NC Newsline – Former state Rep. Earl Jones said Monday that Republicans’ plan for congressional districts in Greensboro looked like a glass smashed against the pavement.
Jones testified on the first day of the federal trial of North Carolina’s congressional and state legislative districts. He is a plaintiff in one of the two lawsuits claiming the election districts Republicans enacted for the 2024 elections are racial gerrymanders that dilute Black voting power in violation of the U.S. Constitution and federal law.
Republicans stressed during debates on their way to approving the new district plans that no racial data was used to create them. In court filings, lawyers for Republican legislators suggested that the lawsuits dress partisan gerrymandering claims “in racial garb.”
Both the U.S. Supreme Court and the North Carolina Supreme Court are shut off to people and advocacy groups that want to sue claiming partisan gerrymanders.
The two lawsuits challenging the redistricting plans were combined for the trial in front of a three-judge panel in Winston-Salem.
Lawyers representing Republican legislators and the lawyers representing voters and voting rights groups did not make opening arguments, so the trial launched directly into testimony by plaintiffs’ witnesses.
All together, six of 14 congressional districts, nine of 120 state House districts, and five of 50 state Senate districts are being challenged.
Much of the testimony focused on the Piedmont Triad, which includes Greensboro, Winston-Salem and High Point.
Republicans cut heavily Democratic Guilford County into three pieces. The individual pieces were melded into districts with Republican counties that are more rural.
“I’m concerned about the carving up and cutting up of my community, and I’m trying to get that changed somehow,” said Jones, who is Black.
Under a court-ordered congressional district plan used for the 2022 election, Guilford County was not divided and incumbent Democrat Kathy Manning was elected to represent it as part of the 6th Congressional District.
The redrawn district is heavily Republican. Manning did not run for reelection, and no Democrat opted to run there.
Overall, seven Democrats and seven Republicans were elected to Congress from North Carolina in 2022 using the court-ordered map. The 2024 map yielded 10 Republican and four Democratic winners.
Jones, a Democrat, said he was drawn into the 5th Congressional District, which extends west to include Ashe and Watauga counties in the mountains. Republican U.S. Rep. Virginia Foxx represents the district.
While Manning supported the Black community, Foxx has been absent and doesn’t have an office in Greensboro, Jones said.
“It hurt my community,” Jones said of the district lines. “We don’t have anyone who will address issues important to us.”
Jonathan Rodden, a redistricting specialist at Stanford University, testified that the 2024 districts “are not especially compact,” and “the Black community in the Triad is divided among several districts by splitting municipalities.”
Rodden said he couldn’t see good evidence that sorting voters in and out of districts is entirely driven by party.
Questioned by a lawyer for Republican legislators, Rodden said he did not know what election results legislators used to make the maps.
“I can’t make conclusions about that,” Rodden said. “I wasn’t there in the room.”
The judges also heard testimony about congressional districts 12 and 14 in Mecklenburg and counties west, about state Senate districts 1 and 2, which divide eastern North Carolina’s Black Belt counties, and about state Senate District 8, which is dominated by Columbus and Brunswick counties, with a sliver of Black neighborhoods in Wilmington added for 2024.
“Inner city Wilmington is purposely cut and sent over to rural Brunswick County,” state NAACP President Deborah Maxwell testified.
Three federal judges appointed by Republican presidents are hearing the case. The trial is expected to end in early July.
