The district, drawn after the 2020 Census, divided communities in Charleston County, placing key suburbs under the purview of Representative Jim Clyburn, the sole Democrat in the South Carolina congressional delegation. Roughly 30,000 Black voters were moved out of the first district, and into Clyburn’s.
In January, after a case was brought by the South Carolina chapter of the NAACP and a Black voter, three federal judges found that the gerrymander amounted to “bleaching” the district and racially discriminated against Black voters. The judges determined that, in order to create a solid Republican district, GOP legislators drew the district to keep the Black voting age population at around 17 percent, and ordered a redraw of the map. The court wrote that reducing the percentage of Black voters “was no easy task and was effectively impossible without the gerrymandering of the African American population of Charleston County.”
This case is personal for Moore, who is a descendant of Robert Smalls, one of the first Black congressmen to serve after the Civil War. There is some symmetry in the history—Smalls was elected to a different district in the mid-1880s after his seat was gerrymandered. Moore is quick to note that he is “fighting a very similar fight” to his grandfather, roughly 150 years later. “There is a lot about what’s happening now in country that, for those of us who are attuned to history and have a sense about Reconstruction, at least give us pause and concern about where we are,” Moore told me in an interview, hours after he spoke at a rally in front of the Supreme Court.