United Jewish Organizations of Williamsburgh v. Carey

430 U.S. 144

Case Year: 1977

Case Ruling: 7-1, Affirmed

Opinion Justice: White

FACTS

To monitor compliance with the Voting Rights Act, Congress stipulated in that act's Section 5 that the reapportionment plans of certain states be submitted to the U.S. attorney general or to the District Court for the District of Columbia for approval prior to implementation. Plans had to be judged not to have the purpose or effect of "denying or abridging the right to vote on account of race or color." States with histories of discrimination and low voter participation were obliged to submit to this procedure.

In 1972 New York State enacted new congressional and state legislative reapportionment plans. Because certain counties formerly had employed a literacy test deemed discriminatory and had low voter participation levels, the state submitted the plans to the U.S. attorney general for clearance. The attorney general objected to the reapportionment plan for the state legislature as it pertained to certain districts in Kings County covering the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn. The state responded in 1974 with a revised plan for this area. Under the 1972 plan, three senate districts in Kings County had nonwhite majorities of 91 percent, 61 percent, and 53 percent. The revised 1974 plan called for nonwhite majorities between 70 percent and 75 percent in all three districts. Under the 1972 plan, seven Assembly (lower house) districts had nonwhite majorities, with 52 percent being the smallest. The revised 1974 plan increased the black voting power in these districts, making the smallest nonwhite majority 65 percent. The clear purpose and effect of the revisions was to ensure black representation from these districts. According to evidence presented, the state was under the impression that, to be assured of approval, a plan needed to show a minimum nonwhite majority of 65 percent in the targeted districts. The plan left 70 percent of the county's legislative districts in the control of white majorities. The attorney general had no objections to the revised plan.

One of the communities adversely affected by the reapportionment plan was Williamsburgh. Under the 1972 plan, the approximately 30,000 Hasidic Jews who lived in that community had been located entirely in a single Assembly and Senate district, as they had been for many years. To create substantial nonwhite majorities in the county, the 1974 revisions split the Hasidic community into two Assembly and two Senate districts. The United Jewish Organizations of Williamsburgh sued to block implementation of the plan, claiming that the Hasidic Jews had been assigned to electoral districts solely on the basis of race, and that this racial assignment diluted their voting power in violation of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. The district court dismissed the complaint, ruling that the Hasidic community enjoyed no constitutional right as a separate entity in the reapportionment process and that taking racial considerations into account was permissible to correct past discrimination. The court of appeals affirmed.

 

MR. JUSTICE WHITE ANNOUNCED THE JUDGMENT OF THE COURT....

... [T]he Constitution does not prevent a State subject to the Voting Rights Act from deliberately creating or preserving black majorities in particular districts in order to ensure that its reapportionment plan complies with section 5. That proposition must be rejected and section 5 held unconstitutional to that extent if we are to accept petitioners' view that racial criteria may never be used in redistricting or that they may be used, if at all, only as a specific remedy for past unconstitutional apportionments. We are unwilling to overturn our prior cases, however. Section 5 and its authorization for racial redistricting where appropriate to avoid abridging the right to vote on account of race or color are constitutional. Contrary to petitioners' first argument, neither the Fourteenth nor the Fifteenth Amendment mandates any per se rule against using racial factors in districting and apportionment. Nor is petitioners' second argument valid. The permissible use of racial criteria is not confined to eliminating the effects of past discriminatory districting or apportionment.

Moreover, in the process of drawing black majority districts in order to comply with section 5, the State must decide how substantial those majorities must be in order to satisfy the Voting Rights Act.... At a minimum and by definition, a "black majority district" must be more than 50% black. But whatever the specific percentage, the State will inevitably arrive at it as a necessary means to ensure the opportunity for the election of a black representative and to obtain approval of its reapportionment plan.... [A] reapportionment cannot violate the Fourteenth or Fifteenth Amendment merely because a State uses specific numerical quotas in establishing a certain number of black majority districts. Our cases under section 5 stand for at least this much.... There is no doubt that in preparing the 1974 legislation the State deliberately used race in a purposeful manner. But its plan represented no racial slur or stigma with respect to whites or any other race, and we discern no discrimination violative of the Fourteenth Amendment or any abridgment of the right to vote on account of race within the meaning of the Fifteenth Amendment.

It is true that New York deliberately increased the nonwhite majorities in certain districts in order to enhance the opportunity for election of nonwhite representatives from those districts. Nevertheless, there was no fencing out the white population from participation in the political processes of the county, and the plan did not minimize or unfairly cancel out white voting strength.... Petitioners have not objected to the impact of the 1974 plan on the representation of white voters in the county or in the State as a whole. As the Court of Appeals observed, the plan left white majorities in approximately 70% of the assembly and senate districts in Kings County, which had a countywide population that was 65% white. Thus, even if voting in the county occurred strictly according to race, whites would not be underrepresented relative to their share of the population. In individual districts where nonwhite majorities were increased to approximately 65%, it became more likely, given racial bloc voting, that black candidates would be elected instead of their white opponents, and it became less likely that white voters would be represented by a member of their own race; but as long as whites in Kings County, as a group, were provided with fair representation, we cannot conclude that there was a cognizable discrimination against whites or an abridgment of their right to vote on the grounds of race. Furthermore, the individual voter in the district with a nonwhite majority has no constitutional complaint merely because his candidate has lost out at the polls and his district is represented by a person for whom he did not vote. Some candidate, along with his supporters, always loses....

Where it occurs, voting for or against a candidate because of his race is an unfortunate practice. But it is not rare; and in any district where it regularly happens, it is unlikely that any candidate will be elected who is a member of the race that is in the minority in that district. However disagreeable this result may be, there is no authority for the proposition that the candidates who are found racially unacceptable by the majority, and the minority voters supporting those candidates, have had their Fourteenth or Fifteenth Amendment rights infringed by this process. Their position is similar to that of the Democratic or Republican minority that is submerged year after year by the adherents to the majority party who tend to vote a straight party line. It does not follow, however, that the State is powerless to minimize the consequences of racial discrimination by voters when it is regularly practiced at the polls....

In this respect New York's revision of certain district lines is little different in kind from the decision by a State in which a racial minority is unable to elect representatives from multimember districts to change to single-member districting for the purpose of increasing minority representation. This change might substantially increase minority representation at the expense of white voters, who previously elected all of the legislators but who with single-member districts could elect no more than their proportional share. If this intentional reduction of white voting power would be constitutionally permissible, as we think it would be, we think it also permissible for a State, employing sound districting principles such as compactness and population equality, to attempt to prevent racial minorities from being repeatedly outvoted by creating districts that will afford fair representation to the members of those racial groups who are sufficiently numerous and whose residential patterns afford the opportunity of creating districts in which they will be in the majority....

The judgment is

Affirmed.

MR. CHIEF JUSTICE BURGER, DISSENTING.

The question presented in this difficult case is whether New York violated the rights of the petitioners under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments by direct reliance on fixed racial percentages in its 1974 redistricting of Kings County....

I begin with this Court's holding in Gomillion v. Lightfoot (1960), the first case to strike down a state attempt at racial gerrymandering. If Gomillion teaches anything, I had thought it was that drawing of political boundary lines with the sole, explicit objective of reaching a predetermined racial result cannot ordinarily be squared with the Constitution. The record before us reveals--and it is not disputed--that this is precisely what took place here. In drawing up the 1974 reapportionment scheme, the New York Legislature did not consider racial composition as merely one of several political characteristics; on the contrary, race appears to have been the one and only criterion applied....

The assumption that "whites" and "nonwhites" in the County form homogeneous entities for voting purposes is entirely without foundation. The "whites" category consists of a veritable galaxy of national origins, ethnic backgrounds, and religious denominations. It simply cannot be assumed that the legislative interests of all "whites" are even substantially identical. In similar fashion, those described as "nonwhites" include, in addition to Negroes, a substantial portion of Puerto Ricans.... The Puerto Rican population, for whose protection the Voting Rights Act was "triggered" in Kings County, has expressly disavowed any identity of interest with the Negroes, and, in fact, objected to the 1974 redistricting scheme because it did not establish a Puerto Rican controlled district within the county.

Although reference to racial composition of a political unit may, under certain circumstances, serve as "a starting point in the process of shaping a remedy," Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Bd. of Education (1971), rigid adherence to quotas, especially in a case like this, deprives citizens such as petitioners of the opportunity to have the legislature make a determination free from unnecessary bias for or against any racial, ethnic, or religious group. I do not quarrel with the proposition that the New York Legislature may choose to take ethnic or community union into consideration in drawing its district lines. Indeed, petitioners are members of an ethnic community which, without deliberate purpose so far as shown on this record, has long been within a single assembly and senate district. While petitioners certainly have no constitutional right to remain unified within a single political district, they do have, in my view, the constitutional right not to be carved up so as to create a voting bloc composed of some other ethnic or racial group through the kind of racial gerrymandering the Court condemned in Gomillion v. Lightfoot....

The result reached by the Court today in the name of the Voting Rights Act is ironic. The use of a mathematical formula tends to sustain the existence of ghettos by promoting the notion that political clout is to be gained or maintained by marshaling particular racial, ethnic, or religious groups in enclaves. It suggests to the voter that only a candidate of the same race, religion, or ethnic origin can properly represent that voter's interests, and that such candidate can be elected only from a district with a sufficient minority concentration. The device employed by the State of New York and endorsed by the Court today, moves us one step farther away from a truly homogeneous society. This retreat from the ideal of the American "melting pot" is curiously out of step with recent political history--and indeed with what the Court has said and done for more than a decade. The notion that Americans vote in firm blocs has been repudiated in the election of minority members as mayors and legislators in numerous American cities and districts overwhelmingly white. Since I cannot square the mechanical racial gerrymandering in this case with the mandate of the Constitution, I respectfully dissent from the affirmance of the judgment of the Court of Appeals.