By Benny Schaft
May 12, 2026

This week, we have witnessed reactionary politicians in the state of Tennessee enthusiastically back and support the U.S. Supreme Court’s April 29 decision gutting the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The court’s ruling opened the door to racist attacks against voters of color through gerrymandering and the systematic dismantling of what little political power Black people in this country have been allowed to hold.

The Republican-dominated Tennessee state legislature promptly redrew the Congressional District map to create three white majority, Republican-leaning districts in Memphis, a city where two thirds of the population is African American.

This institutional racism was made even clearer by the Black community and members of the Tennessee legislature this week, who held protests inside and outside the Tennessee State Capitol in Nashville against the outright racist attacks on Black people in the state.

Republicans in state legislatures have moved to gerrymander and strip away the small gains of political power that they claim to have granted Black people, not only in Tennessee but across this decadent country. This is part of a broader assault which continues its terroristic actions not only against the Black community but against other communities of color as well.

Most especially, we have observed this against the Latine community through the ongoing kidnapping of migrants and the establishment of concentration camps, all funded and carried out by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), an apparatus that also targets Black immigrants.

Historic roots of white supremacy

Many will think that what is happening to Memphis is something new, a product of this particular political moment. But what is happening to Memphis and to the Black community there is part of a long and unbroken story of repression in Tennessee, one that stretches all the way back to the Reconstruction era.

In the aftermath of the Civil War, formerly enslaved people began making major political gains, most especially in Memphis, with the assistance of organizations such as the Freedmen’s Bureau and through the power of community organizing. What made that period truly revolutionary was the coalition being built between Black people and working-class white people, a coalition that proved threatening to the old order in ways that could not be ignored.

The historic alliance frightened the plantation-owning class, who feared the progress and political gains being made by Black people and the growing alliance between the formerly enslaved people and working-class white people. It angered the capitalist class as well, which was desperate to repair its relationship with former slave-owning colleagues and saw the revolutionary movement of Black people during this period as a direct threat to the project of establishing capitalism in the U.S. South. And so, as is always the case when the ruling class feels threatened, the response was violence.

That tension exploded into the Memphis Massacre of 1866, where white supremacist goons, acting on behalf of the ruling class, committed atrocity after atrocity against the Black community, murdering Black people at random, forcing women and children at gunpoint back into burning buildings and burning down the schools that had been established by the Freedmen’s Bureau. It was a campaign of terror, systematic and deliberate, to destroy what Black Memphis had begun to build. And it was endorsed at the highest levels of government.

President Andrew Johnson, who had been warned by officials in the city and in the House and Senate that tensions in Memphis were reaching a breaking point, refused to intervene to defend the Black community. Johnson was a dedicated and sympathetic servant of the ruling class who had no interest in protecting African Americans. In the aftermath of the Massacre, he downplayed the murders and went so far as to blame Black people themselves, even claiming that the violence had been fabricated by the Black community.

It is worth holding onto that image, because this week Republican State Rep. Todd Warner walked through the Tennessee State Capitol draped in a MAGA flag as a cape, taunting the protesters gathered against the gerrymandering of Memphis. Todd did so beneath a portrait of Andrew Johnson himself. Some ironies do not need commentary. They simply need to be named.

Racism fortified after Reconstruction

Violence and repression did not end with Reconstruction, which had officially ended two years earlier with the Great Compromise of 1877. In 1879, racist, white political misleaders, responding directly to six Black representatives having been elected to the state legislature five years earlier, restricted Memphis to a taxing district. They installed a white power structure over the city’s large Black population and introduced tools such as the poll tax to roll back and suppress Black political power.

Thirteen years later, in 1892 Memphis experienced violence again when, on March 9, Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell and Will Stewart were lynched — murdered for the crime of owning a grocery store and having the revolutionary nerve to defend themselves against a lynch mob. Their murders were intended as a warning from the ruling class and their foot soldiers in an attempt to intimidate and terrorize the Black community into submission.

It had the complete opposite effect. Those lynchings, along with other acts of state sanctioned racist terror, gave birth to the anti-lynching movement, organized by revolutionaries including Ida B. Wells. She not only documented and exposed the brutality of the lynch mob but urged armed self-defense for the Black community as a necessary and righteous response to violence.

That revolutionary spirit did not die with Wells. It carried forward into 1968, with the sanitation workers strike in Memphis – where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated – and the rising Black Power movement, proving once again that no matter how many times the ruling class attempts to crush Black resistance in Memphis, it does not stay crushed.

Solidarity with Black Memphis!

Communists must support the Black struggle in Memphis, not only because it is revolutionary, but because solidarity with Black people is what separates those who are genuinely committed to liberation from those who are merely opportunists. The struggle in Memphis is inseparable from the struggle for Black liberation.

It is true that the vote will never on its own lead to the liberation of Black people, and that true liberation requires the abolition of the capitalist system, the white supremacist structure and the patriarchy. But it is important to recognize that Black people have the right to determine their own destiny, and if exercising the right to vote is part of that, then defending that right is part of the struggle as well.

This is why it is necessary to support the struggle in Memphis, because what is happening there is not only about Memphis. It is about what will happen to every predominantly Black city in the South and across this country if this assault on the ongoing struggle for Black political power is allowed to go unchallenged.

The ruling class is counting on the movement’s silence. We cannot give it to them.