Louisiana Erases Black Congressional District & Calls It Redistricting

Louisiana's Republican-controlled Legislature has signed a new congressional map eliminating one of the state's two majority-Black districts — a move critics are calling textbook voter suppression dressed in the language of legal compliance.

Gov. Jeff Landry signed the map after the Supreme Court's recent ruling weakened the Voting Rights Act, the landmark 1965 law designed to protect minority voters from exactly this kind of political maneuvering. The ruling gave Republican legislatures across the South the opening they needed, and Louisiana moved swiftly to capitalize — redrawing districts in a way that dilutes Black political power and delivers Republicans a structural advantage heading into November.

The stakes are immediate. Rep. Cleo Fields, a Black Democrat, has had his district erased. Primary elections have been delayed six months — to November 3 — creating confusion, lawsuits, and disenfranchisement for voters whose ballots had already been cast.

State Representative Kyle M. Green Jr., the House Democratic caucus chairman, put it plainly: "We dress it up in the dry language of redistricting — district boundaries, core principles, communities of interest — but everyone in this chamber knows exactly what we're being asked to do." He added: "The argument that we should now be colorblind about a congressional map in this state of all states requires forgetting a quantity of history that I don't believe any of us has the right to forget."

Republicans insist race played no role. Yet the numbers tell a different story — roughly a third of Louisiana's population is Black, and the new map systematically reduces their congressional representation. One Republican lawmaker even boasted of deliberately obscuring the data: "I personally instructed our staff to turn the feature that displays racial makeup off, so that I wouldn't see it."

Black constituents have invoked Louisiana's long history of racism and segregation, accusing lawmakers of intentionally moving to dilute their political influence. With the Voting Rights Act now weakened and court challenges already looming, this map signals what suppression looks like in 2026 — not poll taxes or literacy tests, but boundary lines drawn in a back room.

Link: NY Times