Moore v. LEFLORE COUNTY BOARD OF ELECTION COM'RS, No. GC 71-84.
| Decision Date | 20 December 1972 |
| Docket Number | No. GC 71-84. |
| Citation | 361 F. Supp. 603 |
| Parties | James MOORE et al., Plaintiffs, v. LEFLORE COUNTY BOARD OF ELECTION COMMISSIONERS et al., Defendants. |
| Court | U.S. District Court — Northern District of Mississippi |
Frank R. Parker, Jackson, Miss., Johnnie E. Walls, Jr., Greenwood, Miss., David Lipman, Oxford, Miss., for plaintiffs.
R. C. McBee, James W. Burgoon, Jr., Greenwood, Miss., for defendants.
Subsequent to the decision of the three-judge court entered October 18, 1971, Moore v. Leflore County Board of Election Commissioners, 351 F.Supp. 848 (N.D. Miss. 1971), the Leflore County Board of Supervisors proceeded to adopt and submit to the court for approval a plan for redistricting the five supervisors' districts in accordance with the one-man, one-vote principle. By a three to two vote the board on March 29, 1972, adopted the plan under present consideration. Thereafter objections were filed separately by the two dissenting board members, Supervisor Robert L. Kyle of District 1 and Supervisor Ray Tribble of District 2, and by plaintiffs suing on behalf of black citizens and residents, black voters and probable black candidates for public office, in the county.
Upon plaintiffs' motion, the three-judge court, originally organized to rule upon the issues of § 5 violation of Voting Rights Act of 1965, 42 U.S.C. §§ 1971 and 1973, was dissolved on September 7, 1972, and the county redistricting issue remanded to the single initiating judge for decision. After extensive discovery, the court conducted a three-day evidentiary hearing. Following submission of briefs and proposed findings of fact in this three-way dispute, the case is now ripe for decision.
Practically all of the salient facts are uncontradicted or at least not in serious dispute. By the 1970 official census, Leflore County has 42,111 residents, of whom 24,373 (58%) are black, 17,550 (42%) are white and 188 (less than .1%) are of other races. The old supervisors' districts were badly malapportioned largely because of the inclusion of the county's only large municipality, Greenwood (22,400) in populous Beat 3, giving that particular district a population almost twice as great as the other four districts combined.1 Greenwood's city population is divided almost equally between the races: 11,118 whites and 11,130 blacks. The black population of Greenwood is mainly centered in 11 enumeration districts situated in a 5 square mile area in the southeast portion of Greenwood; this section of the city has a total black population of 10,763, or 44.2% of the black population in the entire county. No other area of the county is so populated with blacks.
The plan adopted by the board was largely the handiwork of W. L. Kellum, Supervisor of District 3. Kellum resides in Greenwood, is engaged in the gasoline distributing business, and holds B. S. and B. A. college degrees. The hiring of an outside professional consultant to develop a redistricting plan was voted down by the board majority. The two members of the board who favored Kellum's plan, James D. Green and James M. Hooper, Jr., were convinced of his capability to do the work and relied upon him to devise the redistricting proposal, which the board officially adopted, whereby population close to the one-fifth norm (8,422 persons) was assigned to each of the new districts, to-wit:
Beat No. 1 8,479 20.13%
2 8,409 19.97
3 8,485 20.15
4 8,346 19.82
5 8,392 19.93
______ ______
42,111 100%
Kellum relied upon the 1970 census data, including enumeration districts, and his population allocations are essentially correct. He failed to obtain census office separations of all enumeration districts which were split and relied upon house counts to that extent. Nevertheless, this method did not affect the accuracy of the foregoing calculations.
In fashioning district lines, however, Kellum completely ignored land area and road mileage as planning objectives and utilized narrow corridors to bring into southeast Greenwood the lines of four districts (Beats 1, 2, 3 and 5), whereby the concentrations of black residents heretofore in Beat 3 were broken up and placed in those several districts. Mr. Kellum frankly testified on the witness stand that his intent was to bring into each of the new districts the same racial ratio, i. e., 58% black to 42% white, as existed for the county as a whole, and certain enumeration districts were allocated, and in some instances divided, in order to achieve that approximate result. This was also admitted by the board's answers to interrogatories filed in the cause. No consideration was given by the board to the voting age population, or its racial composition and distribution among the new districts, but the lines were purposely drawn so as not to pit the incumbent supervisors against each other in future elections.
Prior to the adoption of the plan, the board conducted no public hearings, it did not seek the views of any former supervisors or other officials experienced in county government, and made no purposeful contact with members of the white or black communities to solicit their views. Supervisors Kyle and Tribble, however, continued to register objections to the board's plan and sought the advice of separate counsel. One of the admitted and basic features which Kyle and Tribble found objectionable was the total failure to consider either land area or road mileage as legitimate planning factors. Under the board's plan, Beat 3 was reduced to a land area size of 23 square miles (3.9% of the county as a whole), with road mileage of 28 miles (4.1%), in sharp contrast to Beat 1 with 195 square miles (33.2%) and 203.5 road miles (29.6%). Beats 2, 4 and 5 were assigned land area and road mileage of varying but generally similar proportions to Beat 1.
Other defects in the plan are readily apparent. The small hamlets of Money, Schlater and Shellmound, which are homogeneous communities, are split or divided between new Beats 1 and 2. The county road which divides the proposed Beats 1 and 2 is wholly within Beat 2, although most of the residents abutting the road reside in Beat 1. It is obvious from a casual glance at maps that Beats 1 and 2, when compared to Beat 3, would require a great deal more time and effort of a supervisor to discharge the duties of his office for supervising the district. The undisputed proof shows that the road mileage and land area for each proposed beat were computed by the county engineer after the boundaries were determined by the board majority, and no effort was made to correlate such data with the plan adopted.
Moreover, the plan is seriously lacking in compactness of the proposed districts structured only with population in mind. For example, Beats 1 and 2, when measured from within their respective boundaries, almost equal the entire length of the county, with each such district being of irregular formation. Laying aside from consideration the fact that Leflore County's road and bridge maintenance funds have been heretofore divided equally among the county's five districts—whereby Beat 1 has maintained 133.7 road miles on the same amount of money as Beat 3 has obtained for maintaining only 84.6 road miles— the proposed plan (203.5 miles for Beat 1 and 28 miles for Beat 3) is shockingly inequitable in that regard.2 At the time of trial, the board majority, although recognizing the inequity, had refused to commit themselves to change from a beat system to a county-wide system of road and bridge maintenance but deferred resolution of that issue until it was evaluated and determined to be "economically beneficial."
The board's plan in fact physically redistricts only two of the county's five beats. Beats 4 and 5 remain substantially unchanged from their prior boundary lines except each has a "finger" extending into Greenwood to obtain requisite population. Beat 3 was merely reduced in size to remove excess population, leaving the remainder of the district exactly as it presently exists. In contrast, Beats 1 and 2 were drastically changed with proposed Beat 1 now including a large part of the land area that was formerly in Beat 2, and Beat 2 incorporating most of the territory heretofore belonging to Beat 3. Historic boundaries and traditional groupings in those two beats, as well as in east Greenwood, were destroyed.
Prior to the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act only a few blacks in the county were registered to vote, and the majority of black citizens were registered to vote for the first time by federal registrars. With a background of fear and civil rights repression, blacks have minimally engaged in political activity, and no black person has been elected to public office in Leflore County. The only black resident who ever ran for the office of supervisor was a candidate who opposed Mr. Kellum in 1966. The black candidate led in the first primary of the Democratic party but lost in the runoff. The following year the board of supervisors changed to at-large elections, and no black person has since sought the office.
Although each new district has a black majority, the extent of that majority, by the board's plan, is materially decreased in every district other than Beat 3.3 The evidence indicates that of the 24,374 blacks, 11,544 are under 18 years of age, leaving a voting population of 12,830, or 50% of the total black population. Of the 17,550 whites, 5,704 are under 18 years of age, leaving 11,846 whites constituting 67.5% of the total white population. However innocent may have been the board's aim in distributing concentration of black population into the various districts, the net result has been to dilute and fractionate the black voting strength in the election of public officials chosen in district balloting.
The defendant supervisors contend that...
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