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HomeVideoWATCH: Justice Jackson uses history to reject ‘race-neutral’ argument in major voting...

WATCH: Justice Jackson uses history to reject ‘race-neutral’ argument in major voting rights case

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first Black woman to serve on the Supreme Court, on Tuesday pushed back against the notion that states should not consider race when drawing electoral lines to comply with the Voting Rights Act.

At the heart of the Merrill v. Milligan case is Alabama’s 2021 congressional map. A three-judge district court ruled that the map violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act because it diluted the votes of Black Alabamians by packing those voters into one district, even though about 27 percent of Alabamians are Black and only make up a majority in one of the state’s seven congressional districts.

The district court agreed with challengers of the map, who argued that those voters deserved a second congressional district based on their proportion of the population. However, the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 vote, allowed the map to take effect.

During oral arguments Tuesday in the redistricting case, Alabama Solicitor General Edmund LaCour said the state’s legislature drew the map “in a lawful race-neutral manner” – an argument that Jackson rejected.

“I understood that we looked at the history and traditions of the Constitution, at what the framers and the founders thought about. And when I drilled down to that level of analysis, it became clear to me that the framers themselves adopted the equal protection clause, the 14th, the 15th Amendment, in a race-conscious way,” Jackson said. “That we were, in fact, trying to ensure that people who had been discriminated against, the Freedman, during the Reconstruction period, were actually brought equal to everyone else in society.”

Voting rights advocates worry that the conservative majority on the high court is prepared to once again cut back the Voting Rights Act, considered the crown jewel of the civil rights movement.Stream your PBS favorites with the PBS app: https://to.pbs.org/2Jb8twG
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