SCSJ represents the Texas State Conference of NAACP Branches in Texas v. United States, litigation in the federal District Court for the District of Columbia in which the state of Texas is seeking federal preclearance for its Congressional, State House and State Senate redistricting plans. The NAACP is joining with the United States Department of Justice in arguing that these plans were crafted with racially discriminatory intent and will have a retrogressive effect on minority voters.
Trial begins on Tuesday, January 17, 2012 and will conclude at the end of the following week, with closing arguments on February 3. The outcome of this trial will be key in what plan is in place for the 2012 elections conducted in Texas this fall. Texas is an incredibly diverse state, and the NAACP stands with all minority voters in resisting the state’s longstanding and egregious attempts to minimize the voting strength of African-American, Latino, and Asian-American voters in Texas.

The Southern Coalition for Social Justice has been representing the Texas State Conference of Branches of the NAACP in ongoing litigation over Texas’s statewide redistricting plans. On Friday, November 25, a three-judge panel in Texas ordered the implementation of a court-drawn interim plan for Congressional elections in 2012. This plan corrects almost all of the major problems that the NAACP identified in the state’s enacted plan.

In the court-drawn plan, Congressional Districts 9, 18, and 30—districts currently electing the candidates of choice of African-American voters—are not weakened, as they were in the state’s enacted plan. The court-drawn plan respects the cores of the district and does not split significant communities of interest, as the state plan did. The court’s drawing of these districts in a way that respects the integrity of the districts and complies with the Voting Rights Act makes even clearer the discriminatory intent that infected the drawing of minority districts in the state’s plan.

In the state’s enacted plan, Texas had purposefully destroyed a Congressional District 25, a multi-ethnic coalition district based in Austin. The state’s plan carved up East Austin, a historically significant African American community that had always been represented by a single representative, into multiple districts, in order to dilute the voting strength of African American voters in that area. The court’s plan retained the core of CD 25, and kept East Austin intact.

Finally, the court-drawn plan creates a new African-American opportunity district in Tarrant County, in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex area. After the 2010 Census, Texas gained 4 Congressional representatives because of population growth of the last decade—population growth that was almost entirely from increases in Latino and African-American population. Despite this fact, the congressional plan that Texas drew created no new African-American opportunity districts and no net increase in Latino opportunity districts. Congressional District 33 is majority-minority, with African-Americans constituting a strong plurality of the citizen voting age population. The drawing of Congressional District 33 is fair and complies with the Voting Rights Act, and will enable the minority community in the Dallas-Fort Worth region to elect a candidate of their choice.

SCSJ staff attorney Chris Brook spoke November 8 at an NC Central panel discussion on environmental justice. Addressing the Central Law Black Law Student Association, Environmental Law Society, and Constitutional Law and Civil Rights Society, Brook generally outlined the origins of the environmental justice movement in Warren County, North Carolina. He also spoke of SCSJ's recent successes in obtaining a benefits package for the New Hill community, which struggled against the placement of a sewage treatment plant in their community, as well as stopping Greensboro's efforts to re-open the White Street Landfill in predominantly African-American Northeast Greensboro. "Too often environmental impacts are placed in communities of color," said Brook. "This was a great opportunity to make the scope of these ongoing challenges known."

Today SCSJ filed a lawsuit on behalf of four statewide organizations and 27 individual voters, challenging the newly enacted redistricting plans for the North Carolina State House, State Senate and U.S. Congress. We allege that all three plans “are an intentional and cynical use of race that exceeds what is required to ensure fairness to previously disenfranchised racial minority voters.” In addition to violating the equal protection rights of North Carolina voters on the basis of race, the maps also unfairly create two classes of voters in the state. One class is those who live in split precincts and who will experience delays, confusion and a heightened risk of receiving the wrong ballot. Approximately two million voting age adults in the state (27% of the total voting age population) live in a split precinct. The other class is those voters who do not live in a split precinct and who will not face these problems. African-American voting age adults are 50% more likely than whites to live in a split precinct.
The organizational plaintiffs are the North Carolina NAACP, Democracy North Carolina, the North Carolina League of Women Voters and the North Carolina A. Philip Randolph Institute. We seek to overturn the legislature’s unconstitutional packing of black voters. The Complaint is attached below.

For a musical explanation of what this case is about, check out this video from ProPublica: http://www.propublica.org/article/video-the-redistricting-song.