Massachusetts redistricting plan unveiled, attacked, defended

March 19, 2004

Massachusetts House leaders unveiled a new redistricting map Tuesday designed to boost the number of districts in Boston with a majority of black voters.

The action follows a ruling by a federal appeals court that tossed out an earlier version of the map. The judges said legislative leaders sought to protect incumbent lawmakers at the expense of black voters by ''packing'' blacks into as few districts as possible, weakening their political clout. ...

The new map is better even than a proposal by the activists, according to Steven Perlmutter, a lawyer for House leaders.

''This plan actually provides more majority black districts than the plaintiff's plan,'' said Perlmutter. -- House leaders unveil new redistricting map (Boston Globe, 16 March 2004)

Plaintiffs in a federal suit that struck down a 2001 legislative redistricting plan yesterday denounced the remedy proposed by legislators, saying the new plan does little to increase the political clout of Boston's growing minority population and continues to protect incumbents at the expense of black and Latino voters.

"They're twisting this court decision to do this racial gerrymandering and incumbent protection," said George Pillsbury, policy director for Boston VOTE, one of the organizations that brought the suit in 2002. "Bizarrely, it maintains these 12 majority-white districts out of Boston's 17 House seats, and to do that, you really have to twist district lines. . . . Dr. Seuss couldn't have dreamed this one up." ...

"We had two districts, minority opportunity districts, in Jamaica Plain and Mission Hill, which happens to be the place where the majority of Latinos live in Boston in addition to East Boston," [Rep. Elizabeth] Negretti said. "And they completely dilute the opportunity of Latinos gaining political power in those seats by pushing the whole community into one district and whitening the other. They're robbing Peter to pay Paul. It's really audacious of them to do this. They're completely cracking the fastest-growing community in Massachusetts." -- Redistricting fix rebuffed (Boston Globe, 18 March 2004)

Massachusetts House Speaker Thomas M. Finneran yesterday defended a new redistricting plan for Boston's 17 legislative districts as "a good effort" that "increases in a significant way the number of African-American seats," but minority advocates continued to express their "grave" disappointment with it.

Finneran, in his first comments since House leaders unveiled their plan Tuesday, said they had been "very specifically responsive" to the recent orders of a three-judge panel in US District Court, which found that the House's 2001 map unlawfully deprived blacks equal voting opportunities in favor of protecting incumbents.