NAACP calls out Tangipahoa Parish, says Black voters underrepresented
30th August 2021 · 0 Comments
By Ryan Whirty
Contributing Writer
The Tangipahoa Parish School Board, which for decades has been besieged by allegations of civil rights violations and legal actions pressing the district for desegregation and racial equity, is under fire again, this time over charges that the schools’ election districts might violate the Voting Rights Act.
On August 16, the Greater Tangipahoa Parish NAACP joined with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund sent a letter to TPSB officials alleging that the school districts Black voters are not being adequately and equally represented by the current TPSB voting district map.
According to the LDF letter, evidence indicates that the voting map does not currently have enough districts that qualify as “majority-minority opportunity districts,” in which a majority of the residents are racial or ethnic minorities.
As such, the letter adds, a third majority-minority opportunity district might need to be created during the upcoming electoral map redistricting, a process that occurs roughly every 10 years following decennial counting of the American population by the U.S. Census Bureau. The most recent Census count took place in 2020.
The letter charges that as the district map stands now, it violates Section 2 of the federal Voting Rights Act, which was signed into law in 1965 as part of the civil rights legislation that led to desegregation and toward racial equity at voting polls across the country.
“… Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act requires the redistricting body to ensure that voters of color have an equal opportunity ‘to participate in the political process and elect candidates of their choice,’ taking into consideration the state or locality’s demographics, voting patterns, and other circumstances,” the Aug. 16 letter to the TPSB states. “A chief purpose of Section 2 is to prohibit minority vote dilution at all levels of government, including school board elections.
“A district map may violate Section 2 when it dilutes the voting power of voters of color, including by ‘packing’ Black voters into districts where they constitute an excessive majority and depriving them of the ability to elect their candidates of choice in other districts,” it adds. “Section 2 prohibits minority vote dilution regardless of whether a plan was adopted with a discriminatory purpose. What matters under Section 2 is the effect of the redistricting plan on the opportunity of voters of color to elect candidates of their choice.”
LDF and NAACP representatives noted that only two African-American members currently sit on the TPSB, out of nine total members, which could be reflective of inadequate, racially motivated election district lines.
In addition, about one-third of the district’s population is African American, meaning the school board membership doesn’t fairly represent the parish’s people of color.
Situations such as a lack of racial diversity among board membership and in the districting map are especially galling, the NAACP says, given that the student body of the Tangipahoa Parish school system is nearly 50 Black and more than 60 percent minority.
Michael Showers, president of the Greater Tangipahoa Parish NAACP Branch, said that from his point of view, and from the points of view of many parish residents, the root cause of the inequitable voting opportunities seems to be the prevailing racist attitudes of TPSB officials and other government representatives.
He said civil rights advocates have spent their whole lives combating such systemic racism in the parish.
“There are people who have been in the [desegregation] fight for longer than I have,” Showers said. “This is a long battle, but don’t underestimate the resolve of the people who want to ensure fair and equitable representation.”
LDF redistricting counsel Michael Pernick said three majority-minority voting districts are needed to ensure equitable election representation.
“Anything less than that is inadequate because it would continue to deny voters of color and equal opportunity to be heard and to be represented on the school board,” Pernick said.
Equity advocates and NAACP members followed up on the sending of the letter by attending the TPSB’s August 17 meeting to further raise concerns of potential Voting Rights Act violations.
Representatives of the TPSB declined to comment extensively on the August 16 letter but said the school board is investigating the NAACP’s assertions.
“We have received the letter and we are looking at all of the relevant data and information from the community and any decisions made by the board will be based on the law and facts applicable to the issues,” said attorney Ashley Bass, of the Hammond law firm Cashe Coudrain & Bass, which represents the TPSB.
Formal charges of segregation and civil rights violations have dogged the TPSB for more than five decades, ever since the 1965 filing of the desegregation lawsuit Joyce Marie Moore v. TPSS. Since then, the school system has failed to meet long-standing legal directives to desegregate the district, with particular emphasis placed on the district’s repeated refusal and failure to hire faculty members and staff of color.
In March of this year, U.S. District Judge Ivan Lemelle granted the school district provisional unitary status, ruling that the TPSB has finally begun fulfilling the terms of a decades-old court desegregation and equity agreement.
However, Showers said that with the possible Voting Rights Act violations, the TPSB is still dragging its feet when it comes to full, fair, legal representation of the school district’s minority residents.
“It has been a long fight,” he said of the struggles in Tangipahoa. “We’ve been in the throes of this for almost 60 years in the desegregation fight. It shows a failure to have adequate representation on the school board, and a failure to recognize that equity means adequate representation at all levels of the school system.”
This article was originally published in the August 30, 2021 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
