Justin Pearson is playing a game in which the cards were marked in favor of his opponent after play had already begun. Pearson is the Democratic candidate for Congress in Tennessee’s ninth district (TN-9), one of three in the U.S. South that Republicans rushed to redraw in the wake of a Supreme Court ruling in April that curtailed the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The decision dealt a fatal blow to one of the major gains of the civil rights era. It banned consideration of race when drawing electoral districts, but the court’s conservative majority approved doing so for political reasons.

This is the partisan redrawing of districts known as gerrymandering, a practice as typically American as it is anti-democratic. The ruling arrived in time to affect the midterm elections on Tuesday, November 3. And it helped dismantle three maps in which Black voters, who tend to vote Democratic, were the majority. The other two are in Louisiana and Alabama.

In Tennessee, the state legislature split Shelby County — home to Memphis — into three districts. Sixty-three percent of Shelby’s 388,000 residents are Black. Neighbors who used to vote together will now be voting in different districts. TN-9, the seat Pearson is running for in Washington, now stretches almost to Nashville and, across almost 220 miles, includes rural, white, Republican towns. The result is the dilution of Black representation, aimed at ensuring Tennessee’s nine members of Congress in Washington are conservatives (up from the current eight).

Still, Pearson, 31, says he is confident he will win the midterms against his opponent, Brent Taylor — not only despite the Supreme Court ruling but for the same reasons polls predict a rout for Republicans: Donald Trump’s unpopularity, the rising cost of living and gasoline, corruption in the White House, and the war in Iran.

“[The Supreme Court ruling and the gerrymandering] were racist decisions. They wanted to silence our voice, but they miscalculated. People who normally don’t vote are mobilizing, and we’re in a position to win,” the Democrat told EL PAÍS in an interview last week, days after his campaign was added to a list of contests that suddenly looked promising for his party.

His opponent Taylor did not respond to this paper’s requests for comment to give the candidate a chance to present his side.

With a smiling charisma, an Afro hairstyle, slim suits and a combative, populist way of doing politics, Pearson became famous for raising his fist when he and two other members of state Congress were expelled from the Nashville Capitol three years ago for protesting in favor of gun control. Since then he has become a symbol of the Black South pushing back against xenophobia and attacks on affirmative action by the Trump administration.

Six decades have passed since his ancestors made history in the civil rights era. This is also the city where Martin Luther King Jr. (MLK) was killed. Ian Randolph of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), an organization that was pivotal then, says his community must revive the “struggle” of their “grandparents and great-grandparents.” “My children have fewer rights than I did at birth. And my grandchild has fewer than my daughter,” he says.

Randolph, who met EL PAÍS at the NAACP’s historic Memphis headquarters, founded the Shelby County Voting Coalition, which promotes participation among Black and Latino communities. He says it’s working. He pulls out a paper comparing neighborhood-by-neighborhood, day-by-day early-vote figures — early voting in Shelby County began in mid-October — with those from the last midterm election in 2022. Totals have doubled, which to him can only mean the city’s Black majority is rebelling against the Supreme Court decision.

“We are witnessing a backlash to Obama and to Kamala Harris being vice president,” says Pastor Keith Blackwell of the curtailing of the Voting Rights Act. “It’s also the frustration of the lower classes at de-industrialization, at the death of progress. And it’s the brutal legacy of white supremacy. Trump wants to take us back to 1860,” he adds, referring to the year before the American Civil War began and slavery ended.

Blackwell is pastor of Centenary United Methodist Church, where MLK delivered his last sermon the day before he was killed. In addition to being a landmark of the civil rights struggle, the church is a beacon in the southern part of the city — an area that has traditionally contributed to Memphis’s reputation as one of the most dangerous cities in the United States. That reputation annoys residents, who nonetheless advise visitors to be careful.

Social life revolves around those streets, where some absent-minded tourists show up looking for the Stax soul-records museum, and around places like Art House, a barbecue restaurant whose smoked turkey “ribs” (in fact the bird’s shoulder blades) are memorable.

One of its owners, a man named Lortoni Butler — who describes himself as a relative of soul singer Jerry Butler and of Emmett Till, the child whose shocking 1955 murder became a symbol of the South’s racist brutality — said politics is currently fueling conversations at the restaurant. He also says he’s seeing “more desire to vote” than ever.

Data centers

Butler is optimistic, though not as much as Booker Batsell, who quoted Genesis to describe what he expects will happen on November 3: “You meant evil against me, but God meant it for good,” he said at City Hall before joining Pearson and hundreds of angry citizens at a tense five-hour meeting to debate a moratorium on new data center construction — a moratorium that failed. “They created three new districts out of one that had been Democratic, and it’s going to backfire on them because the Republicans will lose all three,” Batsell added.

Until it is clear whether the maneuver will harm Trump’s party, nonpartisan voting-rights experts warn of another effect of the Supreme Court ruling: its power to discourage voters who no longer see themselves reflected in the candidates who represent them. There is also a high risk of confusion when maps are drawn under exceptional circumstances. Districts are normally redrawn every 10 years after the census to reflect new demographic realities. What happened out of schedule in Tennessee (and in many other places, some of which benefited Democrats) responds to Trump’s pressure to change election rules.

The rushed redrawing in Memphis means many voters don’t even know which district they belong to. And it’s not only the absent-minded or uninformed who are affected.

Historian Aram Goudsouzian, author of acclaimed socio-political biographies of actor Sidney Poitier and basketball player Bill Reilly, admitted he found himself in that situation during an interview in his University of Memphis office, where he recalled that Black residents in the city had the right to vote long before those in other Southern cities (as long as they voted for a “boss” named Edward Crump). He also noted that “if the Civil Rights Act eliminated segregation in 1964, the Voting Rights Act a year later turned Black people into legitimate citizens.”

Residents of small Elzey Avenue in the gentrified Cooper Young neighborhood are the worst affected. Under the new maps, those living on the north side of the street vote in the fifth district. Those across the way, like Reba Milton, a white retiree who has her house ready for Halloween as tradition dictates, vote in the ninth.

Milton, who described herself as independent, had not realized that her home — where she has lived for “more than 20 years” — sits on the front line of the gerrymandering wars. Maybe because she is more worried about another boundary: a fence erected 10 meters from her house to block access to a newly built subdivision, forcing her to take a detour to get to the other stretch of the street.

For Kristin New, chair of the Republican Party in Germantown, all that electoral confusion matters less than the “positive” effect the Supreme Court ruling produced in her view. “In practice, it has undone an unfair map. A district had been created that corresponded to a county, Shelby, and that wasn’t right. It favored one party, the Democrats. That can’t be right either,” she says.

Asked whether the ruling also silences Black people, she dismissed the idea. “Why should skin color matter? A politician should be loyal to the Constitution, not to a race. I don’t understand those criticisms.”

New, who called Pearson “a radical socialist” and her opponent, Taylor, “someone concerned about crime” who “interceded so Trump would send the National Guard,” was campaigning at a polling site in that commuter town south of Memphis — a largely white, conservative-leaning area. The place was surprisingly busy for a Thursday morning. There were mayoral and school-board candidates and older voters arriving in their SUVs. Early voting was healthy there too, which suggests not only Democrats are participating more than ever.

Not everyone in Germantown was as pleased as New with the redrawn maps. Andy Ellis, who describes himself as “conservative,” said he would like to be able to vote with his neighbors “even if they think differently,” and lamented that “the center” has “disappeared” in the United States. Republican Karen Whitlock said she disagreed with the Tennessee legislature acting “so quickly” instead of waiting for the next election. “But that’s how it is, and in any case it’s a legal maneuver,” she said.

If Germantown’s immaculate lawns and single-family houses contrast with the downtown streets lined with closed shops and gas stations where homeless people in South Memphis wander, driving east across TN-9 to a small town like Moscow, for example, takes you to another world. A world of bearded farmers in caps, battered pickup trucks, shops selling T-shirts that read things like “I want one woman and a lot of guns,” and a wary Southern hospitality.

On November 3, both worlds will converge at the polls to decide on a shared future that the Black community of the big city fears will, six decades later, leave them behind again. On a North Memphis street, a nonpartisan sign recalls that anti-racist struggle in black letters on a white background. It says “I Am a Man,” just like the signs held by the sanitation workers who took to the streets in 1968 to protest in support of Martin Luther King after he was killed at the Lorraine Motel.

William Clark made it and put it up in front of his house “about 25 years ago.” As he repairs the glass in the door — which he claims the police broke before giving his son a chance to leave of his own volition — Clark says he’ll take down the sign when he feels that Black people are finally allowed, once and for all, to “be men” in the Old South.

For now, he still believes that time has not yet come.

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