Jurisprudence: There's a New Lewis Powell Memo, and It's Wildly Racist

By David Daley
Aug 06, 2024

Twisted and determined.

This essay is excerpted from Antidemocratic: Inside the Far Right’s 50-Year Plot to Control American Elections, which will be released on Tuesday from Mariner Books.

It was perhaps the most important voting rights case the U.S. Supreme Court would decide since the passage of the Voting Rights Act.

A federal judge in Alabama had upended Mobile’s city government in October 1976, striking down the at-large elections that ensured that white candidates held every elected office in the city with a large Black population and replacing them with geographic districts, opening the possibility of equitable Black representation in one of the nation’s most segregated cities. That opportunity was denied by the Supreme Court.

Now never-before-seen letters and memos show that behind the scenes at the court, Justice Lewis Powell, an influential jurist with an undeserved reputation for decency and moderation, used wildly racist code words on the court’s letterhead as he strenuously—and successfully—drove a decision in City of Mobile v. Bolden four years later that would overturn the lower court and reinstate a system that reliably produced all-white rule.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/08/john-roberts-supreme-court-racist-lewis-powell-memo.html