A recent U.S. Supreme Court decision over the 1965 Voting Rights Act may significantly impact Memphis, especially the city’s majority-Black 9th Congressional District, according to a panel of local journalists on WKNO/Channel 10’s “Behind the Headlines.”
Host Eric Barnes spoke with the Memphis Flyer's Toby Sells, MLK50’s Katherine Burgess, and the Daily Memphian's Bill Dries and Mary Cashiola about the ruling and its potential local impact.
Dries said the decision, which centers on how majority-minority districts are drawn, could directly affect Memphis. “The ninth congressional district that takes in most of the City of Memphis and parts of Shelby County is right in the crosshairs of the reaction to this,” he said.
The ruling has already sparked discussion among Tennessee Republicans about redrawing district lines. Dries noted that within hours of the decision, U.S. Sen. Marsha Blackburn shared a proposed map that would split Memphis into multiple districts. “It shows the 9th District Memphis split up among three districts the same way District 5 was,” he said.
Cashiola questioned whether those efforts could face legal challenges. “And it feels to me if you are on Twitter or X saying, here's my map that looks like this across the state and we're trying to intentionally flip Memphis, like does that give the people of Memphis an argument to challenge it in court?” she said.
The panel also discussed the state’s planned intervention in Memphis-Shelby County Schools. According to the proposal, a new board, primarily appointed by state leaders, would hold significant authority over local education decisions.
“It's unclear exactly how it'll work, but those board members will essentially be given veto power or authority over the other decisions that the school board and the school administration makes in terms of school closures, budgeting, all those things, all of the decisions, really,” Cashiola said.
Efforts to challenge the takeover legally are still developing. Dries said a recent attempt by the Shelby County Commission to allocate public funding for a lawsuit fell just short. “You needed eight votes to do that. The commission had seven votes to do it,” he said.
Immigration enforcement was another focus of the discussion, particularly the role of the Memphis Safe Task Force. Burgess said reporting by MLK50 and ProPublica found that many arrests tied to the task force were not for violent offenses.
“So we were able to do a data analysis finding that of the more than 800 immigrants detained by the task force in a particular time period, only 17 were detained for violent crimes,” she said. “But we were really able to kind of push back on that assertion that this task force is just about violent crime when you're talking about 800 people who were arrested for what is a civil violation, not a criminal violation.”
The conversation also touched on local government issues, including transparency concerns following a police response to a recent protest and the early stages of Memphis’ budget process.
