The NAACP is calling on athletes to hold southern states accountable for their radicalization of state maps, as many disfranchise black voters and leaders. While this has been an ongoing prob-lem throughout the years from various southern states, Louisiana recently made headlines as they actively redrew their congressional map that eliminated two predominantly Black districts by splitting them up and forcing both previous district leaders, Tony Carter and Castro Fields, to now compete against each other for one district. They also limited the importance of the Black vote, as now predominantly Black communities are overshadowed by the majority of white voters in those districts.
On May 19, the NAACP launched the “Out of Bounds” campaign that targets public universities in eight Southern states that have redrawn or moved to redraw their congressional maps after the Su-preme Court weakened a key provision of the Voting Rights Act earlier this month.
The campaign, according to the release, is focused on flagship public universities generating more than $100 million in revenue annually in eight southern states: Mississippi, Tennessee, Louisiana, Ala-bama, Florida, South Carolina, Texas, and Georgia. This would include Ole Miss and Mississippi State University.
“This generation of Black athletes understands something that those who came before them were never afforded the chance to say so plainly: your talent is yours, and so is your community’s political power,” stated Tylik McMillan, the national director of the NAACP’s Youth and College Division, in the release. “The state that is working to erase your grandmother’s congressional district is the same state whose governor will stand on the field and celebrate your touchdown or game-winning shot.”
Republicans deny their actions of eras-ing Black voting power in their states and claim that changes are needed to comply with the court’s ruling and ensure maps meet legal standards. “These actions hap-pened in days, in some cases in hours, of a Supreme Court ruling that gives extremist lawmakers a playbook to erode Black representation,” NAACP President Derrick Johnson said in a statement. “The same power that built these pro-grams can be redirected.”
While its seldom players have spoken up about the racial messages on their school campus, as Kylin Hill, a former running back for Mississippi State, posted on social media in 2020, politicians need to “change the flag or I won’t be repre-senting this state anymore.” That year, the state changed its Confederate-themed flag to the current magnolia version.
“For generations, Black athletes have helped build college athletics into one of the most powerful and profitable indus-tries in American life,” the caucus said in a statement. “Yet at the very moment those same communities face coordinated attacks on their democratic represen-tation, too many leaders across college athletics have chosen silence.”
The campaign also asks fans, alum-ni, and donors to stop buying tickets, merchandise, and licensed apparel from targeted programs and divert those funds to historically Black colleges and universi-ties and related organizations.