For sixty years, the Tennessee General Assembly broke its own constitution and got away with it.
The state constitution required legislative districts to be redrawn every ten years, after each federal census. The last time the legislature had done so was 1901 — when Tennessee was still mostly rural, Nashville had around 80,000 people, and a Model T was still seven years from the assembly line. By 1960, the state had urbanized beyond recognition. Nashville’s population had tripled. Memphis had quadrupled. But the district maps hadn’t moved an inch.
The result was arithmetic that would have embarrassed a gerrymanderer. Roughly one-third of Tennessee’s population — concentrated in rural counties — elected two-thirds of the state legislature. A vote cast in tiny Moore County was worth nearly ten times a vote cast in Nashville or Memphis. The cities paid the taxes, built the schools, and paved the roads. The countryside drew the maps and kept the power.
Nobody in the legislature had any incentive to fix it. The rural members who controlled the statehouse owed their seats to the very imbalance they’d be voting to correct. Reform bills died in committee, session after session, decade after decade. The governor couldn’t force it. The state courts wouldn’t touch it. And the federal courts had long held that how a state drew its legislative districts was a “political question” — messy, partisan, and none of the judiciary’s business.
In 1959, a group of Tennessee citizens decided to make it the judiciary’s business anyway.
The lead plaintiff was Charles Baker, a Republican from Shelby County whose vote had been mathematically diluted into near-irrelevance. The defendant was Joe Carr, Tennessee’s Secretary of State, sued in his official capacity as the man who administered elections under the rotten maps. The legal team was a coalition of the willing: Walter Chandler, a former Memphis mayor and congressman, who filed the original suit; Tommy Osborn, a Nashville attorney who compiled the devastating statistical evidence; Hobart Atkins from Knoxville; and Charles Rhyne, a former president of the American Bar Association, who would argue before the Supreme Court. Nashville’s own Mayor Ben West joined as an intervening plaintiff — one of the few elected officials willing to say publicly that the system was rigged.
They filed in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee, in the federal courthouse on Broadway in downtown Nashville. A three-judge panel heard the case and dismissed it. The precedent was clear: federal courts didn’t do reapportionment. The plaintiffs appealed.
On March 26, 1962, the Supreme Court of the United States reversed the dismissal, 6 to 2.
Justice William Brennan, writing for the majority, didn’t order Tennessee to redraw its maps — not yet. What the Court did was something more fundamental. It held that legislative malapportionment was a justiciable question under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. In plain English: federal courts could hear these cases. The courthouse door was open.
Justice Felix Frankfurter, 79 years old and weeks from the stroke that would force his retirement, wrote a furious 68-page dissent. He warned that the Court was plunging into a “political thicket” from which it would never extract itself. He was right about the thicket. He was wrong about it being a reason to stay out.
The reaction was immediate and national. The New York Times called it a milestone. Southern and rural newspapers called it a catastrophe. Within months, voters in nearly forty states filed copycat suits challenging their own gerrymandered maps. The floodgates didn’t just open — they blew off the hinges.
Two years later, in Reynolds v. Sims, the Court finished what Baker had started, ruling that both chambers of every state legislature must be apportioned by population. The principle got a name that stuck: one person, one vote. Every state in the union was forced to redraw its maps. The rural lock on American statehouses — a quiet, structural disenfranchisement that had persisted for generations — was broken.
Chief Justice Earl Warren, who presided over Brown v. Board of Education, the Miranda ruling, and a dozen other landmarks of twentieth-century law, was asked late in his career which case he considered the most important. He didn’t hesitate. It wasn’t Brown. It was Baker v. Carr.
His reasoning was characteristically direct: if everyone’s vote counted equally, the democratic process could fix most of its own problems. Brown addressed a symptom. Baker addressed the machinery.
It started in Nashville. Not because Nashville was uniquely oppressed — Memphis had it worse by the numbers — but because the lawyers were here, the federal courthouse was here, and a coalition of urban Tennesseans decided that sixty years was long enough to wait for a legislature to follow its own constitution. The State Capitol on the hill, that Greek Revival temple William Strickland designed as a monument to self-governance, had become the place where self-governance went to die. The remedy came not from inside the building, but from a courtroom a mile down the hill, and then from nine justices a thousand miles away who said what should have been obvious all along: your vote is supposed to count.
It still does. Because of a case that started here.
Photo: Wikimedia Commons