The Congressional Black Caucus on Tuesday urged American corporations to condemn efforts to dilute Black voting strength, as Southern states eliminate congressional districts where most residents are Black.

The CBC’s attempt to mobilize the business community comes as Black representation in Congress potentially faces its most severe threat since the end of Reconstruction following the Civil War. But some business leaders have taken a friendlier tone with President Donald Trump, who backs the gerrymandering.

A U.S. Supreme Court decision in April, in a case called Louisiana v. Callais, sharply weakened the federal Voting Rights Act, which had blocked states from breaking apart majority-minority districts. It limited the use of race in redistricting, prompting several Southern states to advance new maps targeting these districts, which are mostly held by Black Democrats.

“These actions are not routine political exercises,” the letter reads. “They are coordinated efforts to silence Black voices at the ballot box and strip communities of representation in American democracy.”

The message is addressed to more than 200 corporations and business groups that signed on to a 2021 letter in support of voting rights, as well as an unnamed number of other corporate leaders. Among the signatories were Amazon, Apple, Cisco, Facebook, Intel, Microsoft, Nike, PepsiCo, Starbucks, Target, Tesla and Unilever USA. 

That letter called on Congress to update the Voting Rights Act, including changes that would restore the federal government’s ability to review changes to election and voting laws in states and local governments with a history of discrimination, a practice called preclearance that the Supreme Court effectively halted in 2013.

On Tuesday, the CBC said those companies should issue individual or joint public statements opposing efforts to dilute Black voting strength and dismantle protections in the Voting Rights Act.

The lawmakers also want companies to report on corporate political spending and relationships connected to attacks on voting rights and “discriminatory redistricting schemes.” Companies should accept an invitation to participate in a national gathering alongside civil rights leaders and advocates to discuss voting rights and Black political power, the lawmakers wrote.

The letter asks businesses to respond by June 9.

“Five years ago, corporations across America publicly affirmed that democracy, racial equity, and voting rights matter. Today, in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Callais decision, those commitments are being tested in real time,” Rep. Yvette Clarke, a New York Democrat who chairs the CBC, said in a statement. 

“Corporations that have profited from Black consumers, relied on Black workers, and benefited from Black communities cannot remain silent while Black political representation is dismantled in plain sight,” Clarke said. “Silence in this moment is not neutrality — it is complicity.”

Corporate leaders warm to Trump

But political attitudes in parts of corporate America, especially among tech firms, have shifted since 2021.

When businesses signed the July 2021 letter, they were acting after the May 2020 murder of George Floyd, a Black man, by a white police officer in Minneapolis, and the Jan. 6, 2021, storming of the Capitol by Trump supporters. Six years later, some titans of American business have taken a more conciliatory approach to Trump and the Make America Great Again movement.

Elon Musk, who leads Tesla, spearheaded the Department of Governmental Efficiency, or DOGE, initiative in 2025 that resulted in the firings and layoffs of thousands of federal workers. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has spoken positively about the president. Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s CEO, called Trump “more mature” in his second term.

Trump has also led a push against diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. In March, the president signed an executive order targeting DEI practices by federal contractors. The directive followed another anti-DEI order in January 2025 that encouraged the private sector to “end illegal DEI discrimination and preferences.”

Since the Supreme Court’s decision in Callais, some Republicans have portrayed eliminating majority-minority districts as a constitutional imperative. The current districts should be tossed because they were drawn with their racial makeup in mind, they say.

“I don’t think race should be used to help a person because of his race, and I don’t think race should be used to harm a person because of his or her race,” Sen. John Kennedy, a Louisiania Republican, said at a Senate hearing on racial gerrymandering last week.

Rapid remaps

Since the release of the Callais decision on April 29, Florida and Tennessee have changed their maps and Louisiana is expected to follow soon. South Carolina lawmakers tried but failed to advance a new map and Alabama has taken steps to implement a 2023 gerrymander after the Supreme Court lifted a lower court order that had blocked it.

A panel of three federal judges on Tuesday issued a new order halting the Alabama map, which would likely force out one of the state’s two Black Democratic members of Congress if enacted. The judges found that the map was racially discriminatory, even in light of Callais. 

Alabama has appealed the decision to the Supreme Court.

“I applaud the three-judge panel for upholding the rule of law and reaffirming that racial discrimination has no place in our redistricting process,” Rep. Terri Sewell, an Alabama Democrat who also signed Tuesday’s CBC letter, said in a statement.

“While we know that this legal battle is far from over, today’s ruling sends a clear message: Black voters in Alabama cannot and will not be silenced.”

WASHINGTON — The Congressional Black Caucus and NAACP on Tuesday urged pushback against GOP-led redistricting efforts in Southern states via college sports, including a boycott of public universities by athletes and supporters.

U.S. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and fellow Congressional Black Caucus members blasted a bill that sets forth a national framework for college athletes’ compensation. 

But the CBC’s backlash went beyond just the legislation — which was yanked from the House’s voting schedule this week following unanimous opposition from the major voting bloc. 

At a press conference outside the U.S. Capitol, the lawmakers rallied behind the NAACP’s call earlier Tuesday for Black athletes and fans to withhold “athletic and financial support from public universities in states that have moved to limit, weaken, or erase Black voting representation” following the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent ruling in Louisiana v. Callais.

The decision from the nation’s highest court gutted the federal Voting Rights Act and has prompted a major redistricting push in Southern states that could threaten Black representation in Congress. 

Southeastern Conference targeted

“We are here standing in solidarity with the NAACP and its call for athletes to boycott institutions within the (Southeastern Conference) that belong to states that have unleashed these Jim Crow-like racially oppressive tactics, which is unacceptable, unconscionable and un-American,” Jeffries said. 

“We believe that the silence of these institutions is complicity, and we will not stand for it,” the New York Democrat added.

The SEC, a major athletic conference under the NCAA, includes several member universities located in states that have joined the redistricting wave. The NAACP pointed to Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas as “eight priority states.”

“In this moment, our democracy is in crisis,” said Derrick Johnson, president and CEO of the NAACP, at Tuesday’s press conference.

“This is not about partisanship — this is about true representation, and for the NAACP, we will fight with all we have in solidarity with the Congressional Black Caucus to ensure that we have representation, or if we don’t, we will withhold the talent that play on the football field or on the basketball court,” he said. 

SCORE Act under scrutiny 

The Student Compensation and Opportunity through Rights and Endorsements, or ‘‘SCORE” Act, seeks to allow compensation but bar student-athletes from being recognized as employees and provide broad antitrust immunity to the NCAA and college sports conferences. 

The college sports world continues to grapple with the fallout from the NCAA’s 2021 guidelines, which allowed student-athletes to profit from their name, image and likeness, or NIL. 

A federal judge in June 2025 also approved the terms of a nearly $2.8 billion antitrust settlement that paved the way for schools to directly pay athletes.

The college sports landscape is also grappling with gender inequity in NIL deals, a patchwork of state NIL laws, booster collectives and the NCAA’s controversial transfer portal, among other issues.

House GOP leadership had also pulled the SCORE Act from the House floor in December.

In a statement, the CBC said U.S. Reps. Shomari Figures, D-Ala., and Janelle Bynum, D-Ore., two of the bill’s lead sponsors, had been negotiating changes in the legislation to improve it but pulled their support, and the CBC did so as well.

The caucus said its members cannot support legislation that benefits large athletic institutions when their leaders are not speaking out about redistricting that weakens Black representation in government.

“This is not politics as usual. This is a defining moral moment for our country,” the caucus said.

“For generations, Black athletes have helped build college athletics into one of the most powerful and profitable industries in American life. The success, visibility, and cultural influence of major athletic conferences and institutions are inseparable from the talent, labor, leadership, and cultural contributions of Black communities. Yet at the very moment those same communities face coordinated attacks on their democratic representation, too many leaders across college athletics have chosen silence.”

Letters sent

The caucus also said it has sent formal letters to SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey, Atlantic Coast Conference Commissioner Jim Phillips and NCAA President Charlie Baker “demanding immediate engagement and a public response regarding the ongoing assault on Black political representation throughout the South and across the nation.”

Congressional Black Caucus Chair Yvette Clarke, a New York Democrat, said the caucus “cannot support legislation benefiting major athletic institutions that continue to remain silent while Black voting rights and Black political power are being systematically dismantled across the South.” 

Jeffries noted that “with respect to the SCORE Act, our position has been clear: If LSU is for it, we’re against it. If the University of Alabama is for it, we’re against it. If Ole Miss is for it, we’re against it. If the University of South Carolina is for it, we’re against it. If the University of Tennessee is for it, we’re against it, and if the SEC schools are for it, we are against it.” 

The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision gutting the federal Voting Rights Act sent Black Democrats in the U.S. House reeling on Wednesday, as they confronted a new reality where Republicans could gerrymander some of them out of office and limit the ability of Black voters to elect candidates in the future.

Members of the Congressional Black Caucus vowed to fight the court’s decision. They demanded fresh votes on federal voting rights legislation that has languished for several years and urged voters to turn out in the November election.

But facing a Republican-controlled Congress for at least the rest of the year and a Republican White House for at least the next two-and-a-half years, the prospect of major new voting rights legislation becoming law appears slim in the near term.

“It will pave the way for the greatest reduction in representation for Black and minority voters since the years following Reconstruction,” Rep. Terri Sewell, an Alabama Democrat, said of the court’s decision, referring to the post-Civil War period in the South.

Republicans could ultimately secure up to 19 U.S. House seats nationally directly because of the Supreme Court’s decision, according to a projection by Fair Fight Action, a Georgia-based progressive voting rights group, and the Black Voters Matter Fund, which advocates on behalf of Black voters. 

As of Aug. 4, 2025, Congress included 61 Black members of the House, including two delegates, and five senators, according to the Congressional Research Service.

Racial gerrymander

In a 6-3 decision written by Justice Samuel Alito, the Supreme Court ruled that Louisiana’s congressional map was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander because it unnecessarily created a second district where a majority of residents are Black.

Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act had previously limited states from using maps that dilute the voting power of minority citizens. Justice Elena Kagan, one of the court’s three liberal justices, wrote in a dissent that the decision would now allow states to dilute the voting power of minority voters without legal consequences.

Republicans welcomed the decision, with many saying race should play no role in redistricting. President Donald Trump, informed about the ruling by reporters and told that it would help Republicans, exclaimed, “I love it.”

Florida lawmakers approved a new map within hours of the opinion. The proposal, offered by Gov. Ron DeSantis earlier this week, seeks to secure four additional House seats for Republicans. DeSantis had invoked the court’s decision, even before it was released, to push lawmakers to pass the new map.

GOP candidates and officials in other states urged state lawmakers to move quickly to redraw maps, even with primary elections approaching. Even if only a small number of states enact fresh gerrymanders this year, the Supreme Court decision will likely trigger another, bigger wave of redistricting over the next two years ahead of the 2028 election.

“The Court rightly acknowledged that the South has made extraordinary progress, and that laws designed for a different era do not reflect the present reality,” Alabama Republican Attorney General Steve Marshall said in a statement.

Rep. Richard Hudson, a North Carolina Republican who chairs the National Republican Congressional Committee, in a statement said the decision “restores fairness, strengthens confidence in our elections, and ensures every voter is treated equally under the law.”

The Supreme Court in 2019 allowed states to redraw maps for political advantage, ruling that federal courts would no longer adjudicate partisan gerrymandering cases. That previous decision, combined with Wednesday’s opinion, offers states a wide berth to draw maps that limit the voting power of minorities if they’re sold as politically necessary.

Bloody Sunday

Sewell represents a district that includes Selma, where the civil rights activist and future U.S. Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., along with other marchers, was beaten by state troopers in 1965 while walking across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in an episode called Bloody Sunday. 

The beatings helped spur Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act later that year — the same law the Supreme Court weakened on Wednesday.

“The court just gave states permission to use partisan gerrymandering as a wholesale excuse to deny Black and minority voters a voice in our democracy,” Sewell said.

In Missouri, the Republican-controlled legislature earlier this year passed a map intended to oust Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, a Democrat who was Kansas City’s first Black mayor. The state Supreme Court is weighing a legal challenge that could keep the map from taking effect before the November election.

On Wednesday, Cleaver in a statement called the opinion “deeply disrespectful of the generations of African Americans and civil rights advocates who gave their freedom, their blood, and even their lives to make it possible.” 

Obama criticizes ruling

Former President Barack Obama condemned the decision as another example of how a majority of the current Supreme Court seems intent on “abandoning its vital role” in ensuring equal participation in American democracy and protecting the rights of minority groups against majority overreach.

“The good news is that such setbacks can be overcome,” Obama said in a statement. “But that will only happen if citizens across the country who cherish our democratic ideals continue to mobilize and vote in record numbers – not just in the upcoming midterms or in high profile races, but in every election and every level.

Several Democrats said Congress should pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, a Democratic-sponsored measure that seeks to restore preclearance — a requirement that states with a history of discrimination obtain federal approval before making voting changes. The Supreme Court effectively halted preclearance in 2013.

The House, under Democratic control, passed the legislation in 2021 but it stalled in the Senate. Democrats could likely pass the bill again if they retake the House in November but would face a likely filibuster again in the Senate. Even if they managed to pass the bill, Trump would be virtually certain to veto it.

Rep. Cleo Fields, a Louisiana Democrat whose district was ruled an unconstitutional racial gerrymander, sought to place the court’s decision in a broader, historical context. 

Looking ahead to midterms

Recalling Louisiana’s Jim Crow past, he said the state used to require individuals to recite the Constitution’s preamble before registering to vote.

“If you tell me I’ve got to jump a certain height, I could probably do that. Tell me I’ve got to run a certain distance, I could probably do that, too. But if you tell me I have to be white to serve in Congress from Louisiana, I can’t do nothing about that — I need some help from my government,” Fields said, adding that’s why Congress needs to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries called the Supreme Court’s conservative majority “illegitimate” and said the opinion was unacceptable but not unexpected. 

While acknowledging the decision represents a setback, America has an opportunity to mount a comeback in the upcoming election, he said.

Jeffries, who is set to become speaker if Democrats retake the House in November, said one of the chamber’s first actions would be to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.

“So we can end the era of voter suppression in America once and for all,” Jeffries said.

Jennifer Shutt contributed to this report