One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy

by Carol Anderson

Thus, when the commissioners in Shelby County, Alabama, challenged the Voting Rights Act by outright defying it, the U.S. Supreme Court was already primed and just waiting for a test case. Calera City, Alabama, had a city council that included one African American councilman. His district was 65 percent black, in a city that was over 30 percent African American. Then the commissioners in Shelby County began annexing land surrounding Calera City, and with each annexation they began to redraw the electoral districts, so much so that the black councilman’s district population shrank from 65 percent African American to 29 percent. Running now in a predominately white district, where more than three-fourths of the electorate voted against Barack Obama, the lone black councilman lost the next election.171 This was not the first time that the Supreme Court had dealt with the redrawing of a city’s boundaries designed to dilute the voting strength of a town’s black population. In the late 1950s, African Americans in Tuskegee, Alabama, had begun, against all odds, to amass some semblance of voting strength. The state legislature quickly countered by annexing plot after plot of land surrounding Tuskegee until the town’s perfectly symmetrical square boundaries had been horribly disfigured into a twenty-eight-sided blob. But this is exactly what it took to remove all but four or five of the four hundred voting-age eligible African Americans from the city and ensure that no white voter ...