Tennessee Republicans this week passed a redistricting map that would split Shelby County — home to majority-Black Memphis — across three separate congressional districts, according to NPR Politics. The explicit aim is to eliminate the state's only remaining Democratic-held House seat.
No quote was available from the bill's sponsors at publication time.
What's being done to Memphis has a name in American political history: "cracking," the deliberate fracturing of a cohesive community across multiple districts so that its preferred candidate can never command a majority in any of them. The technique is as old as the gerrymander itself — and its most consistent targets, across two centuries, have been urban Black communities.
The word “gerrymander” entered American political vocabulary in 1812, when Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry signed a legislative map so contorted that a Boston newspaper compared one district to a salamander. But the specific technique now being applied to Shelby County — “cracking,” the deliberate dispersal of a concentrated minority community across multiple districts — has a longer and uglier pedigree than the word itself.
After Reconstruction, Southern legislatures became laboratories for exactly this method. When Black voters in Memphis, Atlanta, and Richmond demonstrated the capacity to elect representatives of their choice, the response was not open disenfranchisement alone — it was cartographic. Pack them or crack them: either concentrate a community into a single district where its influence stops at one seat, or fracture it so that its votes are diluted everywhere and decisive nowhere.
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was designed, in part, to interrupt precisely this cycle. Section 2 of the Act prohibits voting practices — including district maps — that result in the denial or abridgement of the right to vote on account of race. For decades, the “results test” established by the 1982 amendments to the VRA gave plaintiffs a meaningful tool to challenge maps that cracked majority-minority communities.
The Supreme Court’s 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder — Shelby County being, not incidentally, the Alabama county that shares a name with the Tennessee county now at issue — gutted the preclearance requirement of Section 5, which had forced states with histories of discrimination to pre-approve map changes with the Justice Department. The practical consequence was to shift the burden of proof: instead of states having to demonstrate their maps were clean, voters now have to prove in court that they are dirty, district by district, cycle by cycle.
What makes the Tennessee action worth particular attention is its timing. Redistricting is conventionally a post-Census exercise, conducted once per decade after new population data arrives. Midcycle redistricting — redrawing maps outside that window for partisan advantage — has become an increasingly explicit Republican tool. Texas did it in 2003 under Tom DeLay, producing a map that helped flip the state’s congressional delegation. The Supreme Court declined to strike it down on purely partisan grounds in League of United Latin American Citizens v. Perry (2006), though it found one district violated the VRA.
Tennessee’s move follows that template. The Census data hasn’t changed. The population of Shelby County hasn’t shifted enough to require a redraw. What changed is the political calculus: Republicans hold a legislative supermajority and want to convert a 7-2 congressional delegation into an 8-0 sweep before November 2026.
The question now is litigation. If the map is signed and challenged under Section 2 of the VRA, the relevant precedent is Allen v. Milligan (2023), in which the Supreme Court — including Chief Justice Roberts, who wrote Shelby County — upheld the results test and ordered Alabama to draw a second majority-Black district. That ruling surprised observers who expected the Court to hollow out Section 2 entirely. Whether Allen provides sufficient protection for a cracked Memphis is a question that will likely land in federal court before the 2026 election.
The pattern here is not obscure or disputed. Splitting a majority-Black urban county across three districts, in a state with a documented history of racial gerrymandering, to eliminate a single Democratic seat — that is the anatomy of a Section 2 claim. Courts will decide whether the law still means what it says.