LSU Manship School Statehouse Bureau

Published: Feb. 15, 2022

By: Allison Kadlubar, Alex Tirado and Lura Stabiler, LSU Manship School News Service

BATON ROUGE — Two weeks of debate, public testimony and pleas from activists for greater minority representation culminated in a 40-minute Senate floor meeting Monday that advanced two Republican bills mostly maintaining the status quo of the state Senate and Supreme Court district maps.

State representatives then voted 82-21 Monday evening to leave the state House with the same number of minority-majority districts, 29 of 105, that it has now. All of the vote margins in both chambers were large enough to override gubernatorial vetoes if they hold going forward.

“It took a while to get to where we are right now,” Senate President Page Cortez, R- Lafayette, said. “I’m glad that the hawks and the doves kept to themselves today.”

Senate Bill 1, authored by Cortez, kept the state Senate map largely intact with only 11 of the 39 seats representing majority-Black districts.

Sen. Gary Carter, D-New Orleans, pleaded for one final chance to increase minority representation. He said he had spent the weekend meeting with elected and unelected constituents concerning district lines.

“These aren’t just lines on a page,” Carter said. “These are people we represent, who we love, who we fight for, who invite us into their homes.”

Read more at BIZ Magazine

Published: Feb. 14, 2022

By: LSU Manship School News Service

The work of a longtime Louisiana newspaper editor will be included in a PBS “Frontline” documentary Tuesday on the 1967 Ku Klux Klan murder of Wharlest Jackson, a 37-year-old Black man in Natchez, Mississippi.

Jackson, who had five children, was treasurer of the Natchez NAACP. He was killed when a bomb planted beneath his truck exploded while he was riding home from work.

The editor, Stanley Nelson, researched the Jackson case and other Klan murders for many years before retiring from the Concordia Sentinel in Ferriday in December.

Nelson was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in 2011 for his work on a similar case, and he has written two books on cold case murders from the civil rights era. He also helped found the LSU Cold Case Project at the Manship School of Mass Communication, where he works as an adjunct professor.

Entitled “American Reckoning,” the Frontline film also follows the work of Jackson’s wife, Exerlena, a civil rights activist who has since died.

In the film, the couple’s surviving children tell the story of their family and of their quest to find justice for their father.

Read more at Louisiana Illuminator

Published: Feb. 12, 2022

By: Rosel Flores and Piper Hutchinson, LSU Manship School News Service

BATON ROUGE — As it became clear that Republican leaders planned to pass redistricting maps that would not expand minority seats in Congress or the Louisiana Legislature, Black lawmakers said they had two fallbacks — possible vetoes by Gov. John Bel Edwards or lawsuits.

Now both of those options seem a bit shakier.

The Louisiana House and Senate both passed congressional redistricting plans last week by vote margins that would be big enough to override vetoes by Edwards, a Democrat, if the Republicans could muster those votes again.

And last Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court delayed hearing a suit in a similar redistricting fight in Alabama in a move that legal experts say could hint at less court intervention to support minority claims in the future.

In a 5-4 vote, the court’s conservative majority let a redistricting plan passed by the Alabama Legislature stand through this fall’s midterm elections even though an appeals court had ruled that the law may have violated the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in failing to provide for a second minority-majority congressional district.

The Supreme Court, which has trimmed back parts of the voting-rights law in recent years, said it would consider the merits of the Alabama case later. But that is not likely to happen until after the November elections, which will decide the balance of power in Congress.

How would the balance of power be affected?

Republicans and Democrats have been fighting across the country to hold or gain congressional seats through the redistricting process. So if lawsuits challenging the decisions are delayed in many states, that could leave the party with the most power — Republicans in red states like Louisiana and Alabama and Democrats in blue states — in the driver’s seat in those areas.

Peter Robins-Brown, the executive director for Louisiana Progress, an advocacy group, said the Supreme Court decision to let the GOP’s Alabama redistricting map stand for now is likely in Louisiana to “embolden those who were already planning to submit a map that would end up in court and make folks who were planning to challenge those maps feel a little worse.”

Read more at the Daily Advertiser

LSU Manship school student Piper Hutchinson was featured in a segment on the Louisiana Public Broadcasting show on Feb. 11, 2022. She discussed the current redistricting special session that she has been following closely. Hutchison is a part of the Statehouse Bureau at the Manship School of Mass Communication.

See the whole episode here

Published: Feb. 11, 2022

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

BATON ROUGE — Sparks flew between lawmakers and high school students at a House redistricting committee hearing Wednesday.

A group of teenagers trekked from Shreveport, missing a day of class, to testify in front of the powerful House and Governmental Affairs Committee against a Republican redistricting bill that would not increase Black representation in the Louisiana House.

Kingson Wills, Sabrina Huynh and Ryan Wilkinson took the stand together to speak out against what they called racial gerrymandering. They were met with pushback from Rep. John Stefanski, R-Crowley, the chairman of the committee.

Stefanski pursued a tough line of questioning against the trio, first asking them to identify a district on a proposed House map that had been gerrymandered and to tell him where it was.

Wilkinson identified House District 23 as one such district. Under the proposal put forward by House leaders, the Natchitoches-based majority Black district would be broken up and absorbed by mostly white districts nearby to accommodate plans for a new majority-minority district in New Orleans.

Stefanski pushed back on the claim, as his proposal did not still have House District 23 in northwest Louisiana.

“Oh yeah, because y’all gerrymandered it,” Wilkinson retorted. 

Read more at Shreveport Times

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