
ST. LANDRY PARISH, La. — Observing a joyous children’s holiday parade in the Louisiana parish she calls home, Clara LaFleur said that she isn’t surprised that the political power of Black Louisianans in her congressional district is in peril.
After all, she told Capital B, it’s long seemed as if no one has been a champion for them. Their concerns about schools that have fallen into disrepair are often ignored, and in 2024, Louisiana again rejected summer food assistance from the federal government that would have been especially helpful to poor Black communities, asserting that families ought to be “self-sufficient.”
LaFleur grew up in Washington, a village of some 700 people in St. Landry Parish, which is located in the newly redrawn, majority-Black 6th Congressional District that’s at the center of a critical legal battle. The U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments early this year over whether the boundaries of the district discriminate against non-Black residents, and a decision is expected by the end of June.
A group of Louisiana voters is seeking to dismantle the district, which was signed into law in January 2024 to give Black residents fair political representation. In their complaint, the district’s opponents refer to themselves as “non-African American” (at least a few of them are white).
They claim that the district, which stretches from the state capital of Baton Rouge to Shreveport, both of which are majority Black, has “injured non-African American voters by costing them one district.”
The case could be a vehicle through which the court denies Black Louisianans an advocate in Congress. It could also shape the balance of power in the U.S. House of Representatives, where Republicans have a thin majority: The court agreed on Nov. 4 to take up the case — one day before state Sen. Cleo Fields, a Black Democrat, won the district.
A coalition of attorneys general has submitted an amicus brief calling on the high court to uphold the revised map.
“Voters should be empowered to pick their representatives, not the other way around,” New York Attorney General Letitia James said in a statement. “State legislatures have a constitutional right to redraw district maps when they are found to violate the Voting Rights Act and fail to fairly represent their communities.”

What’s been happening in Louisiana is destabilizing like whiplash, according to New Orleans resident Alanah Odoms.
“There’s been this ‘two steps forward, one step back’ feeling — the pendulum swinging forward and then rapidly backward,” Odoms, the executive director of the ACLU of Louisiana, which has represented Black voters during the saga, told Capital B. “People all across the state were excited about the voting rights victory we had and about having the additional seat filled by someone the community trusts and respects.”
The fact that Fields won his race nearly three decades after redistricting banished him from the House seemed like an act of fate, Odoms explained. But now, in an echo of a national pattern of resistance to racial progress, this triumph is being threatened.

From the enormously segregated Baton Rouge with its congested streets, to Lafayette with its sidelined neighborhoods, to Opelousas with its damaged roads, Black residents have long been forced to manage with relatively few resources. Around Fields’ office in downtown Opelousas, which was once the site of a racist massacre, there are storefronts that have been abandoned for decades.
Residents say that this lack of resources has had major consequences: aging schools with crumbling foundations and inadequate classroom materials, roads riddled with potholes and scarred by cracked asphalt, and water systems so outdated that drinking a glass of tap water can feel like a gamble.
“Fields seems like he’ll be pushing to get things taken care of, things that would benefit us,” LaFleur said. “But it takes so long for anything real to happen, and if that’s the case and they rip up the district, we’ll never see anything from it.”
What the battle could mean for redistributing power
The stakes of the case are sky-high.
Additional Black representation in Congress means stronger advocacy in various arenas. Fields can push for more federal dollars to confront ongoing infrastructure challenges that plague wide swaths of the state, including parts of the new majority-Black district.
In Baton Rouge, for instance, historically Black neighborhoods have struggled for decades to secure funding to repair broken sewer lines and replace antiquated plumbing. They regularly pay higher water bills and endure boil advisories, all while wealthier, whiter areas enjoy swift improvements and modern updates.
Meanwhile, in Lafayette, predominantly Black neighborhoods navigate a minefield of decaying roads. Here, damaged streets aren’t simply an inconvenience; they pose daily safety risks and slow economic progress, preventing small Black-owned businesses from thriving.
Opelousas faces its own uphill battle. Many schools in the majority-Black city are starved of resources, and forced to rely on outdated textbooks, insufficient technology, and often bare-bones support services for students.
“We have the worst schools of all the parishes. There needs to be more support. We need more money than what we can cobble together locally,” Shauna Sias, who’s lived in Opelousas almost her entire life, told Capital B. “They’re questioning a Black district, but do they question the white ones? It’s always us they have to question. Why?”

Fields has been clear about the work that must still be done to improve the lives of poor and disenfranchised Black communities in the district.
“Although we have passed an infrastructure bill, there are a lot of these local towns and municipalities throughout the district that can’t access it. And so my congressional office … will be working with these local towns and municipalities,” he told BRProud last August, noting that raising the minimum wage and injecting more money into education also are priorities.
Last November, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced that it was giving Louisiana more than $40 billion to upgrade its water infrastructure. The same month, the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Federal Highway Administration said that it was directing nearly $32 million toward the state’s efforts to rebuild and update its transportation system.

The case could have huge implications beyond Louisiana, too.
In a striking turn, the non-Black voters’ argument weaponizes sections of the Constitution against the very communities they were designed to protect. These voters maintain that, by drawing a map with two majority-Black congressional districts, the state is violating the 14th and 15th Amendments, which were ratified during Reconstruction to guarantee equal protection of the law and expand the right to vote.
But the voters’ argument ignores the purpose of the redrawn map, analysts say. Before 2024, Louisiana had only one district — out of a total of six — where Black residents could elect their preferred candidate, even though the state is around one-third Black. State lawmakers redrew the boundaries to add another majority-Black district. With two majority-Black districts, one-third of the districts are Black, corresponding proportionally to the Black population.
If the Supreme Court sides with the non-Black voters, it could weaken Black Americans’ constitutional freedoms in Louisiana and beyond, and also potentially further inspire conservative actors elsewhere to try to defang civil rights protections.
“There’s this Reconstruction-era threat that comes from people who see the country as progressing too quickly — who see things such as the 14 Amendment as doing too much,” Odoms said. “The Reconstruction amendments are so controversial because they fundamentally redistributed power in this country. And a redistribution of power means a redistribution of resources. It means a reorganization of a caste system. This is what the fight is about.”
Why Black Southerners feel like they’re “always going back”
The battle for a fairly representative map has been flashing and flaring for years, and is part of a wider struggle for equality that’s especially prominent in the South.
After the 2020 census, Louisiana was supposed to address demographic shifts, including the growth of its Black population. Instead, in 2022, the Louisiana State Legislature overrode a veto to pass a congressional map that had only one majority-Black district. Advocacy organizations and Black voters sued the state, arguing that, without two such districts, the map violates the Voting Rights Act.
The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, which paused the case while it heard a similar legal challenge out of Alabama. In a decision that surprised analysts, the high court in 2023 required Alabama to draw a map with two majority-Black congressional districts.
As Evan Milligan, a lead plaintiff in the Alabama case, told Capital B at the time, “Having an additional district would allow people to have another representative who’s sympathetic to the region [the rural and impoverished ‘Black Belt’ region] as well as to the concerns of folks here. And that congressperson would hopefully bring in resources and create a sense of urgency around community needs.”
Shomari Figures, whose late father was a revered attorney for having bankrupted the United Klans of America in 1987 after the lynching of a Black 19-year-old, won Alabama’s new seat last November. His victory was lauded in a region that’s a Republican stronghold and where racially polarized voting keeps power beyond the reach of Black Americans, who lean Democratic.
The Alabama decision allowed the Louisiana case to proceed. Last January, Louisiana Republican Gov. Jeff Landry signed into law a constitutional map, one with a second majority-Black district, and seemingly brought the fight to an end.
Almost immediately, however, non-Black voters challenged the map, triggering a new case. Reviving an argument that stretches back to the 1990s, they insisted that the map is an unconstitutional racial gerrymander that discriminates against non-Black residents.
A federal district court agreed and struck down the map last April. But the Supreme Court granted the state’s request to pause the lower court order for redrawn lines. This allowed the state to use the map with two majority-Black districts in the 2024 elections.
Now, the high court is going to weigh in on the case and, yet again, revisit the issue of map constitutionality.
“The map wasn’t in our favor before, and a lot of us paid the price for that,” Keith Aggison, a retired firefighter who lives in unincorporated St. Landry Parish, told Capital B. “I hope that they let it stay the way it is and don’t make us go back to what it was before. We’re always going back.”

He added that if you know Louisiana well, then you know that “deep money and power” are concentrated mostly in white communities, while Black communities are left with little or nothing.
Keeping the new district wouldn’t be the silver bullet that solves all Black Louisianans’ problems, of course. But according to Odoms, with the Louisiana branch of the ACLU, it’s best to think of the district as a stanza in a song — as one part of something much bigger.
“I really do believe that this state has the capacity to engage folks who’ve been disconnected from the political process. We have to start seeing that our votes aren’t being diluted,” she said. “And the candidates people want to support, they have to see that they can win. If the math doesn’t math, we’re not going to see talented people seek these important offices.”
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