Tennessee State Conference of the NAACP v. Hargett

On May 5, 2026, just a week after the Supreme Court decided Louisiana v. Callais that weakened Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (“Section 2”) to the point of inoperability, the Tennessee General Assembly convened an extraordinary session to redraw the state’s Congressional districts. For more than 50 years, Congressional District 9 has primarily consisted of the city of Memphis, the largest majority-Black city in the United States, located in the extreme southwest corner of the state. Section 2 forbids the enactment of voting practices and policies that discriminate based upon race, color, or membership in a non-English language group or have a discriminatory result; in the context of redistricting, this has been interpreted to mean that districts cannot be drawn to dilute the voting power of voters of color. 

Tennessee’s District 9 was a classic example of a district that states were required to draw under Section 2 prior to the Supreme Court’s ruling in Louisiana v. Calais: it was geographically compact, fitting almost entirely within Shelby County, kept a community of interest together, and allowed Memphis’s Black population (which represents nearly half of Tennessee’s Black population) to elect a candidate of its choice.  Prior to Calais, Courts historically used a ‘totality of the circumstances’ test to determine violations of Section 2. In doing so, they look at factors like the history of voting-related discrimination in the jurisdiction, the extent to which voting outcomes are polarized on racial lines, the reality of other forms of discrimination in the jurisdiction that inhibit political participation, such as in education or employment, and the extent to which members of the minority group have won election. Under all of these factors, Black voters in Tennessee did not have equal access to the political process across the state prior to the establishment of District 9. 

Then, in Callais, the Court established an extremely high burden to proving racial discrimination, namely that it requires plaintiffs to prove a focus on race that *cannot* be explained by partisanship – further legalizing partisan gerrymanders at the expense of American’s 14^th Amendment right against racial discrimination in voting. 

The new map adopted on May 7, 2026 by the Tennessee Legislature, split Memphis between three Districts: 5, 8, and 9. Rather than a compact, cohesive district, the map connected Memphis’s predominantly Black population with primarily white suburbs hundreds of miles away that  share no historical ties or policy interests with the people of Memphis. In Districts 5 and 9, Memphis was connected to Williamson County, the 4% Black Nashville suburb with the highest per capita income in Tennessee and a median household income double that of Shelby County. The Tennessee legislature passed the map over an avalanche of testimony about its racially discriminatory outcome and the state’s law against mid-cycle redistricting, which was repealed in a separate bill the same day the map was passed.  

On May 13, 2026, the League of Women Voters of Tennessee (“LWVTN”) filed a lawsuit along with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)’s Tennessee State Conference, the Shelby County Voter Alliance, Free Hearts, the Memphis Urban League, and six impacted voters, against Tennessee Secretary of State Tre Hargett, Coordinator of Elections Mark Goins, and the State Election Commission. The lawsuit claims that the new map was an illegal racial gerrymander under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, and that the Tennessee legislature illegally used race as a proxy for partisanship. Their complaint requested the court: (1): prevent the map from being used for the 2026 elections; and (2) strike down the map permanently as an illegal racial gerrymander. 

LWVTN is represented by Turner Field, PLLC, the National Association of the Advancement of Colored People, the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, Inc., the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, and Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner LLP.