N.C.'s gerrymandered redistricting resurrects Jim Crow

By Mary Ellen Klas / Bloomberg Opinion

North Carolina Republicans will officially enter the redistricting arms race this week when lawmakers try to heed President Donald Trump’s call to create additional Republican seats. But carving out another safe GOP seat will only further unravel the state’s already frayed democratic institutions and leave the state’s rural “Black Belt” region without meaningful representation in Washington.

That’s not the representative democracy these lawmakers swore an oath to uphold.

North Carolina Republican leaders unveiled their new map on Thursday. If enacted, it could flip the 1st Congressional District — the state’s only competitive House seat — to Republicans’ favor, bringing the congressional delegation to 11 Republicans and 3 Democrats.

We’ve come to expect this partisan tit-for-tat reaction from the North Carolina GOP, which has in the last few years demonstrated a brazen willingness to destabilize American democracy for partisan gain. North Carolina was one of the states that was notoriously resistant to democratization during the civil rights movement of the 1960s. (It maintained Jim Crow literacy tests for voting until the 1970s.) But the state made great strides in the 1990s and 2000s and voter turnout increased by more than 10 percentage points during that time.

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