Resource: An Interview with Charles G. Gomillion

Mr. Charles G. Gomillion was the lead plaintiff in Gomillion versus Lightfoot, the Tuskegee gerrymandering case. In 1957, the Alabama legislature had redrawn the Tuskegee City boundaries from a square to a twenty-eight sided shape resembling a "seahorse" that included all 600 white voters, but excluded all except four or five of the 400 black voters. As leader of the Tuskegee Civic Association, Mr. Gomillion held public meetings, publicized the situation, and filed suit. In 1960, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that the Alabama act violated the Fifteenth Amendment. The decision helped persuade Congress to pass the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Since the Constitution leaves voting eligibility and districts to the states, the Court, prior to Gomillion, refrained from getting into "the political thicket," even though most states had not redistricted since the turn of the century. Since 1900, the massive population shift from farms to cities resulted in gross population disparities among legislative districts running as high a five or ten or more to one. The Gomillion decision was a constitutional turning point that, in 1962, allowed the Court to decide the one person-one vote case (Baker versus Carr) and, in 1964, to rule that both houses of state legislatures must be apportioned by population (Reynolds versus Sims). These decisions redrew the legislative map of the nation and changed the nature of politics in the United States. There is the temptation when regarding such high and mighty things as constitutional history and Supreme Court decisions to see events as inevitable, and in so doing ignore the initiative of individuals. Mr. Gomillion was the prime mover in the case that bears his name. His experience in many ways distills the story of black Southerners in this century. The interview that follows is one of seventy-two in a University of Virginia sponsored project to document the Civil Rights Movement in law. Professor William A. Elwood of the University's English Department began the project in 1983. Early in 1984, Hon. A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr. of the 3rd Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in Philadelphia and the author of In the Matter of Color: Race & the American Legal Process: The Colonial Period (Oxford UP, 1978), joined Professor Elwood as the legal advisor and commentator for the project. Some 200 University of Virginia students have worked on the project. Ms. Margaret Ponds transcribed and Ms. Octavia Taylor proofread this interview. A 90 minute television program, THE ROAD TO BROWN, directed by Mykola Kulish, is scheduled for completion in September 1989. California Newsreel, a non-profit distributor, will have the 90 minute program and a 50 minute classroom version available in October