concluding that a racial gerrymandering claim had been stated by North Carolina residents who alleged vote dilution and explaining that "[t]he right to vote can be affected by a dilution of voting power as well as by an absolute prohibition on casting a ballot" and that electoral schemes can "violate the Fourteenth Amendment when they are adopted with a discriminatory purpose and have the effect of diluting minority voting strength"
How later courts described this case
- concluding that a racial gerrymandering claim had been stated by North Carolina residents who alleged vote dilution and explaining that "[t]he right to vote can be affected by a dilution of voting power as well as by an absolute prohibition on casting a ballot" and that electoral schemes can "violate the Fourteenth Amendment when they are adopted with a discriminatory purpose and have the effect of diluting minority voting strength"
- recognizing racial gerrymandering claim for "[a] reapportionment plan that includes in one district individuals who belong to the same race, but who are otherwise widely separated by geographical and political boundaries, and who may have little in common with one another but the color of their skin"
- recognizing that "redistricting differs from other kinds of state decisionmaking in that the legislature always is aware of race when it draws district lines, just as it is aware of age, economic status, religious and political persuasion, and a variety of other demographic factors"
- recognizing that “redistrieting differs from other kinds of state decisionmaking in that the legislature always is aware of race when it draws district lines, just as it is aware of age, economic status, religious and political persuasion, and a variety of other demographic factors”
Written by the judges who cited it.
The opinion
*678 Justice Blackmun,
dissenting.
I join Justice White’s dissenting opinion. I did not join Part IV of his opinion in United Jewish Organizations of Williamsburgh, Inc. v. Carey, 430 U. S. 144 (1977), because I felt that its “additional argument,” id., at 165 , was not necessary to decide that case. I nevertheless agree that the conscious use of race in redistricting does not violate the Equal Protection Clause unless the effect of the redistricting plan is to deny a particular group equal access to the political process or to minimize its voting strength unduly. See, e. g., Chapman v. Meier, 420 U. S. 1, 17 (1975); White v. Regester, 412 U. S. 755, 765-766 (1973). It is particularly ironic that the case in which today’s majority chooses to abandon settled law and to recognize for the first time this “analytically distinct” constitutional claim, ante, at 652, is a challenge by white voters to the plan under which North Carolina has sent black representatives to Congress for the first time since Reconstruction. I dissent.