Since the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the number of Black members of the House of Representatives has grown every decade. Today, about 60 representatives are Black, which means that the share who are Black has at long last nearly equaled the Black share of the nation’s population (both roughly 14 percent). Yet this progress is now on the verge of being reversed.
In this year’s midterms, six Black members of Congress could lose their seats, mostly because Republican state legislators redrew their districts for partisan advantage. After more states gerrymander their congressional maps in 2027 and 2028, another five to 14 Black members may lose their seats. By 2029, the number of Black members of Congress could fall by a quarter or even a third. America is on the cusp of an evisceration of Black political power.
The Voting Rights Act was a monumental achievement partly because it ensured that many Black Americans would live in districts where they were numerous enough to wield democratic power. Republican legislators are now diluting that power by dispersing Black citizens, most of whom vote Democratic, across several districts to maximize the chances that a Republican can win each one.
The result will be a Congress in which Black Americans will again be badly underrepresented. Not every group in a diverse country will be represented in proportion to its numbers, of course. Latino and Asian Americans are significantly underrepresented in Congress today, as are women. Still, Black Americans occupy a distinct place in American political life.
The nation’s founding documents were written to accommodate their enslavement. For a century after Emancipation, millions of Black Southerners could not vote because of a racial caste system based on laws and violence. That violence was often horrific by design, including lynchings, beatings and strategic terror campaigns to crush any attempt at Black political participation. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 attempted to stop this exclusion, and it ensured that voters who had lived in areas with a history of voter suppression could elect representatives who would speak for them in Washington.
The current gerrymandering campaign undermines that principle. It disproportionately robs Black Americans of the ability to vote for their preferred candidates. Those candidates are not always Black, but they often are, much as white, Asian and Latino voters often support candidates who share their own background. Race, after all, still matters in American life, as is clear from the large Black-white gaps in income, wealth, educational attainment and life expectancy.
The decline of Black members of Congress in the late 2020s is likely to be the largest since the decades after Reconstruction. Between 1870 and 1901, when the federal government enforced voting rights and Black political participation in the South, 22 Black members served in Congress. Then came racial disenfranchisement laws across the South and resurgent campaigns of terror by the Ku Klux Klan. From 1902 through 1928, Congress did not include a single Black member.
For the past 60 years, slow progress has been the norm, until now.
Two forces are driving the changes: a Supreme Court that has weakened the Voting Rights Act and a state-by-state gerrymandering campaign driven by President Trump.
Seven years ago, the court ruled that partisan gerrymandering was none of the judiciary’s business, in Rucho v. Common Cause. If legislators wanted to draw districts to maximize their party’s number of seats, no matter how blatant the effort or how serpentine the districts, they could. The decision reversed years of judicial skepticism about partisan gerrymandering. In April of this year, in Louisiana v. Callais, the court went further and removed the biggest remaining obstacle to gerrymandering. In a 6-to-3 decision, with all the Republican-appointed justices in the majority and all the Democratic appointees in dissent, the court effectively overturned the Voting Rights Act’s safeguards for districts in the South where Black voters could elect their candidates of choice. That ruling gutted a protection that had preserved those districts for decades.
Mr. Trump has tried to take advantage. Last year, he began pressuring Republican legislators to redraw their states’ congressional maps to add Republican-leaning seats. Between 1970 and 2025, only two states had voluntarily redrawn their congressional maps in the middle of a 10-year census cycle. Nine states have now done so since the 2024 election, with several expected to follow next year.
The Republican redistricting campaign targets Democrats generally, but its effect on Black members is disproportionate. Black voters lean heavily Democratic, and many live near one another, which is partly a legacy of slavery and segregation. The compactness of Black communities makes their districts targets for dilution. The gerrymandering campaigns in Alabama, Louisiana, North Carolina and Texas all relied on cracking open heavily Black districts and sprinkling their voters into whiter districts. In each of those states, at least one Black member of Congress is likely to be out of office come January. Referring to the legislators who are redrawing the lines, Representative James Clyburn, a South Carolina Democrat, told us, “They know exactly what they’re doing.”
The gerrymandering campaign will also leave the country with fewer competitive House elections, aggravating political polarization and discouraging the compromise that is necessary to legislating.
What can be done? A lot. As wrongheaded as the Supreme Court’s recent decisions have been, the justices have at least made clear that Congress has the authority under Article I of the Constitution to set rules for how its own elections are run. That authority would allow Congress to restrict partisan gerrymandering. It could pass a law, for instance, requiring each state to appoint a bipartisan commission charged with drawing geographically compact districts, as some already do.
A crucial fact is that common-sense districts would probably lead to many more Black members of Congress than there will be after the current gerrymandering wave ends. A recent paper by researchers at Harvard, Princeton and the University of Michigan estimated that “race-blind nonpartisan redistricting” would produce similar levels of minority representation as exist now. A separate analysis, by Nate Cohn and Eve Washington of The Times, came to the same conclusion.
To put it another way, a ban on extreme partisan gerrymandering, one that ensured fair, nonpartisan maps, could restore much of the congressional diversity that the Voting Rights Act initially made possible.
Instead, the Republican appointees on the Supreme Court and Republican legislators around the country are creating a system that will probably lead to a House of Representatives that is even more disproportionately white. What is being lost is not only Black political power. It is the promise made and remade across two centuries, that the country’s institutions can be shaped by the people they claim to represent. Future Americans will inherit either the country that finally kept this promise or the country that let it be broken. Congress will make that choice.
Source photograph via Getty Images.
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