“You cannot have voting rights unless you have redistricting”: How advocates are using Communities of Interest in Arkansas
In October, the Arkansas legislature released a Congressional map that was controversial. The plan splits Pulaski County among the 1st, 2nd, and 4th congressional districts. Pulaski County, which includes Little Rock, is currently situated within one congressional district. As a result, minority communities would be divided into Republican-leaning districts which extend outside of central Arkansas.
This month, several community organizations and legislators in Arkansas held a rally on the steps of the State Capitol against gerrymandering. These organizations are seeking to overturn Arkansas’ newly-drawn congressional district map through a process known as a popular veto. I spoke with the leader of one of these organizations, Kwami Abdul-Bey.
A redistricting cartographer, Kwami established a community mapping drive on Representable and collected several dozen COIs in the last month. His group has used this information to draw (and advocate for) competitive and non-partisan congressional, state legislative, and local maps.
A graduate student at the University of Arkansas Clinton School of Public Service, Kwami (and his wife, Clarice Abdul-Bey) have long been passionate about public service. In 2015, they founded the Washitaw Foothills Youth Media Arts & Literacy Collective (WFYMALC) which provides young people with the “resources and tools necessary to harness, and express, the innate power within their own voices.” Additionally, they lead the Arkansas Peace & Justice Memorial Movement (APJMM) whose mission is to encourage the public to acknowledge and learn from the racial, political, and religious injustice in Arkansas’ history.
Taking Action in Redistricting
During this past election cycle, APJMM was a member of the Arkansas Election Defense Ad-hoc task force: a coalition of a dozen organizations ranging from the NAACP to Arkansas United. At the same time, Kwami worked as a Post-Enumeration Survey (PES) Enumerator with the U.S. Census Bureau. Most recently, he participated in the “Your Representatives & Your Districts: Mapping & Communities Workshop”. It was an intensive redistricting seminar sponsored by the Lawyers Committee for Civil Right Under the Law. With this combined knowledge, he founded the Arkansas Fair and Equitable Mapping Awareness, Planning, and Action Team.
A small group of colleagues, they draw maps for non-profit advocacy groups and collect Community of Interest (COI) reports from citizens throughout the state. His team, joined the Southern Partners Fund Redistricting Cohort, has been quite busy over the past few months:
Here are some excerpts from my conversation with Kwami:
Why did you decide to engage in this work?
I learned about just how important [redistricting] was…I had never heard of redistricting before [the redistricting seminar]. I was so disenchanted with the American capitalist system — I just didn’t want to be apart of it. But, within the past ten years I registered to vote because, when you have children, things change.
After I took the class on redistricting, I came away with this knowledge, I’m like, I need to get this knowledge out! I got a group of friends together (a couple of them were state legislators) and taught them everything I learned from class. From there, I started teaching free weekly Zoom webinars for anyone in Arkansas. I have been doing this every Tuesday night for the last couple of months…we have about a dozen people on the call every Tuesday.
Redistricting and gerrymandering can be really complicated topics, so how do you engage communities and people generally left out of the process?
First I ask, “do you understand what voting rights are?”
Then, I explain:
Voting rights are the table, and redistricting is the table cloth that covers the table. Voting rights cannot be separated from redistricting. You cannot have voting rights unless you have redistricting. Because with redistricting, you choose who you get to vote for instead of the politicians getting to choose who votes for them.
How did the Representable website support you in the process of gathering public input?
I can tell you one thing…we have almost a hundred people who have participated! I am appreciative that I can just tell people:
“hey go to this link, answer 7 or 8 questions, and ‘bam’ ”!
When they do it, I immediately forward that information to the redistricting body so they have this [COI] information.
How do you feel that Communities of Interest have influenced the proposed maps?
The interesting thing is, with this Congressional Map that they’ve done, they did respect Communities of Interest. But they picked and chose which communities they respected…they disregarded the COIs that represented nonwhite communities.
What we want to make sure is that all Communities of Interest are treated fairly. If there are conflicting Communities of Interest, then that’s an opportunity for negotiation and debate to find what is beneficial for all of the people…
So that is one thing that concerns me, that the legislators and the other redistricting bodies are picking and choosing what COIs they are putting into their maps.
Is there a COI submission that you found especially interesting or compelling?
One of the submissions had the Arkansas delta as a Community of Interest. I never thought of the delta as a COI. When I saw somebody had submitted it, I thought: “yes”!
I sent the submission to the legislature and there were three legislators who drew Congressional maps with the delta as a COI! Since the Arkansas delta is around 80% black, that district was a majority-minority district. BUT, those maps were never considered due to the Republican super-majority.
(In general, Kwami sends all of the COIs that they collect on Representable to legislators via email. He has a list of the emails for all 135 state legislators.)
Based on your experience, what do you think organizations should do in the future to engage citizens in the redistricting process?
There is a movement called “Democracy Beyond Elections” and I think that is what we need to be geared towards. Basically, it’s instilling in the American people that their responsibility does not last 30 to 45 minutes every four years. We have a continuing responsibility — a daily responsibility.
If elected officials know they aren’t being watched, they are going to do their own thing…This needs to be a participatory democracy, not a hands-off democracy.
What’s Next?
The APJMM is part of a coalition of community groups arguing that the proposed Congressional map does not respect COIs; the principle of keeping counties and cities whole; or the possibility to draw a majority-minority district.
The people of Arkansas still have an opportunity to participate in the redistricting process. Arkansas is one of 16 states where the public has the ability to veto a law. In order to trigger this veto, 54,000 signatures must be collected from Arkansans.
Kwami encourages any Arkansan that wants to sign and/or volunteer to collect signatures to text their name and email address to 501–442–7377. Lastly, if you want to learn more about redistricting in Arkansas, and stay up-to-date with the coalition, check out these resources:
APJMM website: https://apjmm.org/
Arkansans for a Unified Natural State: https://www.afuns.org/about-us
FiveThirtyEight: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/redistricting-2022-maps/arkansas/
