A Black community in Louisiana faces a future without a champion in Congress after redistricting

SCOTLANDVILLE, La. (AP) — If you cross the Mississippi River on the Huey P. Long-O.K. Allen Bridge, pass the Exxon Refinery, then head north for a few minutes, you’ll find a pocket of Louisiana that’s unlike any other place in America’s never-ending battle over what it means to have equal representation.

Here is Scotlandville, which was once its own unincorporated town but is now part of Baton Rouge. It’s a nearly all Black community of 10,000 people that has been, for the second time, shuffled around on the state’s congressional map to make it part of a majority white district. Both times it was during the term of the same representative.

The first time was 1996, when a group of voters sued to redraw the lines. The second time was earlier this year, after the U.S. Supreme Court decided that a core part of the Voting Rights Act intended to protect minorities’ political rights was unconstitutional.

The ruling led to cascading changes around the American South, but the case originated in Louisiana — specifically the 6th Congressional District that included Scotlandville. This is where Democratic Rep. Cleo Fields, 63, grew up poor and attended local schools before graduating from nearby Southern University A&M, eventually climbing the ranks to the U.S. House.

Now he plans to leave Washington and return to the Legislature instead of running for reelection in a race that he sees little chance of winning because the district boundaries have been altered dramatically. Scotlandville will no longer be represented by a native son, someone who people believed instinctively understood their challenges and offered a direct line to power and influence in the nation’s capital.

“We’re back to where we were right after Reconstruction,” said Press Robinson Sr., 89, who has spent years working on issues involving the congressional map. “When they redistrict, they are not concerned about the effect it has on those of us who are people of color.”

The methods have changed over the years, he said, but the intent has not.

“They disenfranchise people of color and they’ve done it again,” Robinson said.

Field’s career echoes legal battle for representation

Congressional districts are core to debates over racial equality in the South, where white leaders spent decades using gerrymandering to ensure Black people couldn’t gain enough power to elect their own representatives.

The Voting Rights Act signed by Democratic President Lyndon Johnson in 1965 was supposed to fix that. Among other things, it required states and jurisdictions with a history of racial discrimination to get approval from the U.S. Department of Justice before congressional maps could take effect. It also allowed people to sue to challenge laws and procedures that would deny them the chance to elect candidates of their choice.

That didn’t settle the issue, however, and there has been a series of legal battles since then. Fields’ political career has tracked those twists and turns over the years.

He first came to Congress in 1993 when Scotlandville was part of the 4th District, which had been redrawn to create a majority Black seat. A federal court said in 1996 the boundaries that zigzagged from northwest portion of the state to the Baton Rouge area were unconstitutional.

Scotlandville shifted to the 6th District, which was then predominantly white, and Fields became a state senator. But he had an opening to return to Washington when Robinson and other plaintiffs challenged how the state drew its maps following the 2020 census.

A 2023 court decision involving Alabama also affected Louisiana, requiring the state to draw new district lines to achieve fairer representation for minorities. The district became majority Black again, and Fields won the seat in 2024.

Another wave of litigation was already starting, and the issue soon reached the U.S. Supreme Court once more. The new lawsuit by a group of non-Black voters dovetailed with a separate effort by President Donald Trump to push Republican-led states to redraw their maps to help his party keep control of Congress in this year’s midterms.

The high court’s conservative majority said Fields’ district was unconstitutional. Louisiana, Alabama and Tennessee raced to redo their U.S. House districts in time for the November elections.

In Alabama, Democratic Rep. Shomari Figueres is fighting to hold onto his seat, where Black voting age population dropped from 50% to 40% under the new political lines, according to an Associated Press analysis of the citizen voting age population in his redrawn district. In Tennessee, the majority Black district anchored by Nashville was split between three others.

Fields’ district went from being 53% Black to 25% in the new one. He announced in July that he wasn’t going to run for reelection.

Blocks from the main entrance to Southern University A&M, a small crowd hung around a convenience store but people were unwilling to talk about politics, eyeing strangers suspiciously. One younger man said he didn’t know who represents the area on the city council, let alone in Congress.

Frank Levy, 56, the cashier, said people’s apathy created the political environment that allowed for gerrymandering to occur again.

“A lot of people don’t even think about politics like this,” he said. “They don’t understand.”

About five minutes away, Dakasha Caulfield Leonard, 48, sat in the chapel of Scott’s Bluff Morticians, a nearly century-old fixture in the business community. Leonard returned two years ago to take over the funeral home when her father, who purchased it in the 1990s, became ill. She is worried about what will happen when Fields is no longer in office.

“The community is small and everybody knows everybody. Cleo is a member of our community,” she said. “If he doesn’t speak up and carry our voices, there’s nobody else to do that for us.”

Scotlandville has struggled for investment

Scenic Highway is one of the main thoroughfares in Scotlandville, and it once featured family businesses and restaurants as part of a prosperous self-contained Black community.

It’s faded overtime. The centerpiece boulevard has become blighted by empty lots and vacant buildings.

But deeper into the community is the Louisiana Leadership Institute, a sprawling complex that includes a full-scale gymnasium, classrooms, a fine arts center, a football field and a stadium with artificial turf. A thousand-seat amphitheater is being built.

The campus is the legacy of Fields, who founded the institute as the Congressional Classroom in 1993, during his first stint in Washington, and secured a mix of public and private funding for it. Over the decades since, it has hosted government, civics and leadership classes, and it’s created opportunities to travel and experience art and music and see government work in Washington.

“I wanted to engage young people,” Fields said. “Everything you see with the institute is result of me being a member of Congress.” The goal, he said, was to bring the workings of the federal government and other experiences to kids who had grown up like him.

Baton Rouge Councilman Anthony Kenney Jr 29, is one of the human legacies, taking advantage of the course offerings, training and opportunities at the center as a young student.

“Congressman Fields is someone I’ve known my entire life,” Kenney said. “I actually grew up in the Louisiana Leadership Institute. I was talking about civics, how to get involved in government, how to do policy, how to move legislation as a young child.”

Kenney is now responsible for improving the roads, plumbing, drainage and sidewalks around Scotlandville, describing it as essential for attracting new businesses.

He said it was “devastating” to see what happened to Fields.

“It’s important for us to have representation that not only is from here, raised here, but actually lived through that same experiences,” Kenney said.

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Associated Press data reporter Hannah Recht in Washington contributed to this report.