Significance: In this case the Supreme Court ruled that racial discrimination in the drawing of voting districts violated the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
Background: In 1982 North Carolina enacted a redistricting plan for the state legislature. Ralph Gingles, an African American, joined other African American voters in protesting the redistricting. They claimed that the new plan interfered with their ability to elect the representatives of their choice and therefore violated the Fourteenth Amendment, the Fifteenth Amendment, and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Before they could file their lawsuit, however, a section of the act was amended to read that something could only be found discriminatory if it resulted in discrimination, rather than merely having a discriminatory purpose. The amended section required a “results test” to see if the representation was affected. The district court applied the test and found that the black vote was indeed affected unfairly. Lacy Thornburg, North Carolina’s attorney general, appealed to the Supreme Court.
Decision: This case was argued on December 4, 1985, and decided on June 30, 1986. The judgment was affirmed in part and reversed in part. Justice William Brennan spoke for the Court. The Court ruled that in most of the contested districts, the African American vote was being diluted because the redistricting separated the vote along racial lines. The Court called these areas “racial blocs.” The Court judged that these blocs, along with campaign appeals to racial prejudice and a history of official discrimination in such matters as voting and education, gave an unfair advantage to white candidates.
Excerpt from the Opinion of the Court: “The District Court in this case carefully considered the totality of the circumstances and found that in each district racially polarized [split] voting; the legacy of official discrimination in voting matters, education, housing, employment, and health services; and the persistence of campaign appeals to racial prejudice acted in concert with the multimember districting scheme to impair [damage] the ability of geographically insular [isolated] and politically cohesive [unified] groups of black voters to participate equally in the political process and to elect candidates of their choice.”
