Voters at Nashville’s Downtown Library cast ballots in 2022 after redistricting realigned electoral maps. (Photo: Ray DiPietro)
Middle Tennessee has three corridors in which a large portion of the state’s nonwhite population lives, and two of them used to be in one congressional district. Now, they are spread across four.
The move to split Clarksville, North Nashville, and the Antioch-Smyrna region into four different U.S. congressional districts allowed Republicans to flip a seat previously held by a moderate Democrat — a seat that had never had a Republican congressman.
A group of Black leaders sued the state over this split, but in late August, a federal court panel ruled that while Tennessee Republicans gerrymandered map — the process of splitting communities to gain electoral advantage — resulted in a political win for the GOP, making it a legal political gerrymander, not an illegal racial decision.
Federal court upholds Tennessee’s U.S. House map, rules it’s gerrymandered but not racially
Tequila Johnson, executive director of The Equity Alliance, a plaintiff in the lawsuit, said it’s difficult to disentangle race and politics in Tennessee, as drawing maps to dilute Black and Hispanic voters can be both racist and politically beneficial.
“The courts were just trying to justify racism through process,” Johnson said. “The courts understand racism is intertwined in our politics.”
For years, the U.S. Supreme Court has chipped away at federal judges’ ability to rein in gerrymandering. In a 5-4 decision in 2019, divided along ideological lines, the Supreme Court ruled that judges couldn’t block maps if they were gerrymandered for partisan purposes but could if they were designed to create a racial majority.
But the court further eroded this precedent in 2024, when it allowed a U.S. House map in South Carolina to remain intact, even though Republicans collaborated with South Carolina’s only Black U.S. representative, James Clyburn, to pack Black voters into his district, ensuring it remained Democratic instead of creating two potentially competitive districts.
The ruling made it clear that the map resulted in a political benefit that overruled any racial justification.
The federal court applied the precedent to Tennessee’s map despite a GOP lawmaker saying the maps weren’t about politics.
During the redistricting process, Democrats in the Senate spent hours in several committee hearings grilling their Republican colleagues over the maps. In one instance, Nashville Democrat Sen. Jeff Yarbro asked Republican Senate Majority Leader Jack Johnson of Franklin if the maps were politically gerrymandered.
Johnson replied, “No.”