Days after the US Supreme Court gutted a key section of the Voting Rights Act, Tennessee Republicans redrew the state's congressional maps and eliminated its only Democratic, Black-majority district. Memphis's ninth congressional district, which had sent Democrats to Washington for over four decades, was split into three pieces. Each new fragment now contains roughly one third of the city's Black voters, while all nine of the state's congressional districts lean Republican under the new boundaries.
The fracture is invisible from the street, but its effects ripple through neighborhoods already fractured by decades of housing discrimination. On Poplar Avenue, above the railroad tracks cutting through Binghampton, the city's geography tells the story of concentrated wealth sitting inches away from concentrated poverty. Christopher Batts, a Memphis real estate developer, points out what he calls the visible redline: a few blocks separate palatial estates from boarded-up properties and sex workers walking past public housing.
Anthony Robinson grew up in the neighborhood and has watched the boundaries shift. He describes driving past a Starbucks on one corner and a title pawn shop on the next, past a house listing for $1.3 million where he was once reported to police for running in shorts and socks. "Look at how close poverty and prosperity are," he said. "Right on top of each other."
Robinson is puzzled by the redistricting. People in these neighborhoods need money and jobs. Instead, he said, lawmakers are "just breaking every law, and kicking and screaming on their way out the door." He compares their approach to wanting "the country to be what it was in 1776, not what the constitution says it should be."
Republican state senator John Stevens defended the move as both legal and reflective of Tennessee's conservative bent. "Tennessee is a conservative state, and our congressional delegation should reflect that," he said. When asked during the legislative session whether Memphis had a Black majority, Stevens denied it, despite having attended law school there.
Memphis Mayor Paul Young stressed the city's distinct needs. "It's not that we're any better than the rural areas," he said. "We're just different. We have different needs, and we want to make sure that the people who represent this area understand that." Young pointed to federal investment in housing, afterschool programming, and workforce training as critical for a logistics hub increasingly reliant on warehouse automation.
Instead, the city has received thousands of federal law enforcement agents conducting traffic stops and National Guard troops patrolling Beale Street. The actual congressional representation is slipping away. Steve Cohen, Memphis's sitting congressman, announced he would retire at the end of his current term rather than run in the gerrymandered new district.
Cohen described the redistricting as colonization. Breaking up the Black vote is identical to breaking up the Democratic vote, he argued. Each of the three new districts now contains between 29 and 35 percent of the city's African American voting age population. "The odds of that happening simply independent of considering race is less likely than the old story about putting a monkey at a typewriter and then coming out with a Shakespeare play," he said.
The new representatives of districts five, eight, and nine will focus on rural and suburban counties connected only loosely to Memphis. "They won't even consider the African American community at all, because it's not a significant voting bloc," Cohen predicted. His 20 years in Congress focused on community grants, hospitals serving people transitioning from homelessness or prison, and public facilities.
Wes King sits under the Poplar Avenue bridge, among roughly one in ten Tennessee adults disenfranchised by felony convictions. He loves politics and believes government should stabilize the economy and distribute resources fairly. Kenneth Belcher, sitting nearby, feels the weight more directly. "They're taking rights away," he said. "That's what it feels like. That's criminal, really."
Redistricting is abstract when debated in legislative chambers and drawn across maps. But in Binghampton, it is visceral. King struggles daily to survive in a city now represented by those who will not see him or his community as significant. "It's hard to get out of here," he said.
Author James Rodriguez: "This isn't a technical mapping dispute,it's a direct assault on representation, and the courts' weakening of the Voting Rights Act has given Republicans the opening they needed."
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