In the last speech of his life, delivered at the Mason Temple in Memphis on April 3, 1968, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke of the legacy of the student civil rights activists of the early 1960s: “I knew that as they were sitting in, they were really standing up for the best in the American dream, and taking the whole nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the Founding Fathers in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.”

The next day, King was assassinated just blocks away, on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel—hallowed ground which now serves as the home of the National Civil Rights Museum. Few cities are so closely associated with the civil rights movement of the 1960s as Memphis. And fewer still have so rich a history of struggle and success in making real the promise of representative democracy.

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May 2026 Issue

It was Memphis that, one year before President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, elected civil rights lawyer Archie Walter Willis Jr. as the first African American Tennessee state representative since Reconstruction. And it was in Memphis that many of the great electoral campaigns that followed the enactment of the VRA took place —from the elections of dozens of Black state legislators and local officials to the eventual elevation of Harold Ford Sr. and Harold Ford Jr. as US Representatives from Tennessee’s Ninth Congressional District.

This year, an epic Democratic primary battle has been playing out in the ninth district between US Representative Steve Cohen, a white former state legislator who has attracted substantial Black support over the years, and state Representative Justin Jamal Pearson, who came to national prominence in 2023 when he was one of two Black Democratic legislators to be expelled from the legislature by the Republican majority because of their outspoken advocacy on behalf of gun safety.

The assumption had been that the winner of the Democratic primary would prevail in November. But if Republicans get their way, that assumption will no longer hold, because this historic district will be ripped apart in a wild-eyed partisan power grab.

Previous gerrymanders had left the ninth as Tennessee’s only reliably Democratic US House seat—and the only congressional district with a majority-Black population. That was thanks in large part to the mandates of the Voting Rights Act.

But no more. On April 29, the US Supreme Court’s right-wing majority eviscerated the Voting Rights Act in its Louisiana v. Callais decision—one that Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law, described as “the culmination of decades of its rulings limiting the Voting Rights Act.”

“No one, including the court’s majority, disputes the impact of the decision: throughout the South, election districts that were drawn to protect Black voters, such as having districts with a majority of voters of color, will be redrawn to try and help Republicans,” explained Chemerinsky. The Republicans crafting new congressional maps do not even have to pretend to be interested in serving democracy, let alone maintaining the legacy of progress toward greater civil rights and voting rights. Chemerinsky noted, “As [Justice Elena] Kagan explained in her dissent in Callais, ‘the State need do nothing more than announce a partisan gerrymander.’ Therefore, according to her, ‘a State may (so says the majority) draw districts for any political purpose, including for a purely partisan purpose—that is, to increase one party’s electoral strength—no matter their racial effects.’”

So they have. Immediately after the Callais ruling, Republican governors and legislators in a number of Southern states began redrawing US House seats covering places like Memphis—Black political strongholds whose citizens have chosen Democrats to represent them for decades.

On Wednesday, with encouragement from President Trump, Tennessee Republicans proposed a new House map that shreds the ninth district to pieces. The Black voters who once formed a majority in the district could be spread across three majority-white, Republican-leaning districts. If the map is approved, many Memphis voters will find themselves in a new district that stretches across rural Tennessee for 200 miles and ends up in the overwhelmingly white suburbs of Nashville.

This is not what democracy looks like.

Decrying the new gerrymandering plan as an effort to “make things that were illegal… legal,” Pearson said, “This is just wrong. Anyone and everyone knows exactly why it’s happening. This is an attack on our Black-majority district. This is an attack on our democracy.”

The 31-year-old legislator explained: “Donald Trump just conspired with the MAGA governor of Tennessee to try to eliminate my district.” Pearson concluded, “Our ancestors didn’t organize, march, bleed, and pray so we could shrug our shoulders now.”

Cohen said, “Trump and his Jim Crow Supreme Court want to secure GOP control for the next century by rigging the game, re-drawing the maps, and silencing our voice. Well Memphis isn’t going away without a fight.” Describing the new maps as an example of “Trump’s corrupt takeover,” and arguing that gerrymandering Democratic districts out of existence is “the only play [Republicans] have left to hang onto their majority” in the House, the incumbent complained that “they don’t care how devastating it is to cities like Memphis or to the entire country.”

Tennessee State Representative Justin Jones, a Nashville Democrat who has worked closely with Pearson, summed up the historical equation succinctly this week, when he confronted one of the most powerful Republicans in the Tennessee House, majority leader William Lamberth, as the maps were being debated. “I just wanted to look you in the eye,” said Jones, “and tell you that you’ll be in the history books with George Wallace and Bull Connor, and your children will be ashamed of where you stand by presenting these racist maps.”