Supreme Court To Decide If Race Was Factor In Drawing North Carolina Voting District

Jet, Dec 11, 2000

Recently, the United States Supreme Court agreed to issue a decision that could affect the racial makeup of voting districts nationwide.

For the fourth time, the case of North Carolina's much-examined 12th congressional district landed before the justices. At issue again is the role of race in drawing congressional boundaries.

The North Carolina case is a follow-up to the justices' landmark 1993 ruling that election districts drawn to help minorities might violate White voters' rights. The justices are expected to issue a decision by July.

North Carolina claims that the latest boundaries of Rep. Mel Watt's district were dictated by politics, not race. The state legislature wanted to ensure that the district was safely Democratic in order to maintain an even split between Republicans and Democrats in the North Carolina congressional delegation, Atty. Walter E. Dellinger argued before the court.

"These are the reliably Democratic precincts in what otherwise is a Republican area of North Carolina," Dellinger said. The criteria used to determine the district's constituents "was not the color of their skin, but how they voted." The Clinton administration backs the state.

The latest version of the 12th district, which includes the cities of Charlotte, Winston-Salem and Greensboro, is now less than 50 percent Black. Watt was one of two Blacks elected to Congress in 1992 from a state that had not sent a Black to Washington since 1901. He has been re-elected four times.

In a series of rulings, many by a 5-4 split, the Supreme Court has held that congressional districts cannot be drawn with the express intent of creating a minority voting bloc.

A lower court agreed with a group of North Carolina residents that the 12th congressional district improperly made race the "predominant factor" in its creation.

"What they've done here is link portions of urban areas with rural connectors and the rural connectors are basically White filler," Atty. Robinson O. Everett argued in opposing the state.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg sharply questioned Everett's claim that other safe Democratic precincts could have been substituted for some of the district's majority-Black precincts. She added that the district may be politically cohesive because "urban areas share some problems, like health care, housing, the deterioration of public schools."

Justice John Paul Stevens suggested that the boundaries might simply serve to help get Watt re-elected, something that in and of itself does not violate the court's previous rulings.

After the 1993 decision that let White voters challenge districts designed to help minorities, North Carolina's 12th was the subject of two more Supreme Court actions over the issue of race in congressional boundaries.