Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee signed a new congressional map into law on May 7 that breaks up Memphis, eliminates the state’s only majority-Black congressional district and threatens to erase Black voters’ only real voice in Tennessee’s congressional delegation.
On April 30, Trump posted on Truth Social that he had spoken with Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee and that Lee would “work hard” to “correct” Tennessee’s congressional map. Trump said the change “should give us one extra seat” and signed off: “Thank you Governor Lee — PUSH HARD!” On May 1, Lee called the special session.
On May 7, the House passed the map 64-25. One lawmaker walked into the chamber wearing a Trump 2024 flag as a cape. The message was not hidden: this was Trump’s map, pushed through by Tennessee’s legislative majority.
This is not tanks in the streets. It is a Trump coup carried out by law. The Supreme Court guts voting rights. Governors declare “election emergencies.” State legislatures redraw maps so those in power can choose their voters, cancel elections they do not like and wipe out Black representation before November.
Memphis is the largest Black-majority city in the United States. Its Black population is more than 60%. The proposed map does not simply redraw the district — it carves the city into three pieces and connects them to rural conservative areas stretching hundreds of miles away, in some cases reaching into middle Tennessee. Candidate qualifying deadlines have already passed. August primaries are months away. The speed is deliberate.
To make the attack possible, lawmakers first repealed Tennessee’s ban on mid-decade redistricting, a protection that had stood for more than 50 years. Then they reopened candidate qualifying until May 15, after the old deadlines had already passed.
“This whole process has been a sham,” said state Rep. Justin Pearson, speaking on May 6 as the legislative majority advanced the plan. “It’s been done in secrecy, behind closed doors, with backroom deals. This is just wrong. And everyone knows why this is happening. This is an attack on our Black majority district, this is an attack on our democracy.”
Pearson is one of the Tennessee Three: Justin Pearson of Memphis, Justin Jones of Nashville and Gloria Johnson of Knoxville. In 2023, Pearson and Jones, both Black lawmakers, were expelled from the Tennessee House after they joined students and parents demanding action on gun violence following the Covenant School shooting. Johnson, who is white and joined the same protest, survived expulsion by one vote. The official excuse was “disorderly behavior.” The real offense was that two young Black representatives brought the anger of the streets into the chamber and would not be silent.
Now Johnson has named what the same legislature is doing to Memphis. “This is not a special session — this is a white power rally, and a white power grab,” she said ahead of the May 7 vote.
Black legislators at the Tennessee State Capitol put the attack on Memphis in plain terms. “There’s no way to sugarcoat eliminating a district that is 61% Black and breaking it up into three different districts,” said state Sen. Raumesh Akbari on May 6. “You are deliberately trying to silence the voices of a community. You cannot call it anything but racism.”
Tennessee is part of a coordinated offensive. Alabama began its own special session on May 4 to eliminate districts currently represented by Black members of Congress. A federal court had previously ordered Alabama to keep its current map through 2030. Gov. Kay Ivey is now using the Louisiana ruling to seek Supreme Court permission to override that order.
Florida moved the same day as the Supreme Court ruling. Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a new congressional map on May 4 that targets Black representation in Orlando, Tampa-St. Petersburg and South Florida. In Louisiana, Gov. Jeff Landry had already declared an “election emergency” and suspended congressional primaries after more than 42,000 absentee ballots had already been cast.
The AFL-CIO called the Supreme Court ruling “an outright attack on the fundamental freedoms of all working people” — a recognition that stripping Black voters of representation silences the working class as a whole. That is the point. When Black voters are scattered and silenced, the bosses gain a freer hand against every worker.
That connection is not rhetorical. Memphis has a long history of labor and civil rights struggle — it was where sanitation workers struck in 1968, where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in the midst of that fight. Breaking up Black representation in Memphis is an attack on a working-class city’s right to have a voice in Congress.
Protesters made that history present on May 6, interrupting committee hearings with chants of “Memphis is Black, there’s no denying that!” and “Hands off our vote!” Demonstrators rallied outside the Tennessee State Capitol in Nashville. Students confronted senators inside the building.
Martin Luther King III called it a return to Jim Crow. He is right about the lineage. The fight for democratic rights in Memphis runs from the Reconstruction-era Memphis Massacre through Ida B. Wells’s anti-lynching campaign through the 1968 sanitation strike through every generation since. The Voting Rights Act that state lawmakers are now gutting in practice was written in blood.
The Supreme Court did not hand down that act. It was won in the streets of Selma and Birmingham and across the South, by people who faced murder, beatings and jail. The same court now being used to dismantle those gains has a long record: Dred Scott, Plessy v. Ferguson, and now Louisiana v. Callais.
Tennessee’s vote on May 7 is not an isolated event. With more than half of the country’s Black population concentrated in the South, the redistricting war underway is a coordinated ruling-class attack on Black communities’ right to be heard and represented — and on the working class as a whole. A ruling class waging war abroad and cutting programs at home needs Black voters scattered and Black representation gone before resistance can organize.
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