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The reaction speed of southern states to the US supreme court’s decision last week in Louisiana v Callais has been breathtaking for voting rights activists.

One week after Callais, Louisiana’s governor has ordered the state’s ongoing congressional election to be set aside while state lawmakers redraw maps to eliminate a Democratic-majority – that is, a Black-majority – seat covering Baton Rouge.

Alabama’s Republican-majority legislature is drafting legislation in a special session that will allow it to set aside the results of a completed primary later this year if courts lift an injunction on its redistricting.

Florida was amid a special redistricting session as the ruling was handed down, passing a congressional map for 28 districts that packs Black and brown voters into four districts on the south Florida coast and Orlando, eliminating every other Democratic majority.

Mississippi will convene two weeks from now in a Confederate-era capitol building that it hasn’t used in 100 years, ostensibly to eliminate the Democratic majority in the one Mississippi district held by a Black representative.

South Carolina’s Republican majority in the statehouse voted Wednesday to extend its legislative calendar, allowing time to consider whether they should eliminate the state’s sole Democratic-majority, Black-majority district, held by long-serving representative James Clyburn.

And activists watched Tennessee lawmakers vote Thursday morning to eliminate its one remaining Democratic district around Memphis, a city of about 610,000 people, about two-thirds of whom are Black.

Donald Trump’s demand to tear up political norms has been met by Republican states eager to dust off a segregation-era playbook that maximizes the political power of white voters.

“What’s happening right now is probably the swiftest disenfranchisement of Black folks since Reconstruction, due to disenfranchisement by racist gerrymandering. And they will lie and say that it’s for political purposes,” said Democratic state representative Justin Pearson of Tennessee, a Memphis legislator running for a congressional district blown into pieces by Republican lawmakers. “They cracked it into three. The district stretches hundreds of miles … it’s completely diluted in thirds almost to the percentage. It’s surgical, how they remove the possibility of Black participation.”

Lawsuits will be filed. Existing Tennessee state law bans mid-decade redistricting, though lawmakers amended that law to conduct this redistricting. Article 2 of the Tennessee constitution requires maps to avoid dividing counties. Nonetheless, the changes have been made with perfunctory regard to opposition, as an exercise in raw political power.

“Rigged maps that decide elections before a single vote is cast and politicians who rig elections so it’s impossible for them to lose: this is not democracy. This is cowardice,” said Stacey Abrams, a voting rights advocate and former Georgia lawmaker addressing Tennessee lawmakers at the redistricting committee hearing at the capitol Wednesday afternoon. “In the south, we believe in fair contests and government of, by and for the people. Tennessee can be led by Republicans without returning to a terrible, vicious past.”

Republican lawmakers ignored her. After half an hour of pleas from Black voters and voting rights advocates, they moved the meeting to another room without allowing the public in to watch, and passed it out of committee.

Later that day, activists held a “Tennessee People’s Hearing on Redistricting” at First Baptist Church, Capitol Hill, a historically-Black church in Nashville. A Memphis minister mused about whether the next occupant of the ninth district seat would move the district office from downtown Memphis.

“The congressional office for the ninth congressional district could be in Pulaski, Tennessee,” said Rev Noel Hutchinson, and the audience groaned. Pulaski is where the first iteration of the Ku Klux Klan was founded in 1865, a point he didn’t have to make explicit for the crowd.

Democrats described the vote the next day as an exercise in white power and a Jim Crow process. State representative Justin Jones described Tennessee house speaker Cameron Sexton as the “grand wizard in chief”, and handed a Republican lawmaker a Confederate flag. A series of amendments from Democrats were ruled as submitted in an untimely matter, which raised the threshold for their passage to a two-thirds majority. Because the special session moved swiftly from a committee hearing to a floor vote, no amendment would have come in on deadline, Jones said.

“We’re here again for counting jelly beans in a jar. That’s what they want to do. They want to create a process that is unfair and unequal.”

***

Genesis Robinson, executive director of the Equal Ground Education Fund and Action Fund in Florida, somnambulated into a morning conference room last week after catching the red-eye flight from Atlanta. The Southern Coalition for Social Justice had convened a meeting in New Orleans to discuss voting rights issues with hundreds of activists from the American Civil Liberties Union, Black Lives Matter, the NAACP, Common Cause and other groups.

“I landed about 1 a.m., you know, got a few hours of sleep, woke up, went downstairs and we were doing the welcome for the convening and then Callais dropped,” he said.

Their reaction was immediate and devastating, Robinson said. A conference meant to prepare for the Callais ruling became one to respond to it.

“There’s probably no better place that I would have wanted to be than in a room with all my comrades from across the south who do this work,” he said.

The days following the Callais ruling have seen a mad scramble by activists to do what can be done as southern states redraw their maps. Robinson filed a lawsuit in Florida immediately after the state passed its new maps.

“Florida has been the epicenter of all attacks on voting and the right to access the ballot box,” Robinson said. “This is just another chapter in that story, unfortunately. And so, here we are yet again, explaining to people what they need to do to prepare for an election.”

The most dramatic map changes have been around Miami and south Florida, which eliminated two Democratic-majority seats by packing Black voters into one district and breaking the rest across several others. The governor’s office did not conduct a roadshow of proposed maps, withholding them even from legislators before the special session. The state capitol in Tallahassee is a seven-hour drive from Miami, complicating a community response on short notice.

But public sentiment about redistricting appears irrelevant to the legislature, Robinson said. He cited a state constitutional amendment passed by popular vote that explicitly outlawed partisan redistricting.

“When you shift the partisan advantage and stack the deck to give your party an opportunity to control 24 out of 28 seats, from where I’m from, everybody knows that to be cheating, right? And I think most voters in the state know that,” Robinson said. “[Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor] knew that it would be unpopular. That’s why he tried to rush it through in the dead of night, not even providing the legislature the benefit of seeing the maps more than 24 hours before they were supposed to cast a vote.”

***

“I got the ruling when I was in the car,” said Anneshia Hardy, a voting rights activist in Alabama who had been driving to the conference in New Orleans. “I saw that and I cried. I cried for 30 minutes.

“I asked myself, why does this country hate me so much?”

Hardy’s mother, she remembered, used to say: “Baby, you know, the Black struggle is your ancestral truth. You are not privileged enough to be removed from the direct impact of social issues in this country.”

But nothing about either the ruling or Alabama’s reaction to it has been a surprise, she said.

Hardy spent this week attending legislative hearings in Montgomery. Alabama’s Republican majority is bound by federal court to refrain from mid-decade redistricting for both Congress and the state senate. Alabama’s attorney general asked a federal district court Wednesday to lift that injunction. Alabama’s primary election concludes on 19 May, and early voting has already begun. But legislators passed a bill allowing them to immediately set aside the results of that primary if the court lifts the federal injunction.

Amid a tornado warning in Montgomery that forced the evacuation of the state capitol, with klaxon sirens blaring and water flooding into the first floor of the building, Republican lawmakers completed their votes Wednesday.

Framing redistricting as a left-versus-right conflict obscures what is happening, Hardy said: “There’s a pattern that shows up again and again. Every time Black communities get closer to power, something shifts. The rules move.”

Jared Evans, an attorney with the Power Coalition for Equity and Justice in Louisiana, a litigant in the case that established a second majority-Black district, which was then overturned in the Callais decision, recalled that when advocates challenged a map with only one Black district four years ago, state leaders argued that there wasn’t enough time to alter the maps.

“Now, I think it is very clear that they can move mountains when they want to, when it’s for their own political gain,” Evans said. “This election is already in process. Forty-two thousand people have already cast their ballots in this election and their argument is that, well, this map is obviously unconstitutional and we can’t move forward with it.”

It is unclear whether Louisiana will draw a map with one Black-majority, Democratic-majority district, or none. Eliminating both Democratic districts could threaten the seats of one or another of Louisiana’s two most powerful Republican representatives: speaker Mike Johnson and Steve Scalise.

“The supreme court did not catch us off-guard,” Evans said. “The speed and ferocity in which the governor, the attorney general and the secretary of state are moving to undo this election, that has been shocking.”

***

The Callais decision allows lawmakers to defend against a legal claim of racial discrimination with an assertion that they ignored race while discriminating on the basis of political party, and because most Black people in the south vote for Democrats, their disempowerment is simply collateral political damage.

Republicans cannot talk about race without creating a legal liability. But observers say some actions speak louder than words.

Mississippi house lawmakers are meeting on 20 May to consider redistricting, and have opted to use its old capitol. The new capitol is under renovation, requiring its use, said representative Jason White, Mississippi’s Republican house speaker. But when lawmakers have been unable to meet at the new capitol in the past, they have met at the old Central high school building, which is also in downtown Jackson.

“It just doesn’t make any sense why they would choose this location, except for the symbolism that it comes with while they are working to dismantle Black political power in the state,” said Amir Badat, a voting rights attorney in Mississippi for Fair Fight Action.

Using the building that post-Reconstruction white supremacists used to strip free Black citizens of their rights walks right up to the line of what a court might consider in measuring racial animus, he said.

“There are tools that courts can use to analyze whether or not a lawmaker has discriminatory intent,” Badat said. “One of those tools is to look at: ‘Did these lawmakers deviate from the normal legislative process?’ And if this isn’t a deviation from the normal legislative process, I don’t know what is.”

Mississippi has seven congressional districts. Bennie Thompson has represented Mississippi’s second congressional district from Jackson and the delta since 1993. He is the state’s longest-serving African American elected official and its only congressional Democrat, and his seat is on the chopping block.

“This is equivalent to a second civil war,” Thompson said in an interview with MS Now. “We’re going to have to get our act together. We’re going to have to resist with every fiber in our body. We’re going to have to take this system on at every election. Because it’s not just members of Congress. It’s state legislatures. It’s city councils. It’s school boards.”

As Tennessee lawmakers voted Thursday to send new congressional district maps to the governor Bill Lee, state troopers dragged shouting protesters from the gallery. People sounded air horns in the hallways.

Activists are grimly preparing for the kind of mobilization and protest that led to passage of the Civil Rights Act more than 60 years ago: street actions, public disruptions – and a potentially violent response to them.

“We have already seen that happening,” Badat said. “Just look at the protests against ICE. I mean, people have already given their lives for the causes that they believe in and to challenge authoritarianism in America.”

The No Kings protests are a sign that the public may be coming around to the threat to democracy.

“We are entering into now the period before the Voting Rights Act,” said Pearson, just after the church rally in Nashville on Wednesday. “Now we’re in the period of the white-lash, and now we’re in the period of retribution, and the retribution is showing up in Black political deprivation.”