Paging Charles Gomillion
Racial gerrymandering was once evil in the United States
After the U.S. Supreme Court again upheld racial gerrymandering in a case in Alabama, Monday, I immediately thought of the legendary Charles G. Gomillion. Gomillion was a professor at Tuskegee University, in Tuskegee, Alabama, in 1957 when he sued to challenge racial gerrymandering in Alabama (the city of Tuskegee) and won.
Alabama is ground zero for racist voting practices in the U.S. currently and historically and many writers including Allison Gaines and Elie Mystal have immediately called out the most recent Supreme Court decision as racist. As Gaines writes in her essay on the Alabama case — “the Supreme Court is no longer hiding its disdain for Black voters.”
The current U.S. Supreme Court proudly stands with the state’s racist practices in voting. Even the Court’s only African American justice, Clarence Thomas somehow continues to vote to take away the voting power of African Americans in case after case.
Thomas and most of the other justices on the Court were either children or not even born when Professor Charles G. Gomillion courageously exposed the underbelly of American racism in the case of Gomillion v. Lightfoot. Here is how the journal, Callaloo described Gomillion’s heroism:
