation, the Department of Justice gained authority under Section 5 to deal with inequitable districting in addition to the denial of the vote. Federal “preclearance” would be necessary for any changes to voting, even matters that appeared technical or procedural. Over the following decades, rural-dominated districts were dismantled, and the number of metropolitan and urban districts steadily increased.

By the end of the decade, the transformation of legislative representation was complete. It didn’t come as a surprise that Warren would later call Baker v. Carr the “most vital” decision of his tenure.

The legacy of the Warren Court is now hanging by a thread. The immense progress that had been made in the 1960s tackling the problem of systemic racism within the electoral system has lost massive ground. A series of Supreme Court decisions, as well as legislation and court decisions in red states, have expanded voting restrictions and are now leading to a dangerous acceleration of the redistricting wars where long-standing concerns about racial justice are losing their hold.