Court Affirms Call to Unpack Minority Districts

A Vanderbilt professor's argument that challenged the presumption underlying so called "minority influence districts" was supported last week in the Supreme Court's ruling in Georgia v. Ashcroft.

A decade ago, in her book Black Faces, Black Interests: The Representation of African Americans in Congress (Harvard U. Press, 1993, 1995), Carol M. Swain, now professor of law and political science at Vanderbilt University, argued against the dominant strategy of packing minority voters into "safe districts." She asserted that majority-minority districts do not necessarily maximize representation of minorities, but instead may actually dilute minority representation by concentrating minority interests into single districts instead of distributing those interests more broadly across a number of districts.

In the majority opinion, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor twice cited Swain's work as she argued that "various studies have suggested that the most effective way to maximize minority voting strength may be to create more influence or coalitional districts," influence districts being those "where minority voters may not be able to elect a candidate of choice but can play a substantial, if not decisive, role in the electoral process."

Swain is available to talk about the issue of minority districts and what the court's decision means to the future of black representation in state legislatures and Congress.

Editor's note: Carol Swain has written extensively on the 1965 Voting Rights Act and on black representation in Congress. Black Faces, Black Interests: The Representation of African Americans in Congress won the 1994 Woodrow Wilson Prize for the best U.S. book on government.