The NAACP plans a statewide voter mobilization effort to counter a recent redistricting decision that leadership describes as a racially motivated attempt to disenfranchise people of color.
Cookeville Branch President Thomas Savage said the organization has already filed a lawsuit challenging the new maps. Savage said the strategy moving forward requires building a diverse coalition of voters to overcome the dilution of minority representation at the ballot box.
“We’re still ticked off because, you know, they would declare that it’s a political decision and it’s not,” Savage said. “It’s a decision that is based around racism. And it is racism.”
Savage said the current redistricting efforts led by Governor Bill Lee and Speaker of the House Cameron Sexton represent a modern version of historical voter suppression.
“And so now when you look at what the Supreme Court did last week and how immediately, before the ink had even dried on what they did, Governor Bill Lee instituted this action that he’s doing now,” Savage said. “And so now we call this one Jim Crow 2.0. So I say this, ‘Here we go again.’ We gotta fight again but we’re up for the task.”
Savage said the new map for District nine creates a geographic challenge by stretching from Shelby County into Williamson and Davidson counties. Savage said these boundaries make it nearly impossible for minority communities to secure representation.
“How do you get black representation?” Savage said. “How does the voice of people of color, what mechanism do you have to hear what’s going on with them? The main thing is what the Republican party is saying. And you know we’re non-partisan, but the Republican party is saying this throughout all of the red states, but especially here in Tennessee: they said verbatim that they want to make sure that Tennessee is a red state, a Republican state, and shares conservative and Christian values.”
Savage said the Cookeville Putnam County branch of the NAACP includes many members who are not Black but are committed to social justice. Savage said the path to overcoming the redistricting involves these members networking across all three grand divisions of the state to register new voters.
“How will that joy come?” Savage said. “It will come by people taking their souls to the polls, registering people to vote, friends and neighbors and looking, uh, for people to network with, to coalesce with that don’t look like us, but actually share our values. And that’s where the hope is at and that’s how we overcome.”
Savage said the organization is viewing this as a long-term political revolution that requires a total reset of their strengths and weaknesses. Savage said the goal is to overperform at the ballot box to compensate for the watering down of the Black voice in Tennessee.
“And so we just do it like a lioness who’s protecting the little lions, she will fight,” Savage said. “And so that’s what we’re going to do. It’s a political revolution and we’re ready to get involved and, make sure that we overperform at the ballot box where those even in our community where our representation is small. But if we connect at the hip with other people in our community they’ll see that we are an army.”
Savage said the local branch will continue writing letters and making phone calls to residents across the state to organize against the new district maps.