The redistricting frenzy across Republican-controlled Southern states threatens to resurrect some of the gravest racial injustices in American political history.

Red states across the region are rushing to replace districts now held by Black Democrats with seats likely to be won by White Republicans even as minority voters account for all, or nearly all, of those states’ population growth. That divergence carries uncomfortable echoes of the structural inequities that allowed the South, for most of American history, to boost its congressional representation and electoral votes with its large populations of slaves and later free Black citizens — while denying them the right to vote.

The stampede to erase Black-majority districts marks a striking reversal from the widespread GOP claims after 2024 that President Donald Trump was leading the party to historic breakthroughs among minority voters.

These actions, as opposed to those words, suggests that many in the party still view the continuing diversification of the electorate as a political threat. “From the very beginning the largest threat to their movement is in fact Black and brown political and economic power,” said Cornell Belcher, a Democratic pollster.

Like many GOP strategists, CNN commentator Shermichael Singleton says the party’s motivation in these gerrymanders is partisan, not racial. “The average Republican in office, they are not looking at this (through the lens) of race,” he said. “They are looking at, ‘How can we maximize our political power?’”

But critics see the redistricting offensive as just one element of a broader Trump agenda to constrain the political power of the nation’s growing minority population. That agenda includes the attempt to end birthright citizenship and ongoing discussion of penalizing states with large immigrant populations in the 2030 congressional reapportionment. In a recent social media post, Stephen Miller, Trump’s hardline immigration adviser, explicitly linked changes in the Census with attacks on majority-minority Congressional districts, and argued that together they could strip away as many as 40 House seats Democrats now hold .

“There are dividing lines that are being created that I think will have impacts for generations and will have the effect of making people in so many communities feel as though they don’t have an equal say in how this country will move forward,” said Nicole Austin-Hillery, president and CEO of the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation. “And that really is a tragedy, especially given that this is the 250th anniversary of the founding of this country. This outcome is antithetical to what this moment should mean for all of us.”

The redistricting battle across the South amounts to a new front in a very old conflict.

For the nation’s first 175 years, the South tangibly benefited from suppressing Black voting rights and political representation.

Until the Civil War, slaves, of course, were denied the right to vote. For a few years after the war, the presence of Union troops across the South guaranteed the vote to former slaves, albeit frequently in the face of horrific violence from White Southerners. But as the North’s willingness to enforce Reconstruction ebbed after the early 1870s, Southern states rebuilt dense layers of legal barriers that prevented generations of their Black residents from casting a ballot. That only changed with the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965.

And yet while Southern Black Americans could not vote, they were counted in the population tallies that determined the apportionment of congressional seats and electoral votes. One of the Constitution’s most odious compromises between North and South was the three-fifths rule that counted each enslaved person, despite their exclusion from the political process, as three-fifths of a free White person for allocating congressional seats and electoral votes. After the Civil War, the South benefited even more from its Black residents because they were counted as the full equivalent of a free White person in apportionment — even though they remained excluded from the political process.

Progressive political strategist Michael Podhorzer, the former political director of the AFL-CIO, recently quantified how much White Southerners benefited from this structural inequity. He’s calculated that before the Civil War, Southern states received about 1.5 times as many congressional seats per vote cast in their elections as states outside the South. During the near century of Southern voter suppression from the 1870s to the 1960s, that advantage for the South — what might be called the discrimination premium — grew to a ratio of around 2:1. But after the VRA’s passage, that gap gradually narrowed, before virtually disappearing by 2020.

The rapid moves now by Republican-controlled Southern states to eliminate congressional districts held by Black Democrats is resurfacing this inequity in a new form, Podhorzer argued. Using data from the voter files maintained by Catalist, a Democratic targeting firm, he’s calculated that in 2024, a Black voter in one of the seven Deep South states had a 50% chance that the House candidate they supported would win and ultimately represent them in Washington. Even then, White voters in those states had a better chance (70%) that the candidate they supported would win, but the balance was close.

After the Supreme Court’s Callais decision gutting the VRA, though, the racial mismatch may reopen. On this new landscape, Podhorzer projects that a Deep South White voter in 2026 will have a 71% chance that the candidate they support for the House will win and represent them in Washington. But for Black voters in those states, the chance that their preferred House candidate will win falls to 25%.

“This is how we headed right back to the kind of free but not fair elections that were the hallmark of the three-fifths rule and the Jim Crow exclusions,” Podhorzer said on a livestream last week. “Whites get all the value of the full count (of their states’ Black population) for their representation, but they are able to prevent that from actually meaning anything.”

This year’s red-state redistricting moves could eliminate at least six members of the Congressional Black Caucus, with losses possible in Missouri, Texas, Alabama, Louisiana, North Carolina and South Carolina, and, in a slightly different situation, Florida. During the violent dismantling of Reconstruction and suppression of Black voting rights in the late 19th century, the highest number of Black House Members who lost their seats in any single election was four (in 1876). In percentage terms, Black representation fell faster then (from seven seats to three), but in absolute numbers, this year could produce the largest retrogression of Black political representation in American history.

Even more losses are likely for the 2028 cycle. Other Southern states, including Georgia and Mississippi, are planning to redraw their lines before that election. And at a little-noticed Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing last week, Missouri Republican Sen. Eric Schmitt, along with an analyst from The Article III Project, a conservative advocacy group, argued that, under the Callais decision, the Justice Department should sue blue states, including California and Illinois, to dissolve congressional districts where minorities constitute most of the population.

Today’s exclusion isn’t as total as in those earlier eras. Black residents in Southern states can still register and cast ballots, and can affect the outcomes of elections for Senate, the presidency and statewide offices. But in the House, the prospect that Black (and other minority) voters will swell their state’s total representation but then be denied meaningful opportunities to elect representatives who will advocate for their views, uncomfortably echoes the three-fifths rule and Jim Crow voter suppression, as Podhorzer and other critics note.

That echo is especially powerful because minorities are providing the vast majority — and in some instances the entirety — of population growth in the Southern states that are moving to erase minority political representation.

From 2010 to 2023, people of color accounted for 92% of the total population growth in Texas and Alabama; 87% in Florida; 81% in North Carolina; 66% in Tennessee and 52% in South Carolina, according to an analysis of Census data by the Equity Research Institute at the University of Southern California. Since 2010, the White population has declined in Louisiana, Mississippi and Georgia, while all their population growth has come from minorities. And yet all these states have already moved or are planning to eliminate congressional seats held by minority Democrats, while increasing the number likely to be won by White Republicans.

“The gain in political power and political voice for these states comes from a population whose voices they are seeking to suppress through these tools of gerrymandering,” said Manuel Pastor, a USC professor of sociology and director of the Equity Research Institute. “What we are seeing is a full-fledged push for minoritarian rule within these states.”

The rapid elimination of Black-majority House districts across the South is the most visible move by Trump and his GOP allies to suppress the political influence of racial minorities. But it’s not alone.

The administration’s attempt to end birthright citizenship — which is now awaiting a ruling from the Supreme Court — would prevent the children of undocumented immigrants from becoming citizens and eventually voters. And both Trump and Miller have signaled interest in excluding either undocumented immigrants or the larger population of all non-citizens from the population counts that will be used to divvy up Congressional seats and electoral votes after the 2030 Census.

Such a policy would reduce representation for states with large immigrant populations. As the Equity Research Institute has calculated, states with large immigration populations also tend to have large concentrations of minority US citizens. That means removing immigrants from the apportionment counts also would inevitably reduce representation for most racially diverse states as well.

All these efforts suggest at best ambivalence among many Republicans about their ability to compete in diverse communities. That’s a stark contrast from the heady days immediately after Trump’s 2024 victory. At that point, exuberant Republican strategists saw signs of a lasting trans-racial working class realignment in Trump’s historically strong performance among Latinos, the gains most data sources recorded for him among Black men, and his overall advance among all working-class voters of color.

Those inroads look much shakier today. In CNN’s first measure of Trump’s second-term job approval in February of 2025, 36% of non-college, nonwhite adults approved of the way Trump was handling the presidency. In the most recent CNN poll, that same figure stood at just 21%. Even many Democratic strategists acknowledge Trump has likely raised the floor for the GOP with voters of color (especially Latinos), but the Republican hope that his strong 2024 performance established an elevated new baseline for the party now seems wildly premature.

Eric Schickler, a University of California at Berkeley political scientist who has written on the evolution of each party’s policies on race, said the GOP’s willingness to move so forcefully against Black political representation demonstrates how thoroughly the short-term goal of maintaining control of the House in 2026 is eclipsing any long-term considerations. “What we’re seeing is the desperation to get to 218 in the House trumps everything else,” Schickler said.

Schickler is skeptical that a Trump-style agenda could ever consolidate inroads into the Black community as large as some Republicans predicted. But, he said, whatever that potential ceiling was, this overt turn to dilute Black political power is likely to lower it.

“Just layering in this hostility to Black representation … makes it extremely hard to imagine the kind of gains among Black voters that at least some Republicans were hoping to leverage,” Schickler said.

Though Singleton argued that Republicans are erasing these districts for partisan rather than racial reasons, he agreed that the GOP could face losses among Black voters unless it makes greater efforts to nominate viable Black conservatives in the new seats.

“If we don’t prioritize that,” Singleton said, “then I absolutely think the party could” face a backlash by 2028 among “gettable Black voters, specifically Black men.”

One early test case Singleton pointed to is the new Republican-leaning congressional district Tennessee Republicans created around Memphis, where Black conservative Charlotte Bergmann faces an uphill challenge in a crowded field headlined by two White GOP state legislators.

Belcher, the Democratic pollster, said “the million-dollar question” for 2026 and 2028 is how much of a response these GOP moves will trigger in the Black community. Turnout among eligible Black voters, after soaring to roughly equal White participation during Barack Obama’s two elections, has again fallen significantly below White participation, Belcher noted. In 2024, Census figures analyzed by demographer William Frey showed that just 60% of eligible Black Americans voted, compared with 71% of White Americans that year and 66% of Black Americans during Obama’s 2012 reelection.

“Because of sheer demographics, if Black turnout is within 4 or 5 points of White turnout, it’s a completely different kind of election,” Belcher said.

However the partisan implications shake out, the civic cost could be substantial for reducing minority representation so rapidly even as the country irreversibly diversifies. “What we are really seeing is an effort underway to diminish the power of these increased and diverse populations to have their voices heard just like every American,” said Austin-Hillery.

Many critics have described the gerrymandering surge as a threat to “multiracial democracy.” But that framing understates the potential consequence of erasing so much Black representation. “This is about the future of America, period,” Democratic Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey told journalist Roland Martin at last weekend’s voting rights rally in Montgomery, Alabama. “Because there is no democracy for some and not for others.”

Republican-controlled Southern states are testing the boundaries of what qualifies as genuine democracy for minority voters more profoundly than at any time since the fall of segregation.