Houston, Texas – The gospel music from Mount Hebron Missionary Baptist Church spills into the streets of Sunnyside, a predominantly Black neighbourhood in southern Houston. It is a familiar scene on any given Sunday: hands in the air, immaculate bow ties on starched shirts, fabric flowers adorning perfectly pastel hats. But with the US midterm elections just two days away, the service held a special significance on the front line of a US redistricting battle.
Mt Hebron had long been located in the ninth congressional district, its politically engaged Black voters for two decades helping to elect Democrat Al Green, a flamboyant presence in Congress known for his cane-waving opposition to US President Donald Trump. But following an appeal from Trump, the Republican state legislature last year conducted rare mid-decade redistricting, redrawing the church and its Black community into the Black-majority 18th district. Critics call the process “cracking and packing”, diminishing the representation in Congress of minority groups, particularly heavily Democratic Black communities, by consolidating their voting power into fewer districts.
He lost, and Houston lost one of its Black representatives in Congress. The ninth district, meanwhile, was redrawn to favour Republicans, one of at least five US congressional seats the party hopes to pick up in the midterm vote. The machinations have resonated with worshippers at Mt Hebron.
This year Republican and Democratic state legislatures across the country joined the spree: Republicans successfully redistricted in Missouri, North Carolina, Tennessee, Louisiana, Alabama, Florida and Ohio; Democrats did so in California, while a court-ordered map in Utah handed Democrats a favourable seat. A Democratic push in Virginia was subsequently invalidated. Redrawing maps mid-decade, and not waiting for the latest demographic numbers from the US census, was already atypical.
But many of the maps drawn this year would have been deemed illegal in previous cycles. Section 2 of the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965, initially passed to counter blatantly racist voting practices in the US, had long prohibited redrawing congressional maps to dilute the electoral power of minority voters. In April, the conservative-dominated US Supreme Court ruled that anyone challenging such a map must prove “racist intent”.
Critics have said the ruling effectively allows for racial gerrymandering, with proving such an intent an unreasonably high bar. But critics of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act have said drawing maps to protect minority voting power is in itself discriminatory. Defenders in Texas, meanwhile, have said the redistricting was based on the shifting political makeup of the state, and not racial gerrymandering.
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