Author: manshipxgr

Published: Feb. 10, 2022

By: Piper Hutchinson, LSU Manship School News Service

BATON ROUGE–House Speaker Clay Schexnayder on Thursday announced a bipartisan legislative investigation into the fatal 2019 arrest of Black motorist Ronald Greene, declaring “no crime should be ignored, no cover-up will be tolerated.”

Schexnayder said he is launching the select committee because of new information unearthed in an Associated Press article that suggested that Gov. John Bel Edwards knew more about the incident than he had acknowledged as well as what Edwards said in a news conference addressing the allegation.

“These events have raised serious questions regarding who knew what and when,” Schexnayder said in a statement. “The actions taken that night and the cryptic decisions and statements made every step of the way since then have eroded public trust. That trust can only be regained with a transparent and robust search for the whole truth in this matter.”

The announcement follows a public battle of truths. Schexnayder maintains that Edwards told him in a meeting last summer that Greene had died in a car wreck, while Edwards says he said no such thing.

Read more at St. Mary Now

Published: Feb. 9, 2022

By: Piper Hutchinson, LSU Manship News Service

BATON ROUGE – The state Senate on Tuesday advanced a Republican plan to keep only one of the state’s six congressional districts with a majority of Black voters despite complaints from Democrats that there should be two. 

Tensions were high on the floor as lawmakers debated how to redraw the maps for congressional and state Senate districts to reflect population changes in the 2020 Census

The GOP bill, sponsored by Sen. Sharon Hewitt, R-Slidell, passed 27-12, with all Republican senators supporting it and all Democrats opposing it.

The Senate also rejected, in another party-line vote, an amendment by Sen. Cleo Fields, D-Baton Rouge, that would have changed the maps to allow for two majority Black districts.

Fields said only five Black people who have been elected to Congress from Louisiana since reconstruction.

“Louisiana has elected more white congressman in one year that it has elected black congressmen in history,” he said.

Hewitt said it was possible that Fields’ plan could backfire and provide less minority representation, as both of Fields’ proposed majority Black districts had voting age populations around 52%. Her argument was that low Black turnout in those elections could enable white candidates to win.

Fields disagreed, saying the federal Voting Rights Act requires giving Black residents a chance to elect two minority representatives.

Read more at Biz Magazine

Published: Feb. 8, 2022

By: Margaret DeLaney and Piper Hutchinson, LSU Manship School News Service

BATON ROUGE — A majority Black district in northwest Louisiana looks like the first major casualty of war in the redistricting special session.

Under a plan by Republican leaders, House District 23, represented by Rep. Kenny Cox, D-Natchitoches, would be fragmented and absorbed by neighboring districts to accommodate a new seat in New Orleans.

Cox, an Army veteran who formed a human net to catch people jumping from a burning Pentagon on 9/11, made an emotional plea Monday to the House and Governmental Affairs Committee to spare his district.

“I’ve been in the war, and I’ve had to do a lot of killing and a whole lot of things,” Cox said. “But this bothers me more. I have not been able to rest. Because we have a collective group, a historic district where people have something to vote for the first time in over 300 years.”

Cox was testifying in opposition to HB 14, a proposal by House Speaker Rep. Clay Schexnayder, R-Gonzalez. Cox is not a member of the committee, so he, like other members of the public, filled out a card, waited his turn and took the mic to fight back against the bill.

“​​That was the most difficult decision of this entire map,” Rep. John Stefanski, R-Crowley and the chair of the committee, said about moving Cox’s district.

Stefanski said House members told him that if a district had to be eliminated, they would prefer that it be one represented by a term-limited member.

Read more at the Shreveport Times

Published: Feb. 7, 2022

By: Piper Hutchinson, LSU Manship School News Service

BATON ROUGE — After a text surfaced suggesting that Gov. John Bel Edwards knew more than he had acknowledged about the death of a black man in Louisiana State Police custody, what was going to be a tense redistricting session became more contentious.

Battle lines were already drawn between Republicans and Democrats over the balance of power in state legislative and congressional seats, and the controversy involving the governor added a new dimension to the fight

It also suddenly reversed the roles that Black lawmakers and Republican leaders had played after the death of Ronald Greene in a high-speed car chase in 2019, as if Louisiana politics had fallen through the looking glass.

When videotapes were released last May showing that troopers had beaten Greene severely, raising questions about whether he died from their brutality rather than injuries in a car crash, Republicans were largely silent about what had happened to the 49-year-old Monroe man, and Democrats pushed vehemently for justice and accountability.

Now Republicans are out for the governor’s blood, claiming he misled the public about what he knew, and members of the Louisiana Legislative Black Caucus, the largest group of Democrats in the Legislature, are parsing their words carefully, fearful of harming a long-time ally.

Black lawmakers and civil-rights groups know that the threat of an Edwards veto is one of the few levers they have to influence the redistricting process — and that anything that weakens Edwards right now benefits Republican efforts to shape the district maps to their advantage.

Read more at the Daily Advertiser

Published: Feb. 5, 2022

By: Margaret DeLaney, Rosel Flores and Salena Ali, LSU Manship School News Service

BATON ROUGE — Republicans on Senate and House committees voted along party lines Friday to maintain a single majority-minority congressional district in Louisiana, turning back efforts to make it easier for minority residents to elect a second Black congressman.

The Senate and Governmental Affairs Committee also voted along party lines to redraw state Senate districts in a way that is likely to leave Black politicians with 11 Senate seats, as they now have, rather than give them a chance to have 13 seats.

The Republican bills will move to the Senate and House floors for further debate.

Civil rights groups have threatened to sue if minorities do not gain further representation in the process. They also could appeal to Gov. John Bel Edwards, a Democrat, to veto any final bills they consider unfair, and legislators would have to mount two-thirds votes to override any veto.

The 2020 Census showed that Louisiana’s minority population had increased over the previous decade while the white population declined slightly. Black residents make up about a third of the state’s population.

The six Republicans on the Senate committee voted to approve a bill by Sen. Sharon Hewitt, R-Slidell, the panel’s chairwoman, that would likely leave five of the state’s six congressional seats with white representatives.

The three Democrats on the committee opposed the bill.

Read more at the Daily World

Published: Feb. 4, 2022

By: Liz Ryan, Lara Nicholson, Rachel Mipro, LSU Manship School News Service

BATON ROUGE, La. (LSU Manship School News Service) — Aditya Shah was a junior at Hightstown High School in New Jersey in 2015 when he and his AP Government and Politics classmates began studying cold cases involving Ku Klux Klan murders in the South.

Out of curiosity, the students filed a public records request with the help of their teacher, Stuart Wexler, to learn more about some of these cases.

After about a year of waiting, Shah and his classmates had received only a few documents – and those were heavily redacted of vital information despite the cases being so old.

“We realized that this process is inefficient, and it takes too long and that something has to be done to change it,” Shah said in an interview.

From there, the students embarked on drafting a bill and a longshot effort to persuade lawmakers to turn it into law. Congress followed through in 2018, creating the Civil Rights Cold Case Records Collection Act, and now the law is finally about to be implemented.

A U.S. Senate committee approved four nominees last week to serve on a national board tasked with reviewing and eventually releasing to the public hundreds of thousands of pages of FBI documents on murder cases from the civil-rights era.

Once the full Senate approves them, the nominees, all university professors, will be able to get to work reviewing FBI files. Congress has appropriated $4 million for the effort, and it raises the possibility of fulfilling the hopes of historians, journalists, and victims’ family members still searching for answers to unsolved homicides.

In Louisiana alone, 15 victims from that era have been included among cases that the FBI has reviewed, and the board members could help prompt the release of more of those records.

Read more at KLFY

Published: Feb. 4, 2022

By: Lura Stabiler, LSU Manship School News Service

BATON ROUGE — A Republican Senate leader and a Democratic senator on Thursday debated the importance of adding a second majority-minority congressional district, giving different interpretations of the federal Voting Rights Act to justify their positions. 

The back-and-forth came on the third day of the special redistricting session in which senators present their redistricting maps for the state’s six congressional districts. 

Sen. Sharon Hewitt, R-Slidell and the chairwoman of the Senate and Governmental Affairs Committee, presented a map, as did Sen. Cleo Fields, D-Baton Rouge, who was accompanied by NAACP Legal Defense Fund representatives Jared Evans and Michael Pernick. 

It was clear even before the start of the session that Black legislators wanted to make it likely for Black residents to elect two congressmen, while Republicans wanted to preserve the five seats that they hold.

Political considerations will play a major role in the process, but the two sides focused Thursday on how they were each grouping voters to achieve their goals. The committee may vote on the plans Friday.

On three different occasions during the hearing, Hewitt emphasized her interpretation of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in disputing the idea that there should be two districts with Black voters in the majority since Blacks make up about a third of the state’s population in the 2020 Census.

Read more at Town Talk

Published: Feb. 3, 2022

By: Liz Ryan, LSU Manship School News Service

The U.S. Senate Homeland Security Committee on Wednesday approved four nominees to serve on a national board tasked with reviewing and eventually releasing to the public hundreds of thousands of pages of FBI documents on murder cases from the civil rights-era.

Most cases involve Ku Klux Klan murders of African Americans that occurred in Louisiana or other Southern states.

A fifth nominee for the Civil Rights Records Review Board has yet to be named.

The four nominees approved Wednesday are university professors. One, Hank Klibanoff, is a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist now teaching at Emory University. The other three are Margaret A. Burnham of Northeastern University, Gabrielle M. Dudley of Emory University, and Brenda E. Stevenson of UCLA.

The possibility of gaining access to unredacted documents about these cases has long been a hope of journalists, historians and family members still searching for answers to unsolved homicides.

According to the FBI and the Department of Justice, 15 Louisiana residents were murdered in these types of cases between 1954 and 1973.

Read more at the Daily Advertiser

Published: Feb. 3, 2022

By: Allison Kadlubar, LSU Manship School News Service

BATON ROUGE — Black residents and civil rights groups on Wednesday objected strongly to a Republican proposal to redraw the districts for the state Senate, pushing for at least two more districts that would likely elect Black senators.

The concerns arose as Senate President Page Cortez, R-Lafayette, pitched his proposal to the Senate and Governmental Affairs Committee, explaining that it was based on technical strategies to ensure that all districts match representation based on population. 

But more than 80 people filled out cards signaling their opposition to Cortez’s proposed outline, and 20 of them voiced their concerns to the committee. 

Some supported an alternative proposal by Sen. Ed Price, D-Gonzales, who would redraw the maps to include two more districts than Cortez’s plan — one in Shreveport and one near Baton Rouge — that would include a majority of Black voters. 

The 2020 Census showed an increase in minority population in Louisiana and a small decrease in white population. 

But Cortez’s proposal, Senate Bill 1, would leave the number of likely minority seats at 11 of the 39 in the Senate. Price’s proposal would increase that number to 13 to align it with Census data showing that almost one-third of the state’s population is Black.

Read more at the News Star

Published: Feb. 2, 2022

By: Piper Hutchinson, LSU Manship School News Service

BATON ROUGE — Battle lines were being drawn between Democrats and Republicans in the Louisiana Legislature Tuesday as the two sides proposed new congressional maps as a special redistricting session got underway.

Democrats are pushing for a second of the six congressional districts that would be likely to elect a Black representative.

Map proposals filed by State Sen. Cleo Fields, D-Baton Rouge, would redraw congressional District 5 to be majority Black. The district is currently represented by Republican Rep. Julia Letlow.

The new district would run down from the northeast corner of the state, hugging the Mississippi border and going as far south as East Baton Rouge Parish.

On the other side of the trenches, Republicans are proposing to make minor changes to current congressional maps, preserving the current balance of power in the congressional delegation.

Read more at the Daily Advertiser