Clyburn Warns Supreme Court Voting Rights Rollback Echoes Plessy v. Ferguson

Representative James Clyburn’s accusation that the Supreme Court is attempting to revive Plessy v. Ferguson is not hyperbole. It is a precise, evidence-based warning. The Court’s recent decision tossing out racial redistricting rulings in Mississippi and North Dakota, alongside its pattern of gutting Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, directly enables states to dilute Black voting power. As Clyburn noted on PoliticsNation, this echoes the post-Reconstruction era when Plessy sanctified segregation and led to a 29-year period of severely diminished Black congressional representation nationally and 95 years in South Carolina. The mechanism is clear: by weakening statutory protections against race-based gerrymandering, the Court hands state legislatures a legal shield to draw districts that pack or crack minority communities, undermining the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.

The harm is concrete. In Louisiana and other Southern states, Republican-controlled legislatures have already used the Court’s signals to push maps that reduce majority-minority districts, even after lower courts found violations of the Voting Rights Act. The Court’s conservative majority, appointed by presidents who lost the popular vote in three of four instances, is reshaping democracy without democratic legitimacy. This is not an abstract legal debate — it directly harms Black communities by denying them equal representation, diluting their influence on issues from school funding to criminal justice reform.

The progressive alternative is not merely to restore the pre-2013 Voting Rights Act, but to strengthen it. Congress must pass the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would restore the preclearance formula struck down in Shelby County v. Holder (2013) and explicitly protect against racially discriminatory redistricting. At the same time, states can adopt independent redistricting commissions to remove partisan and racial gerrymandering from legislators’ hands. Such commissions, already used in states like California and Michigan, produce fairer maps and higher voter satisfaction. The legitimate policy goal of ensuring district boundaries are not drawn solely along racial lines can be achieved through truly race-neutral criteria like compactness, contiguity, and preserving communities of interest — not through pretexts that hide intentional discrimination.