Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee signed a new congressional map into law that carves up the state's only majority-Black district and puts at risk the lone Democrat in Tennessee's nine-member U.S. House delegation, The Hill reported May 8. The map passed rapidly through the Republican-controlled legislature. In response, a Memphis Democratic state lawmaker called for the city to secede from Tennessee — a protest gesture, but one that signals how completely Black voters in the state's largest city have been frozen out of meaningful federal representation. The tactic of fragmenting a concentrated Black population across multiple white-majority districts to neutralize its vote is not new: it is precisely what Southern legislatures did after the Voting Rights Act forced the end of outright exclusion. Courts struck down comparable maps in North Carolina in 2023 and Alabama in 2024 under the VRA's Section 2. Whether Tennessee's map survives legal scrutiny is now the operative question.