Jim Crow 2.0: Why the South Is Ground Zero for the Fight Over Black Political Power

Aug 27

American history doesn't move in a straight line toward equality. It moves more like waves — progress followed by pushback, followed by more progress.

We're in a pushback period right now. It's playing out in courtrooms, school boards, and state legislatures. And nowhere is it happening faster, or with more familiar echoes, than in the South.

Across the country, voting rights are under attack, and Black history is being erased from curricula and public spaces. Black representation in government is being eliminated, district by district, law by law.

This isn't an accident. It's a Republican strategy, and it has a name: Jim Crow 2.0.

Why the South, specifically

The South has always been America's testing ground. If you want to know where democracy is headed, watch the South first. The rest of the country usually catches up — for better or worse.

For most of American history, the South boosted its power in Congress by counting its Black population — first as enslaved people, then as free citizens — while denying those same people the right to vote. More people counted meant more seats.

White supremacists have had to get more creative since the end of reconstruction, but the end result is the same: Fewer voters meant less accountability.

The names change. The slogans change. The legal arguments change. But the underlying political project has remained remarkably consistent: preserve conservative white political power by limiting the political power of Black Americans. Founders called it the Three-Fifths Compromise. Confederates defended it. Segregationists got creative with it. Today, MAGA is modernizing it.

Journalists covering this year's redistricting fights have pointed out the same uncomfortable pattern: Southern states are racing to draw Black representatives out of Congress even as Black and other minority residents account for nearly all of the population growth in those states.

The people driving the numbers up are being drawn out of the districts those numbers create. It's a remarkable political trick: benefiting from demographic change while making sure the people those demographics represent can't benefit.

The redistricting wave

In April 2026, the Supreme Court ruled in Louisiana v. Callais in a way that opened the door for states to redraw congressional maps with far less fear of being challenged under the Voting Rights Act. Republican legislatures didn't wait around.

A few examples of what's followed:

Louisiana had a second majority-Black district ordered by federal courts, which elected Cleo Fields to Congress in 2024. In May 2026, state Republicans repealed that map and replaced it with one that eliminates the seat.

Tennessee moved even faster. Days after the Callais ruling, Governor Bill Lee signed a bill repealing a fifty-year-old law that barred mid-decade redistricting, clearing the way for the legislature to pass a new congressional map within the week. That map dismantles the state's only majority-Black district, the 9th, which includes Memphis — splitting the city's Black and Democratic voters across three districts that each stretch more than 200 miles into white, Republican-leaning suburbs and rural counties. It's the first congressional map any state has passed as a direct result of the Supreme Court's ruling.

Alabama has two majority-Black congressional districts out of seven, also the result of a court order. Shortly after the Supreme Court's ruling, Governor Kay Ivey called a special legislative session, and lawmakers voted to cut that number down to one.

Florida eliminated a Black-majority district under a map championed by Governor Ron DeSantis back in 2022, following the historic Black turnout that helped elect Joe Biden in 2020. That fight is still working its way through the courts.

Georgia, which has four majority-Black districts, held off on redrawing its map for 2026 only because the courts ruled too late in the year. Governor Brian Kemp has signaled new maps could come for 2028.

By one NPR analysis, at least 15 House districts across the South are now at risk of elimination — and that count doesn't even include newly redrawn maps in Texas and Missouri. Some analysts are calling this the largest potential single-year loss of Black political representation in the nation's history.

The voting restrictions underneath it all

Redistricting gets the headlines, but it's only half the picture. Since 2020, Southern legislatures have also been quietly rewriting the rules for who gets to cast a ballot in the first place.

Georgia's 2021 election law tightened ID requirements for mail-in ballots. A newer bill reduces the number of voting machines available per voter and lowers the bar for challenging whether someone is eligible to vote at all.
Texas passed a law requiring specific forms of ID for mail ballots and targeting groups that help voters "harvest" or turn in their ballots.
Alabama passed laws in 2024 making it harder to vote absentee, expanded the list of felony convictions that strip someone's right to vote, and has run voter purge efforts that specifically target naturalized citizens.
Florida now requires vote-by-mail requests to be renewed every two years, meaning many voters who requested a mail ballot years ago found themselves unexpectedly cut off.
Louisiana, as of January 2025, requires documentary proof of citizenship for anyone registering with a state-created form.

None of this is happening in a vacuum. The Brennan Center tracked 16 states enacting restrictive voting laws in just the first four months of 2026 alone — a pace on track to rival 2021, the biggest year for voting restrictions since the Voting Rights Act passed.

Erasing the history that explains all of this

At the same time these laws are gaining traction, the history that would help people understand them is being pulled out of classrooms.

Florida rejected the College Board's new AP African American Studies course in 2023, objecting to material on the Black Lives Matter movement, reparations, and intersectionality. The state's new K-12 standards on African American history drew national backlash for how they framed slavery. Several other Republican-led states, including Arkansas, Mississippi, and North Dakota, opened their own reviews of whether the AP course should be allowed at all.

That’s because the MAGA movement did not invent these political tactics. It inherited and modernized many of them, replacing the language of segregation with the language of election integrity and voter fraud while pursuing many of the same political outcomes. And if everyone knows what they’re doing, they’ll be easier to stop.

The pattern is consistent: restrict what people can learn about the past, restrict who gets to shape the future.

What we do about it

Bottom line: No one spends this much time trying to stop people from voting if voting doesn't matter.

Black Americans have shown up again and again to vote against the politicians and policies driving this backslide. Election after election, they've sounded the alarm. Too often, the rest of us haven't done enough to back them up.

That has to change. Solidarity isn't a feeling — it's a decision. And right now, more of us need to make it.

The good news is that we're not starting from scratch. We have more resources, more legal infrastructure, and more organizing experience than any previous generation that's fought this fight. We just need to use them.

History on voting rights has a lot of darkness, but it also tells us something hopeful. Every generation that tried to make American democracy smaller was eventually met by another generation determined to make it bigger. The question has never been whether the pushback comes. The question is whether enough of us decide to push back, too.