Losing the Center: The Decline of American Liberalism, 1968–1992

4. Good Intentions, Bad Results: Harold Ford and Majority-Minority Redistricting

4 good intentions, Bad results Harold Ford and Majority-Minority Redistricting it all started in harold Ford’s tennessee. And, though the political fight was over a seeming cliché, “one man, one vote,” the brouhaha involved anything but. in 1962, this platitude scarcely reflected political reality in the Volunteer state or America. indeed, for half a century, tennessee’s state legislators had simply refused to redraw their legislative boundaries and reapportion representation. As a result, of ninety-nine statehouse seats, sixty-six went to rural areas, 40 percent of the population, while urban tennesseans claimed a mere thirty-three seats. in terms of representative impact, one rural vote packed twice the wallop of an urbanite’s: so much for “one man, one vote.”1 hoping to render “one man, one vote” a reality, activists looked to Chief Justice earl Warren for relief. tennessee’s rural Democrats relied on Felix Frankfurter. More specifically, they trusted that Frankfurter’s Colegrove v. Green opinion would stand. in this 1946 decision, the justice restrained the court from entering the “political thicket” and forcing reapportionment. Fifteen years hence, Frankfurter still led the Court’s conservative bloc. three nashville lawyers, however, sued tennessee’s secretary of state, Joe Carr, and called the question again.2 tennessee was far from being the nation’s sole reapportionment procrastinator ; a majority of states featured outdated and, therefore, grossly malapportioned legislative districts. For decades, rural legislators had simply declined to redistrict and transfer political power to the cities. thus, in 1960, cows and sheep routinely boasted more political representation than American urbanites.3 emphasizing this reality, in 1959 one rural California district of 14,294 people counted the same number of state legislators— one—as did six million Los Angelenos.4 76 Losing the Center stopping the courts from intervening were mounds of judicial precedent . though the forces of retrenchment might have owned tradition and Frankfurter, the tennessee plaintiffs had Bobby Kennedy. renowned for his dogged, personal loyalty, the attorney general maintained a close friendship with one lead plaintiff, John Jay hooker. hooker also possessed ties to the solicitor general, Archibald Cox. these prior relationships, joined with the plaintiffs’ compelling case, earned the Justice Department’s amicus brief in Baker v. Carr.5 Far from a slam dunk, Baker v. Carr pushed the judges and liberal legal theories to the limit. After hearing two oral arguments, enduring a yearlong debate, and losing one judge to stress, in 1962 the Court issued a stunning reappraisal of its own power. ruling that individuals were entitled to comparable political representation under the “equal protection clause,” the court established jurisdiction over apportionment and redistricting.6 With the judiciary authorizing itself to enforce the principle of one man, one vote, the reapportionment revolution commenced.7 harold Ford sr. (second from right) (courtesy special Collections, University of Memphis Libraries) Good Intentions, Bad Results 77 Always more hammer than scalpel, the one man, one vote doctrine offered a judicial solution for any number of political woes. While courtordered reapportionment failed to ameliorate some of its intended targets, it did aid civil rights activists.8 in conjunction with the 1965 Voting rights Act (VrA), Baker empowered the court to oversee decennial redistricting and engineer the second generation of the civil rights struggle: legislative apportionment , vote dilution, and majority-minority redistricting. in turn, these were the issues spawning the final act in the south’s political realignment. Harold Ford Sr. the controversial kingpin of an erstwhile urban political machine, Congressman harold Ford sr. blazed trails and burned bridges throughout his thirty years in public life. A one-man political rorschach test, Ford symbolized racial progress to his black constituents while serving as an emblem of wanton political corruption to whites. taking a majority-white congressional seat in 1974, early on Ford consciously, successfully, and by necessity appealed to white voters. once he secured a majority-minority district, the congressman abandoned his early racial bridge building. thereafter, he earned his reputation as a high-living political boss who maintained his power via reckless demagoguery. though the vast majority of black officials were hardly of Ford’s ilk, his story symbolizes the unintended consequences of second-generation civil rights struggles. As African Americans gained political office, southern, white, and centrist Democrats lost their foothold and seats. in their place, white republicans and black Democrats took what became increasingly uncompetitive seats. Without opposition, both the southern goP and the Democratic...