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FORT WORTH — When Lillie Biggins learned that the YMCA in East Fort Worth was in danger of being sold, she did what people on this side of town do when they need help.

She called Marc.

Marc lived in the neighborhood, and his son had learned to swim at this Y. He’d grown up in an area of the city like this one — predominately Black and Latino, poor, often ignored — and understood how important this hub of social services, child care and physical fitness was to the community.

Marc was also, importantly, a U.S. congressman, representing Fort Worth and parts of Tarrant and Dallas counties. He took Biggins’ call, and helped secure $2.4 million in federal funds to save the YMCA.

“I knew I wouldn’t have to explain to him how things work over here,” said Biggins, a board member of the Eastside YMCA. “He lives in this community too. We see him at the grocery store, and we can hold him accountable.”

For many on this side of the city, U.S. Rep. Marc Veasey isn’t just another politician. As the first Black congressman from Tarrant County, he’s the embodiment of long-denied political representation they’ve fought hard to achieve.

Twenty years ago, Tarrant County was 75% white, the largest red county in the country. But explosive growth, driven entirely by people of color, has boosted the power of Black and Hispanic voters, who tend to pull the lever for Democrats like Veasey. Now majority non-white, Tarrant County has become a true swing county, and if demographic changes continue, seems on track to eventually turn blue.

Until redistricting.

Not the usual once-a-decade redistricting to account for population growth, but an extra round to protect Republicans’ narrow majority in the U.S. House. As part of their effort to create five new GOP seats in Texas, state lawmakers erased Veasey’s district from Tarrant County entirely.

The freshly refurbished YMCA will now be in a district with a majority-white, majority-Republican electorate that extends nearly 150 miles west, almost to Abilene. Other historic Black and Hispanic neighborhoods are tacked onto similarly stretched districts covering wide swaths of rural Texas.

Meanwhile, in June, Tarrant County officials redrew its maps to replace a Black Democrat with one of the state Legislature’s most conservative members on the county commissioners’ court.

In a county where 47% of voters went for Kamala Harris in 2024, there will likely be just one Democrat on the county commissioner’s court, and one corner of the county represented by a Democrat in Congress. The new districts virtually guarantee Republican candidates their seats, without having to court communities of color they picked up in Tarrant County.

It’s an evisceration of political power that community leaders fear will set them back decades. It’s especially painful that this is coming right as these communities have finally seen their political clout grow to match their increasing population numbers, Biggins said.

“We don’t have a voice except through our elected officials,” she said. “If you earn something, you’ve earned it. But if you’re demanding it [or] just taking it — that’s not how this is supposed to work.”

A son of Stop Six

Last June, the Stop Six neighborhood in southeast Fort Worth lost a local legend. Robert Hughes, the winningest boys basketball coach in the United States, died at 96, after a nearly five-decade career in which he led the Dunbar High Wildcats to two state titles and more than a thousand regular season wins.

A week after his death, community leaders gathered to honor the coach’s life and legacy at Hughes House, a mixed-income housing development that is the centerpiece of an ongoing effort to revitalize this historic Black neighborhood

Hughes House was “going to be almost as outstanding, and just as fabulous for the community, as Coach Hughes,” Veasey said as he presented a check for $4.1 million in federal funding, according to the Fort Worth Report.

This project is part of a transformation taking place in Stop Six, bringing new housing, businesses and private development to the neighborhood. It’s taken buy-in at every level of government: Gyna Bivens, who then represented this area on City Council, spearheaded an effort to change zoning restrictions to make it easier to build housing. County Commissioner Roy Brooks, part of a newly balanced partisan split on Tarrant County’s governing body, helped improve roads and infrastructure. And Veasey worked with the first Trump administration to get a $35 million grant to kickstart the work.

At the event, Brooks, who was preparing to step down after 20 years on commissioners court, commended all the elected officials who helped make it happen.

“When you occupy these seats of power, you look mighty good sitting,” Brooks said. “But you look even better when you use the powers and authority that you have to make improvements for the people you represent.”

It wasn’t always this way in Stop Six, or many of the historic Black and Hispanic neighborhoods in southeast Fort Worth. Sidelined by segregation and discriminatory housing practices, it took generations for these areas to fight their way to representation at City Hall, on the county Commissioners Court and in the state Legislature.

In Congress, longtime Fort Worth Rep. Martin Frost, a white Democrat, was an ally to these communities until his district was divvied up among Republicans in 2003, when the Legislature’s new GOP majority embarked on mid-decade redistricting to seize control of Texas’ congressional seats for the first time since Reconstruction.

The next year, a former Frost aide and proud son of Stop Six named Marc Veasey ran to represent these areas in the state Legislature. Bivens was glad to give him her vote.

“You really want to know with certainty that the people you elect know your community, know those needs, know those priorities, and just the culture,” she said. “I think that’s key to a representative government … and that was Marc.”

As he entered office, Veasey’s district and the areas around it were changing fast. Between 2000 and 2010, Tarrant County grew by a quarter, with Black, Hispanic and Asian populations each increasing by more than 40%. Fort Worth was now majority non-white, and Tarrant County was on its way, seemingly a boon for the ability of voters of color to elect their candidates of choice.

And yet, when state legislators drew new congressional lines in 2011, Tarrant County was given only majority-white, Republican-leaning districts that carved up communities of color — similar in many ways to the new plan signed by Gov. Greg Abbott on Friday.

“It looked like a racial gerrymander to us,” Nina Perales, the vice president of litigation at the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund, said of the original 2011 map. “It looked like these appendages were following racial lines to scoop minority populations out of Dallas and Fort Worth and combine them with majority white populations outside of the Metroplex.”

State legislators maintained that the maps were drawn blind to race, with the sole goal of winning more Republican seats. A panel of three federal judges disagreed, ruling in 2017 that the state had “acted at least in part with a racially discriminatory motive … with regard to the districts in DFW in particular.”

The court drew up new maps that detached these communities of color from the districts they’d been folded into. What was left was a contiguous stretch from Fort Worth, through east Tarrant County and into Dallas, now known as the 33rd Congressional District. The court-ordered seat was 40% Hispanic, 25% Black and 31% white — an electorate that grew even more diverse by the end of the decade — and would allow Black and Hispanic voters to elect their preferred congressional candidate, according to the court’s analysis.

They chose Veasey, who became Tarrant County’s first Black member of Congress.

“It’s amazing to be able to represent the same areas that I’ve played in as a kid,” he said recently. “East Fort Worth, we always kind of get the short end of the stick on a lot of different things. … We just need for this area to not be ignored and I’m glad to have been a part of that.”

Twelve years later, Veasey is the county’s longest tenured member in a body where seniority dictates influence. He’s launched affordable housing projects, like Hughes House; worked closely with Rep. Kay Granger, a Republican, on a $1.2 billion flood control project; and secured funding for major transportation projects.

Everyone in Fort Worth, it seems, has Veasey’s cell phone number and is happy to use it, sometimes to the frustration of staff trying to keep him on schedule. When people call state Rep. Ramon Romero with immigration issues, or other concerns that require federal intervention, he knows exactly who to point them to in Veasey’s office.

“His constituent services were as good as any,” said Romero, a Democrat who chairs the House’s Mexican American Legislative Caucus. “This was one district where we were able to choose our representative and be happy with [them].”

And if they’re not happy with him, or if they feel like he’s not representing their interests, they have the power to vote him out.

“Had he promised us something, or had he said he would help and he couldn’t do it?” Biggins said. “He has to come back and face us. He lives in this community too.”

The other redistricting

In mid-May, Veasey attended a town hall meeting in Arlington about an unusual mid-decade redistricting effort to shore up Republican power.

“It is blatant, it is intentional and it violates the Voting Rights Act,” Veasey said from the stage, noting that the process had been “crammed into a period of barely six weeks, and only four public hearings.”

Veasey wasn’t defending his own seat — this was months before the state would redraw its congressional map. Instead, he was speaking out on behalf of the portion of his constituents who are represented by County Commissioner Alisa Simmons, a Black Democrat who was being drawn out of her seat.

Two of Tarrant County’s commissioner precincts are solidly Republican; one is solidly Democratic. And one is a swing district, covering the fast-growing, rapidly diversifying and politically unpredictable southeastern stretch of the county.

In 2018, Democrats won the swing district for the first time, electing a Black woman named Devan Allen. Four years later, Simmons beat out a conservative former commissioner by 4,000 votes to succeed her.

Since joining the court, Simmons has spoken out about conditions within the Tarrant County Jail, worked to build affordable housing and pushed solar energy projects, and has joined her Republican colleagues on bipartisan property tax cuts. She has also tried to serve as a blockade against the court’s growing conservative faction, led by County Judge Tim O’Hare.

At the same time that Tarrant County is becoming a diverse melting pot of races, ethnicities and political ideologies, it has also become a laboratory for far-right governance.

An uncompromising conservative, O’Hare made headlines in 2020 for co-founding a political action committee that unseated local school board members who supported campus diversity and equity programming in the wake of several racist incidents, including a viral clip where white students chanted racial slurs. O’Hare’s effort drew national attention to the Southlake suburb and kicked off a national battle over how schools should confront issues of race, sex and gender.

O’Hare ran for county judge — the county’s top executive — in 2022 on a platform of respecting “faith, freedom and family values.” He told KERA News that he would “absolutely, unequivocally” make Tarrant County more conservative “every single day.”

Since assuming office, he has tried to shut down early voting on college campuses, cut funding to a program for low-income girls because of the group’s stances on abortion and LGBTQ issues and voted to outsource social services to private companies. Repeatedly stuck on the losing end of 3-2 votes, Simmons has voiced her opposition during court meetings, leading to public clashes, including one where O’Hare told her to “sit there and be quiet.”

“There’s an attitude that they have where they really can’t be embarrassed, they really don’t care what you think and they stay so focused on whatever it is they’re trying to decimate,” Pastor Michael Bell, a local civil rights leader, said. “They will not be distracted.”

After Tarrant County swung narrowly for Trump in 2024 — while also going for Democratic Senate nominee Colin Allred by a hair — O’Hare began pushing to redraw Simmons’ precinct to make it solidly Republican. The map adopted in early June would pack fast-growing Black and Hispanic communities from her precinct into the sole remaining Democrat-leaning one, giving the GOP a supermajority on the five-person court.

Just days after the map was approved on a 3-2 vote, state Rep. Tony Tinderholt, one of the Texas House’s most conservative members, announced he would run for Simmons’ seat. Tinderholt, who has made headlines for far-right legislation, like allowing women who have abortions to be charged with murder, quickly rolled out a long list of local GOP endorsements — including O’Hare and the two incumbent GOP commissioners — that effectively cleared the primary field. Tinderholt did not respond to a request for comment.

Two different groups have since sued the county, arguing the maps are unconstitutional and run afoul of the Voting Rights Act. O’Hare declined an interview but said in a statement that the redraw was based on constitutional, partisan grounds, to “ensure conservative governance of Tarrant County for years to come.”

Simmons said the new map breaks up communities that have grown together, choosing the voters for the candidate rather than the other way around.

“They shuffle people around from their centralized representation and deny them the ability to elect one of their own,” she said. “The previous map respected communities and interests. This new map confuses power over people.”

A return to the past?

Just weeks after the county redrew its map, state legislators embarked down the same path, pushed by President Donald Trump and his concern about losing the GOP’s narrow House majority in the 2026 midterms.

Amid Trump’s pressure campaign, a top Department of Justice official sent Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton a letter that claimed the state’s existing congressional map was unconstitutional.

The letter said Texas had to redraw four congressional districts, including Veasey’s, because they were “coalition districts,” created to address voting rights violations in areas where Black and Hispanic voters constitute a majority of the population. In 2024, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that coalitions of racial or ethnic groups cannot band together to bring challenges under the Voting Rights Act.

Legal experts told The Texas Tribune this ruling didn’t require states to go back and redraw existing coalition districts, as the DOJ argued, but even if it did — the 33rd Congressional District doesn’t meet the definition of a coalition district.

“It’s not a purposeful majority-minority district,” Perales said. “It’s just what gets left behind.”

Legislators quickly abandoned this letter as the motive for mid-decade redistricting, instead focusing on the explicit goal of holding the GOP majority in the House. Republican Sen. Phil King, the upper chamber’s redistricting committee chair who represents parts of Tarrant County, said on the Senate floor that if Texas didn’t redraw its maps, “the next two years after the midterm, there will be nothing but inquisitions and impeachments and humiliation for our country.”

When the proposed map came out, the 33rd Congressional District — drawn to fix racial discrimination identified by the courts — was erased entirely from Tarrant County. Areas that have been under Veasey’s oversight for a decade will be splintered between three districts with electorates that are majority white and Republican, just like before he took office.

Stop Six will end up in a district currently held by Rep. Roger Williams, a six-term Republican who lives in neighboring Parker County. White residents make up about 55% of eligible voters in the new district, which Trump would have carried by 24 points had it existed last year. The seat takes in a dozen largely rural counties outside Tarrant that, collectively, ensure Williams can hold the seat even if he receives meager support in Fort Worth.

Other parts of the city will go to Rep. Jake Ellzey, who lives an hour away in Ellis County, and Rep. Craig Goldman, who succeeded Granger in a district that will now cover west Fort Worth and Parker County. Ellzey, Goldman and Williams did not respond to inquiries about how they will represent the new parts of their districts.

Veasey said he likes them all personally, but the partisan split of their districts means they’ll have no incentive to robustly represent his old district.

“I know their politics well enough to know they would never ask for community funding to help get a YMCA reopened in this neighborhood, and that the priorities of people in West Fort Worth and [the affluent Parker County suburb] Aledo are always going to come first,” Veasey said. “That’s just the reality.”

Bell, the Stop Six pastor, said it feels like all the momentum they’ve been building over the last few years will be reversed.

“We had someone we knew, someone we could reach, and say, ‘Hey, Marc,’ and he heard us,” he said. “We’re not invisible to Marc, and that’s the best thing I can say about him.”

“Enveloped in hopelessness”

Cee Ellis was wrapping up an exercise class at the YMCA last week, when she ran into Veasey on a tour of the recently reopened gym.

“It’s just terrible what they’re doing to you,” she told him. “Are you still in your seat? Still representing us?”

When Veasey assured her that he was — for now — she asked a version of the question people have been peppering him with for weeks: “Can we still vote for you?”

Veasey told the Tribune he’s been fighting so hard to stop the new map — educating voters, organizing rallies, speaking at public hearings — he hasn’t had much time to consider what he’ll do if they go into effect. He could run, and likely lose, in a Republican-leaning district in Tarrant County, or run against another Democrat in a Dallas-based district. Or he could try his hand at another level of government, like a county or statewide race.

“I haven’t really thought long and hard about that yet,” he said in a recent interview. “There’s always opportunity, someplace.”

Meanwhile, at the county, Republicans are already showing how they plan to wield the power they’ll glean from the new map. At an August commissioner’s court meeting, O’Hare proposed cutting the number of polling places in Tarrant County by a third, as well as some early voting locations, for the upcoming election.

The measure passed 3-2. O’Hare said the cuts were to save money, since there’s lower turnout in non-presidential years. But ahead of the presidential election, O’Hare also tried to close voting locations, this time on college campuses. He was voted down by two of his Republican colleagues, one of whom has since been replaced by a hardline ally, Matt Krause. Adding Tinderholt could give him the votes needed to pass these more extreme proposals.

It also would protect the Republican majority if O’Hare were to ever lose his seat.

“Why would you need four to one, if three to two still gives you the power you need?” Fort Worth City Councilmember Chris Nettles asked. “Because you know at some point, you’re going to lose the judge seat. The county is changing and they know they can’t hold that seat countywide.”

Bell is trying to stay optimistic. But with these compounding redistricting efforts and other upheaval — earlier this month, the Fort Worth City Council suspended diversity efforts to protect federal funding — it’s starting to feel like they’re never going to be allowed to win.

“Our community is enveloped in hopelessness like I’ve never seen before, and I’m not a kid,” the Stop Six pastor said. “I’m seeing it in [council] meetings, with the county, with this redistricting. This is mean-spirited backlash and it’s working to make people feel hopeless.”

Bivens, who retired from City Council this year, said hopelessness is the one thing these communities can’t afford. They’re going to have to once again learn to govern from the outskirts and fight their way into every room, she said, even if no one has an incentive to hear them out.

In the long run, Bivens is optimistic that there’s no “magic formula” to help Republicans outrun demographic changes in Tarrant County, or across Texas. And in the short term?

“Guess we’re all going to make some friends in Parker County,” she said.

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