Alito Said Racism Was Over. Southern States Are Now Rushing to Revive Jim Crow.

Ari Berman, Mother Jones

Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.) is the first Black member of Congress elected from South Carolina since Reconstruction, and the only Black Democrat ever elected from the state. He has been elected seventeen times during his thirty-two year career and rose to become the third-ranking Democrat in the US House.

His seat was drawn in 1992 to give Black voters a chance to elect the first Black member of Congress in that state in 100 years. Its last Black member of Congress elected during Reconstruction, George Washington Murray, was ousted from the US House in 1897 after South Carolina passed a new state constitution designed to disenfranchise Black voters.

But if South Carolina Republicans get their way and pass a 7-0 map eliminating Clyburn’s seat, the state’s lone Democratic US House district, and the only one in which Black voters can elect their preferred candidate, will no longer functionally exist. If Clyburn loses his seat, a state that is one-quarter Black will have no Black representation in the US House.

As Clyburn told reporters last Tuesday before state Republicans redrew the map, “It’s a comprehensive approach to creating Jim Crow 2.0.”

The Palmetto State is not alone. The revival of Jim Crow is happening with alarming speed across the South, following the Supreme Court’s destruction of the Voting Rights Act, with Southern Republicans set to dismantle at least five majority-Black districts in South Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi.

Keep reading.

Learn about the long shadow of Jim Crow.

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