Justices to Rule on Legality of Racial Gerrymandering : Judiciary: White voters, especially in the South, are challenging black-majority districts. Case will have profound implications for civil rights and politics.

The Supreme Court, acting in a Louisiana case with far-reaching implications for civil rights and politics, said Friday that it would rule on whether the Constitution allows lawmakers to use the race of voters as a criterion for drawing electoral boundaries.

The use of race criteria, which occurred largely because 1982 amendments to the Voting Rights Act were read as requiring officials to give minorities fairer representation, was largely responsible for the election of a record number of blacks and Latinos to Congress in 1992.

State officials, using data from the 1990 census, had redrawn electoral boundaries for government at all levels with the intent of creating one or more districts with a majority of blacks or Latinos.

As a result, several Southern states, including North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, Virginia and Alabama, sent their first black representative to Congress in this century.

But this “racial gerrymandering” has sparked a sharp backlash, particularly in the South. White voters have filed lawsuits in virtually every state, challenging the oddly shaped districts as unconstitutional. Agreeing, federal judges in Louisiana, Texas and Georgia have struck down black-majority districts in the last year.

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On Friday, the Supreme Court announced that it would review the broadest of all the rulings: a declaration by a three-judge panel in Louisiana that outlaws “race-conscious decision-making” in drawing electoral boundaries.

Clinton Administration lawyers had filed an appeal in the case, now known as U.S. vs. Hays, 94-558, arguing that state officials should be permitted to draw majority-minority districts so as to give black voters “a realistic opportunity to elect a candidate of their choice.”

If the ruling is affirmed, “it would roll back just about all the progress that has been made since 1965 in electing more blacks,” said Laughlin McDonald, director of the Southern regional office of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Although the Supreme Court case concerns a congressional district, its constitutional ruling will apply to district boundaries for all manner of elected governing boards, including state legislatures, county boards of supervisors, city councils and school boards.

McLaughlin noted that more than 90% of black state legislators were elected from majority-black districts, as were all 17 black members of Congress elected from the South.

Last year, the Supreme Court on a 5-4 vote revived a white voter’s lawsuit that challenged a bizarre-looking, majority-black district in North Carolina. But in that case, Shaw vs. Reno, the justices did not make clear whether all “race-conscious” districts were unconstitutional, or just those that had a highly peculiar shape.

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The issue shows all signs of splitting Democrats and their traditional allies in the civil rights movements. Some Democratic political activists have complained that the newly drawn districts aided the Republicans last month because they drained away minority voters from normally Democratic-leaning districts.

However, the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund derided this analysis as scapegoating and issued a report asserting that the Democrats lost control in the House because of a decided shift to the right by white voters, not because of a racial change in several districts.

White voters challenging the new districts say they violate the fundamental premise that the government should not segregate voters by race.

“We shouldn’t be in the business of fixing elections by race,” said Paul Hurd, a Monroe, La., attorney who filed the suit challenging a second majority-black district in Louisiana. He said the racial line-drawing has created polarized voters in the state’s seven congressional districts.

The Supreme Court will hear arguments in the case early next year and issue a ruling by July.