Baton Rouge, Louisiana: As a child, Leona Tate was among the "New Orleans Four," the first Black students to desegregate a public school in the deep South. She endured racial slurs and death threats while armed US Marshals escorted her to class. On Friday, more than six decades later, Tate addressed Republican state lawmakers, telling them that their proposal to dismantle at least one majority-Black congressional district brought back harrowing memories.
"I need you to understand what it feels like to stand here, to have walked through that mob as a child, and to now watch elected officials do the same thing that mob was trying to do -- just with better suits and a parliamentary procedure," she told a senate committee hearing at the state capitol in Baton Rouge.
Emotional Testimony and Protests
For more than eight hours, Black members of Congress, pastors, activists, and voters delivered testimony that was at times emotional, angry, and deeply personal. Outside the hearing room, protesters cheered them on. "Let him speak!" they chanted at one point, after Republican committee chairman Caleb Kleinpeter cut the microphone of a Democratic colleague during a heated exchange. Mike McClanahan, president of the state chapter of the NAACP, was forcibly blocked from entering the room by security.
Supreme Court Decision Sparks Electoral Chaos
The tumultuous hearing reflected the electoral chaos gripping Louisiana after a recent US Supreme Court decision that weakened a landmark civil rights law. This decision gives Republicans the opportunity to draw a new congressional map that could erase one or both of the state's two Democratic-held majority-Black districts. Black voters make up one-third of the electorate in Louisiana and typically support Democrats. Republicans already control the other four districts.
The unprecedented national redistricting arms race began last year when President Trump pushed Texas Republicans to redraw the state's congressional map, targeting five Democratic seats. With inputs from Reuters and Associated Press.
