Baton Rouge, Louisiana: As a child, Leona Tate was one of the “New Orleans Four”, the first black students to desegregate a public school in the deep South, who endured racial slurs and death threats as armed U.S. Marshals escorted them to class.On Friday, more than six decades later, Tate told Republican state lawmakers that his proposal to gut at least one majority-Black congressional district brought back painful memories. “I want you to understand what it feels like to stand here, to walk through that mob as a child, and now to see elected officials doing the same thing that the mob was trying to do — just with better suits and a parliamentary process,” she said at a Senate committee hearing at the state Capitol in Baton Rouge.For more than eight hours, Black members of Congress, clergy, activists and voters gave testimony that was at times emotional, angry and deeply personal. Protestors outside the hearing room cheered him. “Let him speak!” They chanted at one point, after Republican committee Chairman Caleb Kleinpeter cut off a Democratic aide’s microphone amid a heated exchange.
Mike McClanahan, president of the state chapter of the NAACP, the nation’s largest civil rights organization, was forcibly prevented from entering the room by security.The tumultuous hearing reflected the election chaos engulfing Louisiana following last week’s U.S. Supreme Court decision that gutted a landmark civil rights law, giving Republicans the chance to draw a new congressional map that erases one or both of the state’s two Democratic-held majority-black districts. Black voters make up one-third of the electorate in Louisiana and generally support Democrats. Republicans already control the other four districts.The unprecedented national redistricting arms race began last year, when President Trump inspired Texas Republicans to redraw the state’s congressional maps and take aim at five Democratic seats. With inputs from Reuters and the Associated Press
