HIGH COURT ENDS TERM : Voting District Rule Adds Complications to Complicated Task : Politics: The issue of how to draw election boundaries will likely take more court cases to decide. Critics see backtracking for minorities.

By striking down a Georgia congressional redistricting plan that paved the way for a black Democrat to win a House seat, the Supreme Court virtually guaranteed Thursday that additional court cases will be necessary to clarify how districts may be drawn to account for changing political realities in several Southern states.

The 5-4 decision Thursday forbids state lawmakers from relying too heavily on voters’ race in drawing election districts, but the court did not tell the states how to comply with a variety of competing interests--including party politics and incumbency as well as race--that go into plotting congressional districts affected by the Voting Rights Act.

Indeed, federal lawmakers and civil rights activists reacted Thursday to the decision with heated rhetoric that compared the court’s ruling to a series of Supreme Court decisions more than a century ago that reversed black political gains after Reconstruction.

“It is sad to note that almost 100 years after Plessy v. Ferguson, this country and this Supreme Court have not been able to move beyond the question of the fundamental rights of this country’s African American population,” said Rep. Cynthia McKinney, a Democrat whose predominantly black Georgia district was invalidated by the court’s decision. She was referring to the 1896 “separate but equal” ruling that sanctioned legal segregation and helped strip away black voting rights.

Several civil rights attorneys and activists noted Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s dissent, which said that the decision “renders redistricting perilous work for state legislatures” and “opens the way for federal litigation” to clarify how districts should be drawn.

“The Supreme Court will have to revisit this issue,” said Laughlin McDonald, director of American Civil Liberties Union’s Voting Rights Project in Atlanta. He predicted that his group and others will initiate lawsuits to clarify the court’s new standards.

Wade Henderson, legal director of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People, said that race must be a part of the redistricting equation, otherwise “it’s going to be almost impossible to preserve these black districts.”

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Some political analysts contended that, amid all the uncertainty, several trends are likely to emerge.

The most obvious result would be that fewer blacks are likely to be elected to Congress as the number of districts with a majority of black voters--the so-called majority-minority districts--will shrink as legal challenges force a new round of map-making.

“The only thing that is crystal clear from this decision is that Georgia’s 11th Congressional District . . . is invalidated,” said Jacqueline Berrien, an assistant counsel with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. “The Georgia Legislature will now have to go back and redraw the district. It will have to redraw other districts as well, and there will be another round of legislative battles [over] what the congressional districts in Georgia will look like.”

Berrien and other civil rights activists worry that any erosion of black legislative power--even if it is only one seat in Congress--is too much. Given the history of racially skewed voting patterns across the South, they say, it is unlikely that districts that contain less than a majority of black voters will be able to elect blacks to Congress.

“I don’t know how you can argue there’s fairness for blacks if you do not make it possible to create districts where blacks will win,” said Earl Black, a political scientist specializing in Southern politics at Rice University in Houston.

Of the 38 blacks elected to the House, only three were elected from districts with a majority of white voters. “The court has invalidated one congressional district that has afforded African Americans a congressional district,” said Berrien. “We don’t know how many more will fall, and we can ill afford to lose one.”

Another trend expected to follow in the wake of the court’s ruling is that throughout the South, where reapportionment of districts in the 1990s swept liberal black legislators and conservative Republicans into office, more moderate white Democrats might seek to regain lost ground.

That, said Black, could set white and black Democrats “at each other’s throats.”

And state-level Republicans, who have gained power across the South as a result of redistricting, have cause to worry as well. Many came to power after redistricting concentrated black voters in Democratic enclaves that previously had elected white Democrats. “Some of our candidates could be helped and some could be hurt. It’s just not clear,” said Republican National Committee Chairman Haley Barbour.

Redistricting along lines that ultimately may be declared acceptable by the Supreme Court might yield another, more subtle, trend: a changed political complexion of the Congressional Black Caucus. As surviving black legislators discover that their districts are composed of larger and larger populations of whites, “you could see a more moderate Congressional Black Caucus with a center of gravity closer to the middle,” said political analyst David Bositis at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a Washington think tank that tracks issues relevant to black politics.

James Ferguson, executive director of the National Coalition on Black Voter Participation, added that the court decision makes clear the need for black politicians and civil rights leaders to do the hard work of political organizing.

“African Americans don’t participate, and decisions like this one from the Supreme Court makes it harder to persuade them to participate,” said Ferguson, whose organization serves as an umbrella for a variety of grass-roots operations aimed at educating and encouraging blacks to vote.