Gomillion V Lightfoot Analysis

The case of Gomillion v Lightfoot is a Supreme Court case ruling on the 15th amendment. The case has to do with an act of the Alabama legislature re-drew the electoral district boundaries of Tuskegee, and to replace what had been a area with a square shape into a 28 sided figure. The consequence of the new district was to exclude essentially all blacks from the city limits of Tuskegee and place them in a district where no whites lived. This caused voter dilution, which diminishes a minority group's political power by weakening the effectiveness of its vote. This was a relatively new issue for the Supreme Court to deal with.
Looking at past cases dealing with similar issues, Baker v. Carr is a an example that shows how redistricting was looked at as a justiciable issue by the Supreme court, prior to Gomillion v. Lightfoot. The Supreme Court had usually left redistricting as a matter that should dealt with by the states and congress. This can also be seen in Colegrove v. Green, in which Justice Frankfurter declined to involve the Court in the districting process arguing that the political nature of apportionment disallowed judicial intervention.
The Significance: Prior to this ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court had been hesitant to obstruct with the rights of states to create political boundaries in their own towns and cities. This case nevertheless confirmed that states can’t use their power to deprive citizens of their voting rights which are guaranteed by the Fifteenth Amendment.
The Impact: This case caused a shift in the Supreme Court's logic and involvement with political redistricting cases. In future cases, the Supreme Court ruled that redistricting be done according to population. Though gerrymandering, which is the act or...

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...retation is long:
• Birth - "All persons born or naturalized" "are citizens" of the U.S. and the U.S. State where they reside (14th Amendment, 1868)
• "Race, color, or previous condition of servitude" - (15th Amendment, 1870)
• "On account of sex" - (19th Amendment, 1920)
• In Washington, D.C., presidential elections (23rd Amendment, 1961)
• (For federal elections) "By reason of failure to pay any poll tax or other tax" - (24th Amendment, 1964) (Wikipedia)

Although establishing rights for many different members of society, the voting rights act isn’t the end of this concern. We can learn from history that the interpretation of voting rights will always be in question by some new player. The best we can do is to understand that voting rights in American history has had much to with time and place, thus the reason for the ongoing change in the interpretation.