How the Voting Rights Act Bolstered Black Representation in the House

The central tenet of American democracy is the right to vote.

But in practice, for Black voters, especially in the South, it wasn’t until the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that their access to the voting booth was fundamentally improved. The law eradicated many Jim Crow-era intimidation tactics.

The act also required electoral maps to be drawn in a way that allowed Black voters a chance to vote for someone of their choice, in part by requiring federal approval for maps in certain states and counties. Those changes led to a clear shift in representation in the U.S. House of Representatives for the South, where Black leaders and volunteers had been beaten, jailed and even killed during the civil rights movement.

Since then, the number of Black lawmakers in the chamber has rapidly increased across the United States.

Even so, Black representation didn’t always stem from changes made under the new law. And although many Black majority districts have elected Black representatives, not every candidate backed by Black voters was Black. In Tennessee, for example, Representative Steve Cohen, a white Democrat, has represented a majority Black district for about two decades.

Here is a closer look at how the Voting Rights Act, which was dealt a blow on Wednesday by a Supreme Court ruling, changed Black representation in the House in Southern states.

Louisiana

Louisiana is at the heart of the ruling.

After the Civil War, the state was one of the few to elect a Black member to the House, Charles Edmund Nash, in 1874. But, as Southern states moved to aggressively restrict Black voting rights, the state wouldn’t elect another until 1990.

That meant Black lawmakers have made up a small fraction of the state’s representation.

As of early 2024, the last time Louisiana redrew its congressional maps, Black residents made up 33 percent of its population. Even as the population has changed over time, Black residents have consistently made up between 30 and 50 percent of the state’s total population.

A lack of roughly proportional representation has been used by civil rights groups as evidence that Black voters have been denied a chance to elect a representative of their choice.

The Voting Rights Act never required minority populations to be represented proportionately. Still, Kareem Crayton, a vice president of the Brennan Center for Justice, said “in a perfectly representative society,” it would be reasonable to expect the share of representatives for a set of areas to roughly match the share of their communities they serve.

“When those are wildly out of sync with each other, that’s usually an indication that something is peculiar,” he added.

A New York Times analysis of a selection of Southern states calculated the number of Black lawmakers that would be proportional to a state’s Black population, and rounded down to the nearest full House seat. It found that for most of Louisiana’s history, at least two Black representatives would have constituted a proportional share.

That’s represented by the gap between the dotted line and the orange areas in the chart.

But Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., writing the majority opinion for the court in the Louisiana case, said arguments citing the correlation of Black representation to Black population “failed to disentangle race from politics.” He focused on voter registration and turnout instead, citing increased Black voter participation as evidence of “vast social change.”

Several Black leaders and voting rights groups rejected that assessment and said the ruling had rendered the law ineffective.

Wednesday’s ruling struck down Louisiana’s voting map. On Thursday, the governor issued an executive order delaying the state’s House primary elections and requested the Legislature reconvene and pass new congressional maps.

Georgia and Texas

Georgia and Texas were the first Southern states to send Black lawmakers to the House after the Voting Rights Act. (It had been nearly a century since Georgia did so in 1870.)