Leah Aden is the lead legal professional in South Carolina’s battle towards redistricting.
The NAACP Authorized Protection Fund (LDF) legal professional argued within the Thomas Alexander v. South Carolina State Convention of the NAACP, which is able to decide if South Carolina’s congressional map may have bigger margins within the 2024 presidential election. Her oral arguments earlier than the U.S. Supreme Courtroom marked the redistricting case as “textbook” racial gerrymandering.
Aden wasn’t terrified of the justices’ robust questions.
“I’ve all the time wished to do affect work,” she mentioned. “I’ve lived with this case from the bottom up.”
The U.S. District Courtroom for the District of South Carolina unanimously discovered that the state’s legislature was seeking to dim the sunshine of Black voting energy in January 2023. 1000’s of Black residents in Charleston had been being moved round from District 1, the place Republican Rep. Nancy Mace holds the seat, to District 6, lengthy represented by Rep. James Clyburn, a high Democrat and the state’s lone Black congressman.
South Carolina’s governor, Henry McMaster, signed a brand new map handed by South Carolina’s Basic Meeting in January 2022 into legislation, inflicting pushback from civil rights advocates. They declare the brand new legislation prompted racial gerrymander designed with discriminatory functions beneath each the 14th and fifteenth amendments of the U.S. Structure. Beneath the management of state Senate President Thomas Alexander, South Carolina’s legislature appealed the court docket’s choice in Might 2023 and introduced the case to the Supreme Courtroom.
Aden reminded the decrease court docket’s discovering of “stark racial gerrymandering,” arguing that state lawmakers had been “constantly race as a result of they’d an expectation that race was a predictor of how political events would carry out.” “In mild of the whole report, it displays that there was a racial goal, it displays that there was a big sorting of Black folks,” Aden mentioned.
The Washington, D.C. native is part of a small however mighty group of oralists and follows within the footsteps of legendary LDF attorneys together with the late Constance Baker Motley in addition to Christina Swarns, head of the Innocence Venture. She prides herself on being a scholar of Black legislation and schooling. “I grew up understanding the legacy of Brown v. Board of Training. I’m one in every of its beneficiaries,” the Howard College College of Regulation graduate mentioned. “Training, that’s our equalizer.”
Because the case was filed on behalf of the South Carolina State Convention of the NAACP, a Hilton Head Island, and a member of the historic Gullah Geechee neighborhood, Aden mentioned she was optimistic, in response to LDF, and seemed ahead to the Supreme Courtroom’s choice. “There are congressional elections subsequent 12 months, and each election the place our shoppers don’t have their rights revered is one election too many.”
