2026-06-14T10:30:11.065Z / https://www.cnn.com/2026/06/14/politics/redistricting-black-house-lawmakers-vis
- 国会中的黑人代表席位可能遭遇《投票权法案》通过61年以来最严重的下滑。
- 今年4月最高法院作出一项裁决后，美国多个南方州的选区重划进程加剧。
- 六名黑人民主党众议员可能在今年秋季中期选举后因新的选区地图失去席位。
AI生成的摘要经CNN编辑审核。
美国正处于国会黑人代表席位自近61年前《投票权法案》颁布以来最大幅度缩减的边缘。
由于最高法院削弱了依据联邦投票法提起种族歧视诉讼的权力，随后引发了全国范围的选区重划运动，众议院民主党可能在今年中期选举后失去六名黑人议员。在重划后的选区中，两名现任议员不会在明年重返国会，其余四人则在保住席位的竞争中处于劣势。
另有一名黑人议员——犹他州共和党众议员伯吉斯·欧文斯——将离开众议院，此前一名法官否决了原本有利于共和党的选区地图。
共和党发起了史无前例的中期国会选区重划行动，民主党也随之跟进。两党当时明确的目标是赢得今年秋季的中期选举，而非维持少数族裔的代表权。但这场重划运动的结果以及美国最高法院的裁决，可能导致黑人政治权力出现历史性萎缩，尤其是在大多数黑人居住的南方各州。
“最高法院的所作所为等于认可了政治进程中针对非裔美国人的歧视，”全国有色人种协进会主席德里克·约翰逊在接受CNN采访时表示，“美国历史上只有在重建时期之后才出现过这种情况。”
美国建国后的头一个世纪里，黑人没有投票权，接下来的一个世纪里，黑人们一直在为争取投票权而斗争。
南北战争后，前邦联各州为重新加入联邦开始允许黑人投票，联邦军队驻扎南方以保障黑人的投票权，一批黑人议员因此当选国会。
但随着军队撤离，官方对黑人选民的压制几乎立刻开始，有时甚至通过国家支持的暴力和谋杀手段。到1877年，重建时代结束，国会中的黑人代表席位也随之消失。
在1870年至1901年间，共有20名黑人众议员和两名黑人参议员在国会任职。
1965年《投票权法案》通过的同年，阿拉巴马州州警挥舞警棍，在塞尔玛的埃德蒙·佩图斯大桥上殴打和平的投票权抗议者，其中包括约翰·刘易斯。在塞尔玛“血腥星期天”事件震惊全国五个月后，林登·约翰逊总统签署了这项投票权法案。此后多年，该法案帮助扩大了国会中的少数族裔代表席位，催生了新一代黑人政治领袖。
吉姆·克莱伯恩1992年首次当选国会议员，成为南卡罗来纳州第九位黑人众议员——也是重建时代结束近一个世纪以来的第一位。（他在近期出版的《前八人》一书中记录了这段历史。）
在17个任期内，克莱伯恩积累了非裔美国人在吉姆·克劳南方时代童年时期无法企及的政治权力。他曾担任众议院民主党三号人物，成为当时国会中职位最高的非裔美国人。在2008年南卡罗来纳州民主党初选中，他为时任参议员巴拉克·奥巴马提供了关键背书，帮助奥巴马向许多人——包括黑人选民——证明自己有机会成为首位非裔美国总统。
十二年后，克莱伯恩对乔·拜登的背书 famously 重振了这位前副总统低迷的总统竞选活动。他推动拜登承诺提名一名非裔女性担任最高法院大法官，拜登随后也确实提名了凯坦吉·布朗·杰克逊进入最高法院。
一项针对克莱伯恩的选区重划计划在州参议院最后时刻夭折，原因是几名共和党议员不愿打乱已经启动的初选。不过该州的一些共和党人已誓言，将在2028年选举周期前再次尝试修改他所在的选区。
州议员们甚至考虑针对克莱伯恩，这让一些南卡罗来纳州人感到震惊。查尔斯顿学院政治科学家克莱尔·沃福德表示，克莱伯恩为这个“棕榈州”带来了声望和联邦资金，涵盖从基础设施项目到历史黑人学院和大学的方方面面。“我的意思是，这家伙就像一个活传奇，”她说。
但85岁的克莱伯恩表示，他并不感到意外，因为他知道历史可能重演，而他担心这一幕正在重现。
“本届最高法院正在让这个国家重新实行种族隔离，”他说。
几十年来，《投票权法案》帮助扩大了少数族裔的代表权。国会自法案最初通过以来已五次重新授权这项联邦法律。最高法院在1986年确立了一套框架，用于测试州选区重划计划是否具有稀释少数族裔投票权的效果。
但从2013年开始，最高法院的一系列裁决削弱了该法案的保护措施，最终在今年4月的“路易斯安那诉卡莱斯”案中达到顶峰，确立了批评者所称的几乎不可能达到的标准：挑战者必须证明选区绘制过程中存在“强烈的故意歧视推论”。
大法官塞缪尔·阿利托为法院的保守派多数派撰写裁决意见时表示，1965年法案最初设立的保护措施如今已不再必要。“全国范围内发生了巨大的社会变革，尤其是南方在结束根深蒂固的种族歧视方面取得了巨大进步，”他写道。
批评者表示，法院的新标准允许议员在绘制稀释少数族裔投票权的选区地图时，以党派立场为借口。
“归根结底，最高法院基本上是在说，‘只要你告诉我们你这么做是为了击败民主党人，我们就不在乎选区划分在种族上有多刻意操纵，’”阿拉巴马州众议员绍马里·菲格尔斯说。这位首次任职的议员是在共和党主导的选区地图下面临连任失败风险的黑人民主党现任议员之一。
在最高法院作出裁决后的几天内，田纳西州、路易斯安那州和阿拉巴马州开始实施旨在获取党派优势的选区地图。不到一个月，这些州就重新划分了三个拥有大量黑人选民的国会选区，以帮助共和党在11月的中期选举后保住众议院席位。
“这本质上是在贬低为实现真正、可行的美国民主而进行的斗争，”亚特兰大埃默里大学非裔美国人研究教授卡罗尔·安德森说，“所有为通过《投票权法案》所付出的鲜血、泪水、勇气、斗争和战略谋划。”
但共和党议员坚称，他们的行动仅由政治动机驱动。
“这与种族无关，”领导本州选区重划行动的路易斯安那州共和党众议员博·博利厄在近期的议会辩论中表示，“我们在绘制这些地图时没有考虑种族因素。”
一些在国会任职的黑人共和党人对最高法院的裁决表示欢迎，称《投票权法案》的补救措施已不再必要。
“只要在意识形态上与所在州或选区契合，黑人无论在哪里都能获胜，”美国参议院唯一的黑人共和党议员南卡罗来纳州的蒂姆·斯科特近期表示。
对克利奥·菲尔兹来说，历史在他有生之年再次重演。
和克莱伯恩一样，菲尔兹1993年首次进入国会，是当时国会更新投票权法和一项法院裁决后涌入国会的创纪录黑人议员群体之一，该裁决为创建更多少数族裔占多数的选区铺平了道路。
但后来一家法院推翻了路易斯安那州的选区地图，他四年后就离开了华盛顿。
现年63岁的菲尔兹去年刚重返国会，结束了近30年的缺席，结果美国最高法院又推翻了他目前所在的选区——路易斯安那州第二个黑人选民占多数的选区。这使得路易斯安那州六个国会选区中仅剩下一个黑人选民占多数的选区，尽管黑人居民占该州总人口的三分之一。
“我们已经无数次走上这条路了，”他哀叹道。
作为重建时代以来第四位来自路易斯安那州的黑人众议员，菲尔兹现在再次面临失去席位的风险。他表示尚未最终决定自己的政治前途，但不会为了仅剩的一个黑人选民占多数的选区，与 fellow 民主党众议员特罗伊·卡特竞争。
新的选区地图已经在其他州颠覆了政治生涯。
例如，得克萨斯州民主党众议员马克·维西在该州由共和党主导的选区重划后决定不寻求连任。另一位得克萨斯州现任议员——资深民主党众议员阿尔·格林——近期在初选中输给了众议员克里斯蒂安·梅尼菲，新的选区地图将两名黑人选民议员安排在了同一场初选中对决。
（其他黑人众议员将在本届任期结束后离开国会，但原因并非选区重划，其中五人正在竞选更高职位。）
与此同时在佛罗里达州，民主党众议员黛比·沃瑟曼·舒尔茨的现任选区被共和党重划计划拆分，她选择在一个历史上的黑人选区参选——这引发了一些黑人民主党人的强烈抗议，他们称这位资深众议员的参选可能会排挤非裔候选人。
佐治亚州由共和党控制的州议会即将召开特别会议，以响应最高法院的裁决，考虑为2028年选举周期调整选区划分。
民主党战略家表示，他们正在努力宣传选区重划的利害关系，以期提高黑人选民在中期选举中的投票率。一些民主党人看到了选民参与度上升的早期积极迹象。
国会黑人核心小组呼吁企业领袖谴责他们所称的稀释黑人选民投票权的行为，而全国有色人种协进会则呼吁黑人运动员和球迷抵制南方各州推行选区重划的公立大学的体育项目。
在南卡罗来纳州，州民主党官员利用针对克莱伯恩的企图，鼓励选民在该州初选首日积极参与提前线下投票。最终，当天有超过5.6万人投票，据南卡罗来纳州选举委员会称，这是该州单日初选投票的纪录。
“我认为11月的投票率会飙升，因为我认为人们，尤其是黑人民主党人，认为这太离谱了，”南卡罗来纳州民主党执行主任杰伊·帕姆利说。
活动人士表示，鉴于最后时刻的选区重划行动严重扰乱了选举程序，选民教育和动员工作将比以往任何时候都更加重要。
例如，路易斯安那州和阿拉巴马州在最高法院作出裁决后重新安排了众议院初选，许多选民前往投票时可能会发现自己身处新的国会选区和投票站。
回到路易斯安那州，菲尔兹表示，议员们通过新的选区地图时他深感失望，但在本州的议会辩论中看到的情景让他感到鼓舞：各种肤色的居民都站出来表达反对意见。
“在某些方面，他们正在唤醒一个沉睡的巨人，”他谈到选区重划行动时说。菲尔兹表示，选民们“现在需要站出来，前往投票站说，‘你们不能这样对待我们。’”
On the brink: Black lawmakers could lose decades of gains in one year
2026-06-14T10:30:11.065Z / https://www.cnn.com/2026/06/14/politics/redistricting-black-house-lawmakers-vis
- Black representation in Congress faces what could be its steepest decline since the Voting Rights Act passed 61 years ago.
- Following a Supreme Court ruling in April, redistricting has intensified across multiple Southern states.
- Six Black Democratic House members could lose their seats after this fall’s midterms due to the new maps.
AI-generated summary was reviewed by a CNN editor.
The US is on the brink of the largest reduction in Black representation in Congress since the enactment of the Voting Rights Act almost 61 years ago.
House Democrats could lose six Black members after this year’s midterms due to a redistricting campaign that intensified after the Supreme Court gutted the power to bring claims of racial discrimination under the voting law. Two of the incumbents in redrawn districts will not return to office next year and the remaining four are underdogs to keep their seats.
A seventh Black lawmaker, Republican Rep. Burgess Owens of Utah, is leaving the House after a judge struck down a map that had favored the GOP.
Winning this fall’s midterm elections, not maintaining racial representation, was the stated target of Republicans who launched an unprecedented mid-decade sweep of redrawing US House maps across the country and Democrats who responded with their own push. But the results of that campaign – and the US Supreme Court’s ruling – could lead to a historic erosion of Black political power, particularly in the South, where most Black people live.
“What the Supreme Court has done is sanction discrimination against African Americans in the political process,” Derrick Johnson, the president of the NAACP, told CNN. “The only time in history that we’ve seen this is after Reconstruction.”
Black Americans spent the first century after the country’s founding without the right to vote and much of the next century fighting to make it a reality.
A number of Black lawmakers were elected to Congress after the Civil War, when former Confederate states began allowing Black Americans to vote as a condition of rejoining the Union. Federal troops stationed in the South helped ensure Black access to the ballot.
But official suppression of the Black vote began almost immediately as troops were withdrawn, sometimes through state-sanctioned violence and murder. By 1877, the Reconstruction era was over, and the end of Black representation in Congress followed.
In all, 20 Black representatives and two Black senators served in Congress between 1870 and 1901.
The 1965 Voting Rights Act was enacted the same year that baton-wielding Alabama state troopers bloodied peaceful voting rights protesters, including John Lewis, on Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge.
Five months after that “Bloody Sunday” in Selma jolted the nation, President Lyndon Johnson signed the voting law. In the years since, it has helped swell the ranks of minorities in Congress and elevated new Black political leaders.
Jim Clyburn was first elected to Congress in 1992. He became just the ninth Black congressman to represent South Carolina – and the first in nearly a century, since the end of Reconstruction. (He chronicled that history in a recent book, “The First Eight.”)
Over 17 terms, Clyburn amassed the kind of political power that eluded African Americans during his childhood in the Jim Crow South. He served as the No. 3 Democrat in the US House, becoming the highest-ranking African American in Congress at the time. He was a critical validator for then-Sen. Barack Obama in South Carolina’s 2008 Democratic primary when Obama was vying to prove to many people – including Black voters – that he had a credible chance of becoming the first African American president.
Twelve years later, Clyburn’s endorsement of Joe Biden famously revived the former vice president’s flagging presidential campaign. He pushed Biden to promise to nominate a Black woman as a Supreme Court justice, which Biden did when he picked Ketanji Brown Jackson for the court.
A redistricting plan targeting Clyburn died in the state Senate at the last minute after several Republican lawmakers balked at disrupting the primary election already underway. Some Republicans in the state, however, have vowed to try again to change his district ahead of the 2028 election cycle.
That state lawmakers would even consider targeting Clyburn shocked some South Carolinians. Claire Wofford, a political scientist at the College of Charleston, said Clyburn has brought prominence and federal money to the Palmetto State – for everything from infrastructure projects to historically Black colleges and universities. “I mean, the guy’s like a living legend,” she said.
But Clyburn, 85, said he wasn’t surprised because he knows that history can repeat itself, and he fears it is happening again.
“This Supreme Court is resegregating this country,” he said.
For decades, the Voting Rights Act helped expand minority representation. Congress reauthorized the federal law five times since its initial passage. And the Supreme Court in 1986 established a framework for testing whether state redistricting plans had the effect of diluting minority voting power.
But a series of rulings from the high court starting in 2013 have undercut the law’s protections, culminating in April’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais, setting a standard that critics say is all-but-impossible to meet: Challengers must show there’s a “strong inference” of intentional discrimination in the map drawing.
Writing for the court’s conservative supermajority, Justice Samuel Alito indicated that the guardrails first erected by the 1965 law were no longer needed today. “Vast social change has occurred throughout the country and particularly in the South, which have made great strides in ending entrenched racial discrimination,” he wrote.
Critics say the court’s new standard allows lawmakers to use the cover of partisanship when drawing maps that dilute minority voting power.
“At the end of the day, the Supreme Court basically said, ‘We don’t care how racially gerrymandered the districts are as long as you tell us that you did it to get rid of Democrats,’” said Alabama Rep. Shomari Figures. The first-term lawmaker is among the Black Democratic incumbents at risk of losing reelection under a Republican-friendly map.
Within days of the court’s decision, Tennessee, Louisiana and Alabama began moving to put in place maps for partisan advantage. And within a month, three congressional districts with sizable Black populations were reconfigured across those states to help boost Republicans’ chances of holding the US House after November’s midterms.
“This is basically denigrating the fight for a real, viable American democracy,” said Carol Anderson, a professor of African American studies at Emory University in Atlanta. “All of the blood, all of the tears, all of the courage, all of the fight, all of the strategizing that it took to get the Voting Rights Act.”
Republican legislators, however, have insisted that politics alone is driving their actions.
“It’s not about race,” Louisiana state Rep. Beau Beaullieu, a Republican who helped lead the redistricting push in his state, said during the recent legislative debate. “We did not take race into account when drawing these maps.”
Some Black Republicans who serve in Congress have hailed the court’s decision, arguing that the Voting Rights Act’s remedies are no longer needed.
“The Black person … who ideologically is aligned with their state or their district can win anywhere,” South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, the lone Black Republican in the US Senate, said recently.
For Cleo Fields, history is repeating itself in his lifetime.
Like Clyburn, Fields first entered Congress in 1993, part of a then-record group of Black lawmakers swept into power following a congressional update to the voting rights law and a court decision that helped pave the way for more majority-minority districts.
But a court threw out Louisiana’s map, and he was gone from Washington after four years.
Fields, 63, had just returned to Congress last year, after a nearly 30-year absence, only to have the US Supreme Court strike down his current district – Louisiana’s second Black-majority district. It leaves Louisiana with one Black-majority district out of six in total, although Black residents make up a third of the state’s population.
“We’ve been down these roads so many times,” he lamented.
Only the fourth Black congressman from Louisiana since Reconstruction, Fields is now at risk of losing the seat again. He said he has not made a final decision on his political future, but he will not run against his fellow Democrat, Rep. Troy Carter, for a sole remaining Black-majority district.
The new maps already have upended political careers in other states.
Texas Democratic Rep. Marc Veasey, for instance, decided against seeking reelection, following Republican-led redistricting in the state. Another Texas incumbent – longtime Democratic Rep. Al Green – recently lost to Rep. Christian Menefee after the new map left the two Black lawmakers facing off in a primary election.
(Other Black House members are leaving Congress at the end of this term but for reasons other than redistricting, including five who have sought higher office.)
In Florida, meanwhile, Democrat Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who saw her current district broken apart by the Republicans’ redistricting plan there, has opted to run in a historically Black district – prompting an outcry from some Black Democrats who say the veteran congresswoman’s bid for the seat could shut out an African American contender.
The Republican-controlled legislature in Georgia will soon gather for a special session to consider redistricting for the 2028 cycle in response to the high court’s ruling.
Democratic strategists say they are working to spread awareness of redistricting’s stakes in the hopes of increasing Black turnout in the midterms. Some Democrats see encouraging early signs of voter engagement.
The Congressional Black Caucus is asking corporate leaders to condemn what it describes as the effort to dilute Black voting power, while the NAACP has called on Black athletes and fans to shun athletic programs at public universities in southern states pursuing redistricting.
In South Carolina, state party officials seized on the attempt to topple Clyburn to encourage heavy participation on the first day of in-person voting in the state’s primary. In the end, more than 56,000 people cast ballots that day, a single-day record in the state for a primary election, according to the South Carolina Election Commission.
“I think turnout is going to go through the roof in November because I think people, Black Democrats in particular, think this is nuts,” said Jay Parmley, the executive director of the South Carolina Democratic Party.
Activists say voter education and mobilization will be more important than ever, given how much the last-minute redistricting moves have disrupted elections procedures.
Louisiana and Alabama, for instance, rescheduled House primaries after the Supreme Court ruling, and many voters likely will find themselves in new congressional districts and precincts when they head to the polls.
Back in Louisiana, Fields said he was deeply disappointed when lawmakers enacted the new map but was heartened by what he saw during the legislative debate in his state: Residents of all colors showing up to voice their opposition.
“In some respects, they are waking up a sleeping giant,” he said of the redistricting push. Voters, Fields said, “now need to stand up and go the polls and say, ‘You can’t treat us this way.’”