Why the current redistricting of Tennessee offends me

It offends me to see Tennessee elected officials rush to redistrict the state in the wake of a recent Supreme Court decision overriding a crucial part of the Voting Rights Act. I am offended because I have a sense of the costs paid to get and maintain the Act.

My personal cost was serving seven days of a five day jail sentence in Selma, Alabama, a month before Bloody Sunday in March 1965. Several dozen of us helping the Civil Rights Movement were sentenced for contempt of court. We were right to be contemptuous of that court because it was enforcing a judge’s order forbidding gatherings of three or more people except for religious services — an order that had been swiftly ruled unconstitutional in federal court, but that was still being enforced by the county judge who had issued it. 

But others paid much higher costs.

In the wake of Bloody Sunday when Alabama law officers beat and teargassed voting rights marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, my colleague Jim Reeb answered Dr. Martin Luther King’s call to come to Selma. Jim was walking next to a close friend of mine when they were attacked by four white men on the streets of Selma — attacked for the offense of supporting Black voting rights. 

Jim was hit on the head with a club and died a few days later.

Since then, while leading civil rights pilgrimages to Alabama and Mississippi, I have come to know the sister of Jimmie Lee Jackson and some of the children of Viola Liuzzo. 

I have met and listened to the widow and children of Vernon Dahmer, Sr., of Mississippi, who was killed by the Klan in 1966 because of his strong, active support of Black voting rights and work with the NAACP. 

Jimmie Lee Jackson was shot by an Alabama State Trooper while he was protecting his mother and octogenarian grandfather from police violence. Viola Liuzzo, a white housewife from Detroit was shot on the highway between Selma and Montgomery by a carload of Klansmen (one of whom was an FBI informant). 

Tennessee legislators should ponder the costs paid to obtain federal protections of voting rights. They should remember that these costs included hundreds of Black Tennessee citizens forced to live in tents in the early 1960s for attempting to register and vote in Hayward and Fayette Counties.

Tennessee legislators should realize that although voting rights have been increased by the Voting Rights Act there are recently increased barriers to voting, some of which have been erected by our legislature. I call on them to ask themselves the question of the civil rights and labor song: which side are you on? Are you on the side of those who paid a price to expand the rights of American citizens to cast meaningful ballots? Or are you on the side of those who want to marginalize and disempower some voters — the same side as Klan members in the 1960s? It’s a choice that calls for moral perception to challenge temporary partisan advantage.