Miller v. Johnson

Between 1980 and 1990 the state of Georgia had only one congressional district that had a black majority. Due to the results of the decennial census for 1990 it was determined that the black voters of Georgia were entitled to an additional eleventh congressional seat. This prompted the Georgia General Assembly to redraw congressional district boundaries and prepare a reapportionment plan. Designated as a covered jurisdiction by the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Georgia was required to submit the reapportionment plan to the U.S. attorney general for pre-clearance before enactment to ensure that the proposed changes did not deny or abridge citizens' rights to vote based on race.

In October of 1991 the first plan for reapportionment was submitted for approval. It included two majority-minority congressional districts, and a third district that was comprised of 35 percent black voters. The Justice Department denied approval of the plan on the grounds that it had created only two majority-minority districts and did not acknowledge certain minority populations by aligning them in majority-black districts.

The General Assembly rewrote the plan, increasing the black populations in three districts--the Second, Fifth, and Eleventh. The Justice Department denied pre-clearance a second time, citing an alternate plan for creating three majority-minority districts. The plan, called "max-black," had been drafted by the American Civil Liberties Union for the Georgia General Assembly's black caucus. It involved several trades of black populations in Macon and Savannah, which would convert the districts into three majority-minority districts.

In order to comply with the Justice Department's recommendations, Georgia redrew the reapportionment plan a third time, utilizing the "max-black" plan for a benchmark. The resulting plan split 26 counties, and the Eleventh District connected the black neighborhoods of metro Atlanta with the poor black districts of coastal Georgia located 260 miles away. This third district alone split eight counties and five municipalities and covered a territory of approximately 6,784 square miles. The end result of the plan, however, included the three majority-minority districts recommended by the Justice Department. In April of 1992 the reapportionment plan was granted pre-clearance; elections were held under the new redistricting the following November, in which each of the three new districts elected a black candidate.

Five white voters from the Eleventh District filed a claim in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Georgia. They alleged that the redistricting plan was a "racial gerrymander" by which voters had been separated into districts on the basis of race alone. This was a violation of their equal protection rights as guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and interpreted by the precedents set in Shaw v. Reno (1993). A three-judge panel was convened, and the majority ruled in favor of the five appellees. It was held that Shaw required close scrutiny of a redistricting plan if it had the overwhelming appearance of a process decided by racial factors. The panel also held that the Georgia plan did not require three majority-minority districts in order to comply with the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Upon appeal Miller v. Johnson came before the Supreme Court in April of 1995.