The Paradox of Representation

Racial Gerrymandering and Minority Interests in Congress

David Lublin

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780691010106, 9780691026695
• eBook ISBN: 9780691221397
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Process
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In The Paradox of Representation David Lublin offers an unprecedented analysis of a vast range of rigorous, empirical evidence that exposes the central paradox of racial representation: Racial redistricting remains vital to the election of African Americans and Latinos but makes Congress less likely to adopt policies favored by blacks. Lublin's evidence, together with policy recommendations for improving minority representation, will make observers of the political scene reconsider the avenues to fair representation.


Using data on all representatives elected to Congress between 1972 and 1994, Lublin examines the link between the racial composition of a congressional district and its representative's race as well as ideology. The author confirms the view that specially drawn districts must exist to ensure the election of African Americans and Latinos. He also shows, however, that a relatively small number of minorities in a district can lead to the election of a representative attentive to their interests. When African Americans and Latinos make up 40 percent of a district, according to Lublin's findings, they have a strong liberalizing influence on representatives of both parties; when they make up 55 percent, the district is almost certain to elect a minority representative.


Lublin notes that particularly in the South, the practice of concentrating minority populations into a small number of districts decreases the liberal influence in the remaining areas. Thus, a handful of minority representatives, almost invariably Democrats, win elections, but so do a greater number of conservative Republicans. The author proposes that establishing a balance between majority-minority districts and districts where the minority population would be slightly more dispersed, making up 40 percent of a total district, would allow more African Americans to exercise more influence over their representatives.

PART I

BLACK AND LATINO DESCRIPTIVE REPRESENTATION

2

THE HISTORY OF BLACK AND LATINO REPRESENTATION

THE GOAL OF this study is to determine if racial redistricting under the aegis of the Voting Rights Act has advanced the descriptive and substantive representation of African Americans and Latinos. This chapter begins to answer this question by examining how the descriptive representation of minorities has changed over time. The next section outlines the history of African-American and Latino representation in the U.S. House in order to place gains made under the Voting Rights Act since 1965 in their proper context. Past levels of representation provide a yardstick against which later advances can be judged.

The chapter then turns to a detailed examination of minority representation in the post-Voting Rights Act era. After tracing the dramatic rise in the number of African-American and Latino representatives and majority-minority districts, the discussion focuses on the connection between racial redistricting and the election of minority officials. The analysis establishes that the well-known link between majority-minority districts and minority representation remains strong despite recent victories by a small number of minority candidates in majority white constituencies. This section further explores the effectiveness of the Voting Rights Act as a tool to force the creation of more majority-minority districts. African Americans and Latinos have not achieved proportional representation in the House of Representatives despite the potency of the act. Battles over the application of the act to redistricting resulted in long delays before the realization of gains due to racial redistricting. Savvy white candidates won election from majority-minority districts and delayed anticipated gains from redistricting. Comparatively low levels of participation among Latinos hamper efforts by Latino candidates to win election from Latino majority districts. The strategy of utilizing racial redistricting to boost the number of minority congressional representatives achieved full flower only during the 1990 redistricting cycle.

The chapter concludes with a discussion of potential costs to African Americans and Latinos of increasing minority representation through racial redistricting. Racial redistricting concentrates African Americans and Latinos into separate majority-minority districts. This policy may have concrete costs for minorities in terms of the loss of congressional clout. Minorities relinquish the opportunity to influence several representatives in exchange for solid control over one representative.

Black and Latino Representation Prior to the Voting Rights Act

The story of minority representation in the halls of Congress did not begin with the enactment of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. African Americans involved themselves in the political process and elected several blacks to Congress as soon as the Civil War brought an end to slavery. This brief burst of black representation quickly faded thanks to repression by southern whites and a lack of support by northern whites. Latinos won no representation in Congress until after the turn of the century. Besides demonstrating the in-voluntary nature of minority political disengagement, the history of minority representation in Congress provides a baseline to measure increases in minority representation against in the post-Voting Rights Act era.

African-American Representation, 1865-1964

RECONSTRUCTION AND REPRESSION

African Americans first tasted political power during Reconstruction. Republicans encouraged African Americans, strongly supportive of the party of Lincoln, to vote as a means of maintaining Republican political control of the South. Reflecting this partisan divide, all Reconstruction-era black congressmen sat in the House as Republicans. The number of blacks elected to Congress climbed continuously to a peak of eight from 1868 through the 1874 elections.

African-American congressional representation declined by 50 percent to four in 1876 with the close of Reconstruction. Only one African American won election to the House in 1888 but blacks did not completely disappear from the halls of Congress until 1901.¹ African Americans could not successfully resist efforts by so-called redeemers to exclude blacks from the franchise without the support of the federal government. White supremacists engaged in a variety of legal and state constitutional subterfuges, such as white primaries, literacy tests, poll taxes, and grandfather clauses, to deny blacks, and many poor whites, access to the ballot. The threat and the actual use of violence accompanied by economic intimidation continued to prevent southern blacks from registering to vote in large numbers until the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.²

No African Americans served in Congress between 1902 and 1928. The election of Republican Oscar DePriest of Chicago to the House ended the long drought in black representation. Black membership in the House rose only to three prior to the onset of the civil rights movement in the late 1950s. In contrast to nineteenth-century black representatives, who uniformly hailed from the South, the second wave of black members of Congress represented northern districts located in either Chicago, Detroit, or New York.³ The high concentration of blacks in compact areas of each of these cities made it impossible to eliminate these majority black districts without placing large numbers of blacks in neighboring white ethnic constituencies. Black Democrat Arthur Mitchell’s defeat of DePriest in 1934 heralded the massive shift in the allegiance of black voters from the Republicans to the Democrats.⁴ The attraction of the New Deal overcame old ties to the party of Lincoln. No African American again sat as a Republican in the House until Gary Franks’s election in 1990.⁵

RACIAL GERRYMANDERING IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

Twenty blacks won forty-one congressional elections between 1868 and 1900. No African American won election from a district with a clear white majority during the nineteenth century. Thirty-six, or 88 percent, of black victories occurred in districts greater than 55 percent black. Florida elected Josiah T. Walls to the House twice in statewide elections though blacks composed only 49 percent of the population. Walls won a single term from a district between 50 and 55 percent black as did Alabaman James T. Rapier and Georgian Jefferson F. Long.⁶

Far from being invented by overzealous civil rights advocates, nineteenth-century southern Democrats enacted the original racial gerrymanders. In the 1870s and 1880s, Alabama, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia adopted racial gerrymanders designed to pack black voters into one congressional district in order to minimize Republican voting strength. Table 2.1 shows the ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• List of Figures and Tables
• Preface
• One: Introduction
• Part I: Black and Latino Descriptive Representation
• Part II: Black and Latino Substantive Representation
• Notes
• References
• Index