Good morning. It's Sunday, May 10th. I'm Antonia Hilton in for my friend Ali Valshie.

One week after the U.S. Supreme Court effectively gutted the Voting Rights Act, Tennessee on Thursday,

became the first state to pass new congressional maps,

dismantling the state's only majority black congressional district in the Memphis area.

To do it, state Republicans first had to repeal a 56-year-old law prohibiting mid-cycle redistricting,

allowing them to adopt the new maps four years before the next mandated census,

effectively bypassing the traditional 10-year waiting period. On Wednesday, Republicans unveiled

the new maps. Memphis, which previously was in Tennessee's ninth congressional district,

which you can see on the left, has been carved into three districts,

a community. More than 60% black has been sliced and stretched into surrounding white rural

counties, each designed to elect a Republican. Martin Luther King III sent a letter to Tennessee

lawmakers, imploring them not to pass these maps.

This decision undermines the work that my father, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., carried out

to help secure passage of the Voting Rights Act.

Do not dismantle the only congressional district that provides black voters in Memphis

a fair opportunity to have a voice in our democracy.

Do not take this nation back to the days of Jim Crow, he said.

On Thursday, the legislature passed the maps anyway.

What happened next looked a lot less like a regular legislative session,

more like a civil rights turning point, the stuff

of our history books. As the final vote approached, Democratic senators linked arms on the

floor, a flashback to the marchers who came before them. Hundreds of protesters flooded the state

...