Document Type

Article

Publication Title

Kentucky Law Journal

Abstract

The subject of this brief Article is captured only inadequately by its title: Tuskegee Modem. For those of us who still remember Gomillion v. Lightfoot, this title should evoke a certain sense of d6jh vu. Gomillion was hailed as an obvious advance for its time, for it accomplished what was thought to be morally necessary, by decisively moving the law forward into uncharted waters. Tuskegee had been laid out as a perfect square before the Alabama legislature converted the city into a "strangely irregular twenty-eight-sided figure."' The purpose and effect of the legislation was to eliminate from the city's rolls all but four or five of the 400 black citizens eligible to vote in local elections. The shift in boundaries did not remove any white persons from the list of eligible voters. In the Supreme Court, the case was thought to be practically easy because it was evident to all that the sole reason for the tortured redefinition of the city's boundaries was the exclusion of black voters from the district. No other explanation was, or could have been, offered for this "essay in geometry and geography." Writing for a unanimous court, Justice Frankfurter struck down the redrawing of the boundaries under the Fifteenth Amendment. Yet by the same token, the case was difficult as a legal matter because the Court was required to overcome the well-established proposition that, given the allocation of power under the Constitution, the drawing of local lines within a state is the business of the state and no one else. Even though the Fifteenth Amendment clearly imposes some limits on the states' power to deny or abridge the right to vote, it was far from clear before Gomillion how far those prohibitions went. To be sure, the core of the Fifteenth Amendment reached cases where black citizens were refused the right to vote while the city boundaries remained unchanged. It was not possible on anyone's reading for Tuskegee to have its cake and eat it too: to impose taxes and other obligations on black citizens to whom it overtly denied the right to vote. Indeed, if that course had been open to Tuskegee, doubtless, it would have been adopted.

First Page

869

Volume

80

Publication Date

1992

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