Voting rights at risk after Supreme Court makes it harder to challenge racial gerrymandering

  Two recent Supreme Court rulings on congressional redistricting will have starkly different consequences for Black voters in the 2024 election.

  One ruling boosted Black voting power in Louisiana, while another decision upheld a South Carolina congressional map that the lower court had declared “illegal racial gerrymandering.”

  Despite these seemingly contradictory outcomes, there is a through line.

Alabama leads nation for arresting, punishing pregnant women, according to report

  Tennessee, Alabama, and South Carolina lead the nation in arresting and criminally punishing women for allegedly posing a danger to their fetuses, according to a report released by advocacy group Pregnancy Justice.

  Nationwide, nearly 1,400 people were arrested or subject to disparate bail, sentencing, and probation for conduct related to their pregnancies between 2005 and the Supreme Court decision in June 2022 dismantling abortion rights, the report found. The vast majority were poor, white women, though poor Black women were disproportionately represented.

  The report found 649 pregnant women in Alabama had been arrested in the time period, the largest in the country and more than twice the numbers of the next two states combined.

Diversity and moderation over tradition – why Democrats moved South Carolina to the start of the 2024 presidential campaign

  The Democratic National Committee approved a proposal on Feb. 4, 2023 that puts South Carolina first on the party’s presidential nominating calendar, upending 50 years of tradition. For the first time, voters of color, moderates, hourly workers – and Southerners – will have the first say in choosing the party’s nominee.

  President Biden weighed in on changes to the nominating calendar in a Dec. 1, 2022 letter to the DNC Rules and Bylaws Committee. He wrote that early nominating states should reflect the diversity of the party and nation and that time-consuming caucuses, like those held in Iowa, should no longer be a part of the process because they disadvantage hourly workers and others who can’t take the required time away from work.

Long lines, broken machines, voter ID laws: Welcome to the neo-Jim Crow

  Felon disenfranchisement was designed to “preserve the purity of the ballot box,” or in other words, the whiteness of the electorate.

  By the time the Alabama Supreme Court issued that opinion in 1884, Florida had already beaten it to the punch. Florida outlawed voting for anyone convicted of a felony in 1868, at the very same time that it began to convict more black people of felonies.

  Exactly 150 years later, Florida voters finally overturned that discriminatory policy, re-enfranchising 1.5 million people in a single stroke last Tuesday. The news that Florida had passed Amendment 4, giving as many as 40 percent of the state’s black men the right to vote, was cause for celebration around the country and certainly here at the Southern Poverty Law Center, where we invested heavily to support its passage.

Sam Fulwood III: The myth of police reluctance

  FBI Director James Comey seems to believe that a recent uptick in violent street crime plaguing several major U.S. cities can be traced to the reluctance of police officers to do their jobs in the wake of intense public scrutiny.

  Some observers call it the “Ferguson effect,” an anecdote-rich belief that criminals are more brazen and that cowering police officers are declining to fight crime since the death of Michael Brown in August 2014. The Atlantic’s David A. Graham labels such a theory “the Bigfoot of American criminal justice: Fervently believed to be real by some, doubted by many others, reportedly glimpsed here and there, but never yet attested to by any hard evidence.”

Hank Sanders: Senate Sketches #1463: Symbols are powerful

  Symbols are powerful. On Wednesday night, June 17, 2015, a 21-year-old white man named Dylann Roof drove 120 miles to Charleston, South Carolina. He entered the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church where African Americans were participating in weekly Bible studies. He shot down nine human beings in cold blood, reloading his .45 caliber Glock handgun five times. I grieve for each life lost, each suffering family, each community in mourning, and each person weighed down by this terrible tragedy. But we cannot lose sight of the powerful role symbols played in these hate-filled acts of terrorism. Symbols are powerful.