Tennessee’s Republican-controlled legislature’s new congressional map will send two longtime Memphis neighbors to different political districts, despite the fact that they have lived across the street from each other for about a decade. Steve Fowler and Sam Wilson, both longtime Memphis residents who have performed together on Beale Street for 21 years, will no longer cast the same ballot once the new U.S. House lines take effect after the midterms.
The map splits Memphis into three Republican-leaning districts, drawing the city’s majority-Black population into districts that extend away from East Memphis and toward mostly white, rural and conservative communities. Fowler is placed in the 8th Congressional District, which runs hundreds of miles through central Tennessee across a dozen counties. Wilson is zoned for the 9th District, which extends across much of the state’s southern border before curving up to include largely white and affluent Nashville suburbs.
Fowler said the change is harmful and questioned how members of Congress would be able to serve communities that are geographically and economically distant from each other. “I think it’s horrible,” Fowler said, describing the impact as extending beyond Black residents. He added: “This isn’t just going to be bad for Black folks in Memphis, but poor whites in these new districts also aren’t going to get services. How are any of these congressmen going to serve all these different counties?”
Wilson, a Black musician, framed the districting shift less as a personal rupture and more as another test that Memphis has faced, with public safety and outside narratives about the city’s conditions a prominent backdrop. He said, “It’s a hustling community. We’re going to make ends meet for our families,” and tied Memphis’s identity to the city’s civil-rights history. “The legacy of Memphis is music and our civil rights history,” Wilson said, adding, “Hard times mean you’re going to try and find your gift. That’s what we do here; music in Memphis is a way of life.”
The congressional redraw is part of a larger redistricting competition after a U.S. Supreme Court decision on April 29 that sharply weakened a Voting Rights Act-related requirement. For decades, the provision had required mapmakers to demonstrate they were not discriminating against racial minorities when drawing districts, a standard that often produced boundaries allowing some minority communities to choose their preferred representatives rather than having their votes diluted by surrounding white majorities. The justices’ ruling said courts had handled the issue improperly and that the approach had injected racial matters into redistricting in violation of the U.S. Constitution.
Republicans across the South moved quickly after that decision to redraw maps before the November elections, seeking to eliminate as many Democratic-held, majority-minority House seats as possible. Tennessee was the first GOP-controlled state to finalize a new map, according to the report, and it was one of several southern states—Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina among them—participating in the broader effort. Republican state Sen. John Stevens, who shepherded the bill for a map that made all nine congressional districts solidly Republican, said, “Tennessee is a conservative state and our congressional delegation should reflect that.”
Democrats and civil rights groups argue that splitting Memphis along partisan lines undermines representation for Black Tennesseans and violates protections intended to ensure minority voting power is not diluted. The report says the Memphis district predates the Voting Rights Act and that, for at least a century, Tennessee had believed it made sense for the metropolis on the Mississippi River to have its own U.S. House district. Since Congress passed the landmark law in 1965, attorneys and legal experts say, attempts to split that district for partisan gain could be challenged in court—though legal experts interviewed for the story said the risk of overturning the new map is not as high as it once was.
The dispute carries sharp symbolism because Memphis is home to the National Civil Rights Museum, built around the motel where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968. When the legislature passed the new maps, Democrats and protesters shouted “hands off Memphis!” and waved signs accusing Republicans of bringing back Jim Crow. Eric Holder, a former U.S. attorney general who chairs the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, said: “Memphis is not just any city; it holds a central place in the national story of our quest for racial justice in this country and how, over time, we have increasingly achieved civil, voting, and economic rights for all Americans.” Holder added: “Black citizens protested, marched and died there for the right to vote.”
Behind the redistricting fight, the report describes a city with competing narratives about investment, safety and services, and a tense political relationship with the rest of Tennessee. It says billions of dollars in private investment and federal dollars have flowed into the area in recent years, even as local businesses have expressed concerns about a lagging regional economy. Residents also told the Associated Press they worried about safety and public services while rejecting stereotypes about rampant crime.
The story also notes that Tennessee’s conservative legislature in Nashville has clashed repeatedly with Memphis and accused its leaders of mismanagement. The legislature passed a law blocking many police overhaul efforts in Memphis that were put in place after the death of Tyre Nichols in 2023, and it passed another measure that seized control of Memphis’ airport board and those of other cities. It also gave the state attorney general power to remove Memphis’ elected district attorney. U.S. Rep. Steve Cohen, a white Democrat who still represents the city until the new lines kick in after the midterms, said, “The state legislature is trying to take it over.” He added: “And that’s absurd. It was all partially because it’s a majority Black city.”
Thomas Goodman, a politics and law professor at Rhodes College in Memphis, said the congressional districts may increase friction over which communities receive attention and funding from lawmakers. Goodman said that Memphis residents will share districts with Republican towns that have different economies, geographies and demographics, which could create incentives for representatives to focus elsewhere. “It would not only deprive Black Tennesseans of proper representation,” Goodman said. “These changes also break up the city of Memphis as an entity into multiple districts, thereby removing a dedicated agent in government who knows the people, who understands their concerns and can speak for them and deliver on behalf of their interests and desires.”
Some residents described the redistricting as reflective of how politics in Tennessee weighs perceived electoral value over local cohesion. Chris Wiley, a Black 29-year-old who works at a sports stadium, said his house sits in what was previously a quiet street in Midtown Memphis but is now carved apart across the intersection of three congressional districts. He said the change is not surprising, describing the state as “all about the dollar” rather than residents. “Memphis is majority Black, so if you mess with that, what’s the point of even voting in Tennessee?” Wiley said. “Whatever the congressional numbers, whatever that is, we don’t count on the scale as high, anyway.”