Louisiana Republicans move to eliminate majority-Black U.S. House district, sparking anger and confusion

BATON ROUGE, La.: As a child, Leona Tate, one of the “New Orleans Four” and the first black students to desegregate public schools in the Deep South, endured racial slurs and death threats as armed U.S. Marshals escorted them to class.More than sixty years later, Tate told Republican state lawmakers on Friday that their proposal to eliminate at least one majority-Black congressional district brought back painful memories. “I need you to understand what it feels like to stand here, walking past the rioters as a child, and now watching elected officials do the same thing the rioters were trying to do – just with better suits and parliamentary procedures,” she told a Senate committee hearing at the state Capitol in Baton Rouge.For more than eight hours, black members of Congress, clergy, activists and constituents delivered sometimes emotional, angry and deeply personal testimony. Outside the hearing room, protesters cheered them on. “Let him talk!” they chanted at one point after Republican committee chairman Caleb Kleinpeter cut off a Democratic colleague’s microphone during 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 raucous hearing mirrored last week’s election chaos in Louisiana, where the ruling struck down a landmark civil rights law and gave Republicans a chance to draw a new congressional map that removes one or both of the state’s two majority-Black districts held by Democrats. Black voters make up one-third of Louisiana’s electorate and generally support Democrats. Republicans already control the other four districts.The unprecedented national redistricting arms race began last year, when President Trump urged Texas Republicans to redraw the state’s congressional maps and target five Democratic seats. With input from Reuters and AP