Tennessee Republicans eliminate Memphis's lone Black-majority congressional district

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The Tennessee General Assembly voted last month to dismantle the 9th Congressional District, a Memphis-based seat that has been the state’s only Democratic, Black-majority district in Congress for more than four decades. The new maps split the city’s Black voters across three adjacent districts, each containing roughly a third of Memphis’s African American voting-age population, according to data cited by outgoing Rep. Steve Cohen. The redistricting came weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court effectively invalidated a key provision of the Voting Rights Act that had for decades barred voting changes that would discriminate on the basis of race.

Cohen, who has represented the 9th District since 2006, said each of the three districts that now absorb portions of Memphis holds between 29% and 35% of the city’s Black voting-age population. He described the probability of that distribution occurring without consideration of race as vanishingly small, comparing it to “a monkey at a typewriter producing a Shakespeare play.” Under the new configuration, all nine of Tennessee’s congressional districts lean Republican, according to the maps approved by the Republican-dominated legislature in Nashville.

The redistricting prompted Cohen to announce his retirement from Congress at the end of his term rather than seek reelection in a district he said would make it difficult for a Black candidate to win. “Breaking up the Black vote is the same as breaking up the Democratic vote,” Cohen said. The 9th District has sent only Democrats to Washington since its creation in the 1980s. Cohen described the broader state and federal actions as an act of colonization, noting that when he first ran for his seat 20 years ago, most of the district’s voters were white. “There’s been fear and concern of black people there for a long time,” he said.

In the Memphis neighborhood of Binghampton, where railroad tracks and the Poplar Avenue bridge cut through the community, residents described a sense of political abandonment deepened by the redrawing. “There’s nothing we can do. They’re taking rights away,” said Kenneth Belcher, who, like roughly one in ten Tennessee adults, has lost voting rights due to a felony conviction. “That’s what it feels like. That’s what it looks like. What’s the word for that? It’s criminal, really.”

Anthony Robinson, who grew up in the neighborhood and lives nearby, described the redistricting as continuous with a legacy of racial and economic segregation visible in the geography of Memphis itself. “Look at how close poverty and prosperity are. Right on top of each other,” Robinson said while driving through neighborhoods divided by the new boundaries, pointing to a Zillow listing for a $1.3 million home a short distance from boarded-up properties and title pawn shops. “It’s like the most baffling thing to me is, how are you a politician and sworn to uphold the constitution, but you’re just abiding all of this bullshit that goes clearly against the rules, and what the fuck is going on?” Robinson said. “It’s like they want the country to be what it was in 1776, not what the constitution says it should be.”

Memphis Mayor Paul Young, a Democrat, said the city’s government has invested in neighborhoods like Binghampton and is beginning to see growth — progress he attributed in part to coordination with a congressman who primarily represents the city. “We need individuals in those roles that can understand the challenges of an urban community,” Young told the Guardian. “It’s not that we’re any better than the rural areas. We’re just different. We have different needs, and we want to make sure that the people who represent this area understand that.” Young cited housing investment, afterschool programming and workforce training as Memphis’s most pressing federal needs, with the latter growing more urgent as automation expands in the region’s logistics sector.

Tennessee state Sen. John Stevens, a Republican, defended the redistricting during the legislative session. “Tennessee is a conservative state, and our congressional delegation should reflect that,” Stevens said. When asked whether he knew Memphis had a Black majority, he denied it, despite having attended law school in the city.

The redistricting is the most direct local consequence of the Supreme Court’s decision to weaken Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which had for decades served as a barrier to racially discriminatory redistricting. Without that protection, Tennessee Republicans moved swiftly to revise maps that had been in place since the 2020 census. Christopher Batts, a Memphis real estate developer and civic leader, said the district lines in Binghampton are invisible from the street but the impact of decades of housing discrimination is not. “You’re going to see the red line,” Batts said. “You know it’s visible.”