NAACP pans court ruling

The North Carolina NAACP blasted the U.S. Supreme Court today for its interpretation of the federal Voting Rights Act, saying the decision was a “direct blow” to the state’s efforts to heal the “racist wounds of the past.”

The Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision issued Monday, found that the Voting Rights Act did not apply to legislative districts that are less than 50 percent minority. As a result, state lawmakers will have to re-fashion districts in the Wilmington area so that Pender County is not split among two districts.

Rev. William Barber, president of the North Carolina chapter of the NAACP, said the decision ignores the troubled history in that part of the state, reports Dan Kane.

In 1898, white supremacist mobs came to Wilmington, which was governed by a “Fusionist” coalition of black and white council members. The mobs drove out the elected leaders, burned down a black-owned newspaper and killed at least 14 blacks.

“Somebody’s really got to examine this from the perspective that people don’t really know the history,” Barber said. “They don’t know that Pender County was separated (from New Hanover County) to make it an all-white county.”

More after the jump.

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The U.S. Supreme Court’s more conservative members found that a House district that state lawmakers created to increase the likelihood of black representation violated the state’s constitutional goal of keeping counties whole. House District 18 includes parts of Pender and New Hanover counties, but its African American voting population is just under 40 percent. Therefore, the court found the district could not be protected by the Voting Rights Act.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s dissenting members said the majority had misinterpreted the act. Such a narrow interpretation, they said, forces minorities to be packed into majority-minority districts. While that guarantees some minority-supported candidates will be elected, it diminishes their opportunity to form coalitions with white voters in other districts, the justices said.

Barber and Al McSurely, the NAACP’s legal redress committee chair for North Carolina, said the decision was strictly partisan and intended to reverse the momentum that allowed Democrat Barack Obama to win the presidential vote in North Carolina in November.

They said their next move was to petition Congress to amend the Voting Rights Act so that it protects districts with a sizeable, if not majority, percentage of minority voters.