Gomillion v. Lightfoot Reverberates in the Fight for Justice Today

Dr. Charles Gomillion's leadership at Tuskegee Institute and refusal to accept disenfranchisement sparked a legal battle that redefined the constitutional protection of the right to vote.Tuskegee University Archives

As academic communities struggle with the twin challenges of responding to growing threats to democratic rights and inspiring students whose sense of powerlessness can lead to disengagement, it is helpful to point to an all-but-forgotten moment in American history: the 1960 Supreme Court case of Gomillion v. Lightfoot that recently celebrated its 65th anniversary. A groundbreaking moment in election jurisprudence on issues of race and gerrymandering, which took place against the backdrop of the Jim Crow South, Gomillion offers lessons for today’s academic communities about their capacity to resist authoritarianism and promote democratic rights.

Gomillion pitted a Tuskegee Institute (now University) sociology professor and administrator, Dr. Charles Gomillion, and members of the Tuskegee Civic Association (TCA), of which Gomillion was president, and many Tuskegee Institute faculty and staff were members, against the white politicians who controlled the city government of Tuskegee, Macon County, Alabama, and the entire state government.

The TCA, founded in 1941, focused on voting because, as Gomillion put it, “the ballot is the citizen’s best self-help tool.” The TCA managed to slowly register voters, in spite of a myriad of impediments to voter registration that were directed at the Black community, from erratic or non-existent registration hours, to requirements that new registrants have two registered voters “vouch” for their good character, to demands that potential registrants transcribe vast tracts of the U.S. Constitution. Thanks in large part to the TCA’s efforts, the number of registered Black voters in Tuskegee slowly grew from less than twenty in the 1930s to more than 400 voters among the city’s 5,000-plus Black residents by the mid-1950s.

However, with the TCA’s success, the local white community increasingly felt that their political power was under threat. Those concerns accelerated when Jessie P. Guzman, Tuskegee Institute’s director of the Department of Records and Research, ran unsuccessfully for the county Board of Education in 1954 but still managed to garner several hundred votes. She was the first African American woman to run for office in Alabama, and the first African American to run for office in the county since Reconstruction.

The white establishment responded by greatly reducing further Black voter registrations, with the local board of registrars literally refusing to convene for long periods of time. Then a more radical plan was developed. In 1957, State Senator Sam Englehardt introduced an extreme gerrymander in what became Act 140. The Act, which was passed by the Alabama state legislature without opposition, transformed the boundaries of the city of Tuskegee from a neat square into what has been called a 28-sided “sea serpent.” Acting with the type of precision we see in today’s computer models, it removed all but a dozen of the 410 Black registrants from the city, including the entire Tuskegee Institute, while retaining all of the white voters.

Gomillion and the TCA instituted a boycott of white merchants in Tuskegee, building from the model the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and filed a lawsuit. They were represented by Fred Gray, who had recently successfully represented Montgomery bus boycotters before the Supreme Court in their successful effort to ban segregation in public transportation, and Robert Carter, NAACP General Counsel.

On November 14, 1960, the Court ruled unanimously (after an unusually short period of twenty-seven days) in favor of Gomillion finding that, notwithstanding the critical role of state legislatures, “when a legislature singles out a readily isolated segment of a racial minority for special discriminatory treatment, it violates the Fifteenth Amendment.”

As we discuss in our new book, “Youth Voting Rights: Civil Rights, the Twenty-Sixth Amendment, and the Fight for American Democracy on College Campuses,” which features a case study of written by Dr. Lisa Bratton, a Tuskegee professor, from a legal perspective, Gomillion was a pathbreaking case in terms of the decision of the court to intervene on a case of redistricting. 

The case and boycott reverberated nationally, and were featured in leading national publications. Gomillion testified before a Senate committee and members of the TCA, including Tuskegee professors and staff, were the first to testify before the newly created U.S. Civil Rights Commission in 1958. The egregious nature of the gerrymander and the detailed testimony and documentation of systematic discrimination and voter suppression offered by Tuskegee faculty and the TCA informed and helped shape the Civil Rights Act of 1960 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the crown jewel of the Second Reconstruction.

The efforts of Gomillion and the TCA, including numerous Tuskegee Institute faculty and staff, and the many students who stepped forward to support the economic boycott, illustrate that universities can be laboratories of resistance. Gomillion resonates today not simply because of contemporary threats to voting rights, but because it illustrates that citizens, and members of college communities in particular, have agency and the capacity to mobilize important intellectual, organizational, and moral resources to resist authoritarianism and promote democracy in order to promulgate a more equitable future.

Dr. Jonathan Becker is professor of political studies and vice president for academic affairs at Bard College. Dr. Lisa Bratton is an associate professor of history at Tuskegee University.