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Friend,
In the face of fierce Black community opposition during months of public hearings, the city council in Jacksonville, Florida, voted 17-1 on March 22 to pass a voting district map with racially gerrymandered districts.
The new map packs most of the city’s Black voters into districts 7, 8, 9 and 10, classifying these voters because of their race and weakening their ability to affect elections in other districts.
Further, it fails to reflect the city’s changing demographics. According to the 2020 census, Jacksonville’s nearly 1 million residents had equal percentages of non-Latinx white people and people of color. In wider Duval County, which is filled almost completely by the city – the country’s 13th largest – white residents slid into the minority.
Racial gerrymandering
A report that a coalition of civil rights groups submitted to the council concludes that Jacksonville’s districts show a consistent pattern of racially polarized voting over 14 elections since 2014, and that – in these elections – Black voters’ candidates of choice would have been elected, on average, in districts with at least a 41% Black citizen voting age population (the percentage of U.S. citizens age 18 and older who identify as Black).
The report on racially polarized voting in Jacksonville elections was commissioned by the Northside Coalition of Jacksonville, the ACLU Northeast Florida Chapter, the Harriet Tubman Freedom Fighters – which is a client of the Southern Poverty Law Center in voting rights litigation against the state of Florida – and the NAACP Jacksonville branch.
The report found that candidates preferred by Jacksonville’s Black voters disproportionately failed to achieve electoral success citywide. Further, a majority of white voters in Jacksonville voted as a bloc against Black-preferred candidates. In every single election studied in the report, most Black voters supported one candidate and most white voters supported the opposing candidate.
The civil rights groups asked that the council analyze the report’s findings and redraw the currently proposed neighborhood seat plan such that Black voters are properly and lawfully represented in the final plan. The report’s author, Hannah Walker, assistant professor of government at the University of Texas, told the SPLC that based on her analysis, “an alternative map could be drawn with additional districts that allow Black voters to elect their representatives of choice.”
Some advocates for the Black community believe the council never even considered their concerns.
“At the public council meetings, we were allowed three minutes to speak but we weren’t allowed to ask any questions,” said Ben Frazier, president of the Northside Coalition, a community organization focused on social, racial and economic justice. “The council said at the beginning [of the hearings process] that they were going to pass the map. They said the process was transparent and open. They heard, but they didn’t listen. It was an exercise in futility.”
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In solidarity,
Your friends at the Southern Poverty Law Center
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