How the MAGA gerrymander in Texas resurrects Jim Crow’s racist playbook for voter suppression

The insidious congressional redistricting effort by Texas Republicans is voter suppression with a 21st-century twist: Unlike years past, Black Americans are not being driven away from polling places by bullwhips and lynch mobs, but with spreadsheets and algorithms that are designed to surgically silence people of color.

The redistricting campaign by Texas lawmakers, orchestrated at the behest of President Donald Trump, is yet another assault on voting rights. It’s also a chilling echo of the brutal tactics of post-Reconstruction white supremacists who dismantled Black political power through violence, fraud, and legal chicanery.

The proposed revisions to the state’s congressional map, which aims to flip five Democratic seats to MAGA Republican control, is a cynical and racially discriminatory maneuver designed to dilute the political power of Black and Latino voters, much like the Mississippi Plan of 1890, which used poll taxes and literacy tests to reduce Black voter registration from 70% to 9% in just two decades.

Redistricting typically occurs once every decade, following the census. But Texas MAGA Republicans, emboldened by Trump’s demand to “find five more seats,” have rushed through an unprecedented mid-decade redraw — a tactic reminiscent of the 1901 Alabama constitutional convention, where white lawmakers openly boasted of “eliminating the Negro vote without violating the 15th Amendment.”

The proposed map would shift 30 of Texas’s 38 congressional districts into solid Republican territory by dismantling Democratic strongholds in Austin, Dallas, Houston, and South Texas, mirroring the racial gerrymanders of the Jim Crow South, where Black-majority districts were splintered or merged with white-dominated areas to ensure political impotence.

The tactics are ruthlessly efficient: packing Black and Latino voters into supermajority Democratic districts while splintering others across Republican-leaning ones.

For example, the map dismantles the 35th District, a Latino opportunity district created under the Voting Rights Act, just as Southern legislatures in the 1880s dissolved Black-majority counties to prevent the election of Black sheriffs or judges.

Similarly, Fort Worth Rep. Marc Veasey’s district, originally designed to empower communities of color, would be stretched into rural GOP territory — a tactic borrowed from the 1898 Wilmington, N.C., coup, where white supremacists’ redrawn city lines purged Black officeholders.

MAGA Republicans claim the map increases minority representation by adding two majority-Black districts and one majority-Hispanic seat. But civil rights advocates note these are smoke screens, much like the “grandfather clauses” of the 1890s, which pretended to exempt illiterate whites from literacy tests while disenfranchising Black voters en masse.

In Tarrant County, Texas, Black and Latino voters are split among multiple GOP-dominated districts, ensuring their votes are drowned out — precisely as Virginia did in 1883 when it reapportioned city districts to eliminate Black representation.

Meanwhile, the Rio Grande Valley, a historically Democratic but increasingly competitive region, is being redrawn to favor Republicans, echoing the disenfranchisement of Mexican American voters in South Texas through poll taxes in the early 20th century.

This is not just partisan hardball; it is a violation of the Voting Rights Act, much like the whites-only primaries struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court in Smith v. Allwright in 1944.

Yet, Texas Republicans, undeterred by legal precedent, are banking on a conservative MAGA-leaning Supreme Court to green-light their scheme, just as the Shelby County v. Holder decision in 2013 gutted federal oversight of discriminatory voting laws.

The brazenness of Texas lawmakers is amplified by a U.S. Department of Justice letter — crafted under Trump’s appointees — that absurdly claims the current maps are “too friendly” to people of color, echoing the racist logic of 19th-century Democrats who argued Black voting would lead to “Negro domination.”

Texas MAGA Republicans, emboldened by Trump’s demand to “find five more seats,” have rushed through an unprecedented mid-decade redraw.

Facing near-total GOP control, Texas Democrats have resorted to a quorum break, fleeing the state to deny Republicans the votes needed to pass the map. It is a tactic with little precedent outside Texas, but one that underscores the existential stakes of this fight — akin to the “carpetbagger” legislators of Reconstruction who were driven from office by Klan violence.

Already, Gov. Greg Abbott and the MAGA Republicans are threatening to arrest absent lawmakers, echoing the 1874 “Brooks-Baxter War” in Arkansas, where white militias expelled Black legislators at gunpoint.

The parallels to Reconstruction’s collapse are unmistakable. Democracy, in any meaningful sense, cannot survive if one party is allowed to choose its voters rather than the other way around.

Courts, the Justice Department, and ultimately voters must reject this latest assault on fair representation. Otherwise, the Texas model will spread, and the promise of equal political participation will fade further into myth — just as it did in 1877 when the federal government abandoned Reconstruction and ushered in a century of homegrown American apartheid.

The lesson is clear: Voter suppression isn’t a bug in the American democratization process — it’s a recurring feature. The tools change (from night riders to machine learning), but the goal remains: white power retention — by any means necessary.

Delgreco K. Wilson formerly taught comparative politics and international relations at Lincoln University. He is a political analyst, educator, and advocate whose work centers on empowering Black Americans through a deeper understanding of political strategy and its historical roots in the fight against systemic racism and white supremacy.