‘A civic engagement wildfire’ hits the Gulf South in response to redistricting efforts

She and two other little girls she'd just met, Gail Etienne and Tessie Prevost, spent that first day sitting on a bench outside the principal's office. Being bored, they did what bored children do: they played hopscotch on the floor while they waited to be placed in their classroom.

By the end of the day, her white classmates' parents pulled them out of the school, one by one, until only the "McDonogh Three," as they came to be known, were left in a small room tucked away in a corner of the building.

Today, when young students visit the TEP Center for field trips, they watch grainy black-and-white footage of that day. When it ends, Tate walks into the room. Every time, she said, the reaction is the same: the students “look like they’ve seen a ghost.”

"They really think that happened so long ago that we no longer exist," she said. "I've had a student say, 'We thought y'all were dead.'"

The crowds outside the schoolhouse are gone. The battle over political power and civil rights is not.

After a Supreme Court ruling in April struck down Louisiana’s congressional maps, the Republican-controlled legislature moved to eliminate one of the state’s two majority-Black districts — handing Republicans five of six U.S. House seats in a state where Black residents make up more than a third of the population.

Tate told the Senate and Governmental Affairs Committee that what elected officials were doing by gerrymandering maps was not so different from what the crowd on St. Claude Avenue had tried to do to her, Etienne and Prevost in 1960.

"Just with better suits," she said. "I walked through that mob once. I feel like I'm still walking through it."

Near her sat Rep. Cleo Fields, who knows this particular loss firsthand. First elected in 1992 after the Voting Rights Act produced a new generation of majority-Black districts, Fields had his seat struck down by a court in 1996, won it back three decades later, and now watched the Supreme Court take it away again.

At the hearing, Fields testified alongside three other Black congressmen: Rep. Troy Carter, former Rep. Bill Jefferson, and former Rep. Cedric Richmond.

"I wanted Louisiana to see that real-time, firsthand," Fields told the Gulf States Newsroom about sitting next to the only Black representatives Louisiana has sent to Congress since Reconstruction.

Outside the committee room, a crowd packed the Capitol hallways for 8 hours. When Sen. Gary Carter, another Black lawmaker, had his microphone cut off mid-testimony, people pressed against the doors and chanted: “Let him speak.”

Tens of thousands of absentee ballots were voided after Gov. Jeff Landry suspended the House primaries the day after the Supreme Court ruling. People arrived at early polling locations to find signs taped to the doors saying the race was canceled — though many would still see the candidates on their ballots when they went to the polls. Those votes just wouldn’t count.

Fields said Louisiana is only the beginning. In the weeks since the ruling, lawmakers in Alabama and Mississippi have advanced similar redistricting efforts, setting off new legal and political fights across the Gulf South.

On a warm Saturday in Montgomery, Alabama, just days after Louisiana lawmakers voted to approve a new congressional map that eliminated Fields’ district, the response he predicted began to take shape.

More than 200 organizations had come together for a national day of action called “All Roads Lead to the South.” People filled the streets of Alabama's capital — the birthplace of the Civil Rights Movement — holding signs and chanting in defense of the Voting Rights Act.

It began, as these things often do in Alabama, with prayer. Worshippers packed Tabernacle Baptist Church in Selma, Alabama, where activists first organized in 1963, before marching across the Edmund Pettus Bridge and making their way to Montgomery.

"People of faith don't go into battle first — we worship first," said Rev. Traci Blackmon of the advocacy group Faith Out Loud.

Alabama Republicans had quickly followed Louisiana’s suit. Gov. Kay Ivey called a special session, and the state attorney general filed a motion to lift a court injunction that had prevented Alabama from redrawing its maps until 2030.

A special election was set for August, and the target is plain: two majority-Black districts held by Democratic Reps. Shomari Figures and Terri Sewell — seats that exist only because previous Voting Rights Act litigation forced the state to create them. Five of Alabama's seven congressional districts are currently held by white men.

Like Fields in Louisiana, Figures' seat is also a product of that history. He was elected in 2024 only after the Supreme Court ruled in Allen v. Milligan that Alabama had discriminated against Black voters and ordered the state to redraw its maps. Now, less than two years later, Alabama is moving to undo that remedy.

“It’s damaging to Black America, but not just Black America, to America as a whole,” Figures said at the rally. “You hear some Republicans now say, since the Callais case, ‘No, we’re not doing this to get rid of Black people, we’re getting rid of Democrats, ’ well either one of them is wrong.”

For Khayla Doby, an organizer with the Georgia Youth Justice Coalition who traveled to Montgomery for the rally, the stakes were immediate and personal — and extended well beyond Alabama's borders.

"We know that when elected officials try to attack our district maps and try to pick their voters instead of letting the people choose who represents them, that impacts the future that we will all inherit," she said. "If our votes didn't matter, they wouldn't be coming for them."

National figures including Dr. Bernice King, Sens. Cory Booker and Raphael Warnock, and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez joined the rally.

Ocasio-Cortez put a number to what was at stake across the region: nearly a third of all Black representation in Congress, she said, could be eliminated in a single election cycle.

"This is absolutely a racist attack on our voting system," she said, urging the crowd — and especially its youngest members — not to wait for someone else to lead. "You shouldn't wait for instruction. You should just go out there and organize. You are leaders in your own right."

In Mississippi, community meetings have been quickly organized in the days and weeks following the Callais decision and state leaders’ calls to redraw electoral maps — both at state and congressional levels.

At the Pearl Street African Methodist Episcopal Church in West Jackson, a few weeks after the Callais decision was handed down, a town hall gathered to hear more about the state’s redistricting efforts. People lined the pews, chatting like church parishioners would on a Sunday morning.

“People are beginning to catch on,” said state representative Zakiya Summers, who helped host the event with the ACLU of Mississippi. “It's almost like a civic engagement wildfire, where people are now more engaged about how important their vote is.”

For Summers, that means building momentum off of the increased interest and building a broad coalition of people involved.

“There are many ways for you to participate: the point is that you do participate,” said Summers. “We need everybody participating, we need everybody mobilized, we need more people organized so that we can activate the vote in November.”

Immediate redistricting like in Alabama and Louisiana isn’t likely in Mississippi. Cases involving the state’s legislative and supreme court districts have been sent back to lower courts to be reargued under the new Callais standard. With the state’s primaries already over, it would be a challenge to redraw congressional maps.

But Theresa Green, a retired public schools administrator and Mississippi NAACP member, said there’s still a sense of urgency.

“I can connect the dots,” Green said. “I can see from my generation and my father, who was a sharecropper who could vote only at the latter part of his life, and then growing up where I was a part of integration.”

Green went to the town hall to make sure she has the information her community needs to grapple with what she sees as the potential backslide of all the opportunities that previous generations built on.

“This is just a symptom of a larger thing that's happening in society,” she said. “That sense of urgency wasn't created by what's happening in Mississippi: it was created by what's happened in our national government. We're slowly getting the fallout from all of that.”

The beginning of that fallout is slowly, but surely, becoming evident in the Magnolia State.

Both Mississippi’s state House and Senate have established committees for redistricting, and Gov. Tate Reeves has said he’d like to establish wide-ranging redistricting plans before 2027 elections.

“We ought to take the entire…legislative map, and we should take the entire Supreme Court map, and we should take the entire congressional map, and we should draw based upon partisanship,” Reeves said in early May on SuperTalk Mississippi Media.

One of the biggest goals for state lawmakers looking to redistrict would be eliminating Congressional District 2, the only majority-Black district in the state, represented by Rep. Bennie Thompson, the only Democrat and only Black congressional representative from Mississippi.

Thompson has held his position for over three decades. He got his start in politics in 1964, working as a field organizer for Civil Rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer’s campaign for the seat he now holds.

More recently, Thompson was chairman of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, further putting him at odds with many Republican state leaders.

At Pearl Street AME Church, Thompson spoke to voters about the importance of having representation of choice.

“Don't let them rewrite the script just because somebody you put where they are, they disagree with,” said Thompson.

Even with more time compared to Alabama and Louisiana, advocates say the threat of redistricting in Mississippi is a real one for voters.

“It may not be in the next month that we see a new map in the same way that we've seen it from neighboring states, but just because the reaction is not immediate, it does not mean it won't be as harmful,” said Lily Moens, policy and research director for Mississippi Votes.

Without those federal protections, Moens said, the need for voter action and state guardrails is urgent.

“It is a call to action to mobilize around putting in a state-level VRA (Voting Rights Act), procedures or enforcement tools that combat racial gerrymandering,” Moens said. “The Supreme Court is living in this reality — or this non-reality — that we have somehow moved past racism…that we don't need these protections anymore.

“I think that really quickly we have seen that we do, in the way that other states have moved and the ways that Mississippi is likely to move.”

Mississippi’s voters are mobilizing ahead of those moves. Town halls — like the one at Pearl Street AME Church — and organizing are what state Rep. Timaka James-Jones said she’s seen from her constituents in the Delta and across the state.

“It's been absolutely remarkable,” said James-Jones. “This has absolutely stirred quite a bit of conversation, more than probably ever before.”

James-Jones said that the worst-case scenario with redistricting ahead is that people choose not to vote — and simply don’t show up.

“It's really true that if we don't use our voices, we will lose our voices,” said James-Jones. “That's what's on the table right now.”

This story was produced by the Gulf States Newsroom, a collaboration between Mississippi Public Broadcasting, WBHM in Alabama, WWNO and WRKF in Louisiana and NPR.