Eric Holder Statement on Tennessee’s Immoral Congressional Gerrymander

Washington, D.C. — Today, Eric H. Holder, Jr., the 82nd Attorney General of the United States and Chairman of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee (NDRC), released the following statement in response to the Tennessee General Assembly passing an extreme mid-decade congressional gerrymander that makes all of Tennessee’s congressional districts majority white, despite the fact that minority populations make up 35 percent of the statewide population:

“Memphis is not just any city; it holds a central place in the national story of our quest for racial justice in this country and how, over time, we have increasingly achieved civil, voting, and economic rights for all Americans. Black citizens protested, marched and died there for the right to vote. 

“We are not the same country we were in years past, but what is being done to Memphis by Tennessee Republicans—at the behest of the White House—shows that the protections once afforded by Section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act do indeed remain necessary to this day. 

“Now, Memphis is going to be connected to another dark chapter in our country’s story, one where we are entering a revised, modern-day Jim Crow, where politicians act with impunity to diminish the voting power of Black and Latino communities across the country. Republicans want us to believe that Tennessee’s newest and repressive gerrymander is justified for partisan reasons—as if that were somehow consistent with the best of American democracy. The reality is that there is no moral justification that can be made for knowingly splitting apart a historically Black community and drowning out its votes by pairing it with extremely wealthy, predominantly white suburbs hundreds of miles away. In fact, it is immoral. 

“Tennessee Republicans shamelessly and happily racing to diminish the voting power of Black citizens shows just how detrimental the Roberts Court’s decision to gut the Voting Rights Act is to our democracy. The Court has put in place a nefarious permission structure. This move by Tennessee will be the first of many immoral, flagrant racial gerrymanders that we will see from Republican-led states unless and until we can enact federal legislation to protect the rights of voters and to reform an out-of-control and unprincipled Supreme Court. 

“Make no mistake, this fight will be hard, it will be long, and there will be setbacks as well as many victories. Martin Luther King, Jr. once said, ‘The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.’  But the arc does not bend on its own. It’s now on us, again, to do the necessary work to pull that arc towards justice—together.”

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