One Person, No Vote (YA edition): How Not All Voters Are Treated Equally

by Carol Anderson

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, black people 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. This is what it took to remove all but four or five of the four hundred voting-age eligible black people from the city and ensure that no white voter was excluded. Alabama argued that it had the authority to change its city boundaries whenever and however it chose and it didn’t need a reason.