Justice Thomas: Brown Ruling Led to Racist Redistricting

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas on Thursday criticized the Brown v. Board of Education ruling, which marked its 70th anniversary last week, over its precedent of "extravagant uses of judicial power" in redrawing maps.

Brown v. Board put an end to racial segregation in the 1950s and '60s by banning the practice of separating school children by race.

Thomas issued his rebuke of "Brown" in a concurring opinion in the high court's 6-3 decision in Alexander v. South Carolina NAACP on Thursday, a ruling that said South Carolina Republicans could redraw a congressional map that moved 30,000 Blacks out of a district.

A federal three-judge panel in January 2023 ruled that the map unlawfully sorted voters by race and deliberately split up Black neighborhoods in Charleston County in a "stark racial gerrymander."

The high court overruled the lower court's decision, saying the South Carolina Legislature cared about partisanship, not race. Thomas, in a solo concurrence of the ruling, took it further, writing that the Supreme Court should overrule every precedent that limits political branches in matters of redistricting.

"The view of equity required to justify a judicial map-drawing power emerged only in the 1950s," Thomas wrote. "The court's impatience with the pace of desegregation caused by resistance to Brown v. Board of Education led us to approve extraordinary remedial measures."

Thomas wrote that the Supreme Court in 1954 "took a boundless view of equitable remedies," including a new "flexible power to invent whatever new remedies may seem useful at the time."

By overturning every precedent, including ostensibly "Brown," Thomas wrote the Supreme Court should return "political districting to the political branches, where it belongs."

Information from Reuters was used in this report.

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