Hugo Black

Baker v. Carr was a landmark 1962 decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in which the Court held that federal courts could take jurisdiction of and decide redistricting cases under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Although the case arose in Tennessee, it built upon Gomillion v. Lightfoot (1960) and influenced Reynolds v. Sims (1964), both of which originated in Alabama. In addition, Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black of Alabama was a persuasive voice in the decision and made a notable dissent in a preceding case, Colgrove v Green.  

Prior to Baker, the U.S. Supreme Court decided in Colegrove v. Green (1946) that federal courts were powerless to correct malapportioned federal congressional districts. Colegrove was a suit brought by three Illinois voters to correct what would surely be malapportionment today. Because Illinois had not redistricted its congressional districts since 1901, a rural county of 1,000 and an urban county of 100,000 had equal voting power. Writing for the 4-3 plurality, Justice Felix Frankfurter opined that because the Elections Clause in Article I of the Constitution gave state legislatures the power to fix the time, place, and manner of holding elections for congressional representatives, only Congress, and not the courts, could determine whether a state legislature had met its responsibility to ensure fair representation for its citizens. The Court decided that the case presented a nonjusticiable political question and that voters had either to elect legislatures that apportion correctly or to seek relief from the U.S. Congress.

In dissent, Justice Hugo Black of Alabama argued that the case was justiciable and did not present any political question. He further contended that the law in question violated citizens’ constitutional right to vote in such a way as to obtain the kind of congressional representation guaranteed by the Constitution, and that the fact that elections were political did not prevent the Court from enforcing the constitutional right to vote. In his view, the Constitution required that each citizen’s vote must have equal weight with that of other citizens. He considered it wrong, as he said, that a citizen in a district of “900,000” had less voting power than one in a district of “112,000.” (The actual disparity was 914,053 compared to 112,116.)  In sum, Colegrove made it nearly impossible for citizens to obtain relief in federal court from malapportioned legislative and congressional districts.

The Court departed somewhat from its Colegrove precedent in its willingness to hear and decide Gomillion v. Lightfoot (1960). In this pivotal case, the Court concluded that gerrymandering to disenfranchise Black voters in Tuskegee, Macon County, violated the Fifteenth Amendment, which prohibits denial of the right to vote based on race. One week after Gomillion was decided, Justice Black persuaded other justices to hear arguments in Baker v. Carr.

Baker involved a 1959 challenge to Tennessee’s reapportionment, which had last occurred in 1901, even though the Tennessee constitution required reapportionment every 10 years. Plaintiffs Charles W. Baker and other Tennessee citizens sued defendant Joe Carr and other Tennessee officials. Carr was sued in his official capacity as Tennessee Secretary of State, the state official ultimately responsible for the conduct of elections in the state. The plaintiffs alleged that the 1901 statute had been made obsolete and without any logical basis because of the state’s considerable population growth and redistribution. For example, between 1900 and 1960, according to Census figures the populations of Memphis and Nashville grew nearly fivefold and that of Knoxville nearly 343 percent, whereas the share of people living in rural areas declined. The plaintiffs alleged, with clear factual support, that the 1901 statute violated their Fourteenth Amendment right to equal protection under the laws by debasing their votes. The three-judge district court panel agreed with the plaintiffs that their constitutional rights had been violated but dismissed the case for lack of subject matter jurisdiction and for failure to state a claim upon which relief could be granted. Relying on Colegrove in its decision, the court noted that federal courts could not address state reapportionments because they were political questions that should be addressed by political entities. Some constitutional violations, the court concluded, simply could not be remedied in federal court.

As permitted by federal statute in three-judge panel cases, the plaintiffs appealed directly to the Supreme Court. Justice William Brennan wrote the opinion for a 6-2 majority, with one justice not participating. The Supreme Court reversed the district court’s dismissal order and sent the case back for further proceedings. At the request of Tennessee’s attorney general, the district court then gave the Tennessee State Legislature the opportunity to enact reapportionments for its House and Senate, ultimately approving both plans in 1963.

In the majority opinion, Brennan illustrated that the case presented a judicial controversy and not a political question. He first observed that a case alleging discrimination involving political rights does not always present a political question that is unsuitable for judicial resolution. He then cataloged a list of factors, all related to concern for the separation of powers, that would indicate the presence of a nonjusticiable political question. Chief among those factors, and what would seem the most obvious, was the existence of a question that was constitutionally delegated to another branch of the federal government, and an issue that cannot be resolved without making a policy decision more suitable for the Congress or the executive to forge. Brennan found that none of those listed factors existed in Baker. He distinguished “political questions” from “political cases,” stressing that the political question principle was designed to avoid conflict between co-equal branches of the federal government and not between the federal government and the states. A decision about the validity of the statute in question, he wrote, did not involve a decision to be made by Congress and therefore did not intrude upon a power that was constitutionally delegated to Congress. The issue was simply whether Tennessee’s inaction was consistent with the U.S. Constitution. Accordingly, a federal court could properly resolve the issue under the Equal Protection Clause.    

Justice Frankfurter, who had written the Colegrove plurality opinion, which would now be overturned, wrote a dissenting opinion. He insisted that the outcome of the case should be governed by Colegrove and that legislators, and not judges, should decide the relevance of numerical equality in designing legislative districts. Frankfurter also noted that the political question doctrine clearly applied to a case involving the “structure and organization” of a state government. Justice John Marshall Harlan also dissented, asserting that because the Equal Protection Clause did not require equality of votes for a state legislature, the plaintiffs had failed to state a constitutional claim for which relief could be granted.

Since Baker v. Carr, the federal courts have continued to decide cases, including Reynolds v. Sims, involving state legislative apportionment. In 1964 alone, the federal courts struck down as unconstitutional the legislative apportionments of 15 states. The Court held that the Equal Protection clause requires that, when possible, states must redistrict in a way that state legislative districts have roughly equal populations, ensuring substantially equal legislative representation for all citizens in a state (the “one person, one vote” rule). Yet undecided is whether states must apportion based on voting population or total population. In the 2016 case of Evenwel v. Abbott, the Supreme Court permitted reapportionment based on total population instead of the population of eligible voters as some conservatives want, without deciding whether such a basis is necessary.

The trio of Gomillion v. Lightfoot, Baker v. Carr, and Reynolds v. Sims, all decided in just four years, collectively have had a remarkable effect on the trajectory of both the nation’s Constitutional jurisprudence and Alabama politics.