Race to defeat: how the Black Caucus elected Newt Gingrich speaker.

• Author: Miller, John J.

Black Democrats in the House suffered a disastrous defeat in November's election, even though they didn't lose a single seat. Despite going 37 for 37 at the polls, they enter the new Congress as members of the minority party--something none of them has ever done before.

They have only themselves to blame. Racial gerrymandering--long promoted by civil fights activists as necessary to ensure the election of blacks to Congress--doomed at least seven white Democrats to defeat in November, mainly in Florida, Georgia, and North Carolina. "I've warned the Black Caucus for years that this was coming," says David Bositis, a senior researcher at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies in Washington. "Over the last two elections, the Democrats have lost as many as 15 seats because of majority black redistricting."

If those 15 seats were still in Democratic hands, House Democrats would have a 218-216 edge. Black Democrats would continue to operate in the majority party and sway national policy on such issues as welfare reform, aid to cities, and Haiti.

But no more. What enabled record numbers of blacks to win election to the House in 1992 also planted the seeds for their political disenfranchisement in 1994. Congressional redistricting after the 1990 Census saw federal courts and state lawmakers create 13 new majority black districts, mainly by snatching black voters from existing districts and stuffing them into new ones. This essentially guaranteed the election of black Democrats to the new seats, but it also "whitened" neighboring districts and made them more Republican.

Most of the redistricting occurred in the South, home to nearly half of all black Americans. In 1990, the 13 southern states elected three blacks to Congress. Redistricting after the census lifted the number of blacks elected to Congress from the South to 17. But it also hurt many white Democrats who had previously enjoyed the reliable support of African Americans, up to 90 percent of whom vote Democratic in any given election. Approximately five candidates who probably would have won in the absence of racial gerrymandering were defeated in 1992. Others weathered the storm, sheltered in part by Bill Clinton's coattails. With Clinton a drag on the Democrats in 1994, however, the GOP found itself with easy pickings throughout the South. Republican congressional seats from the region now outnumber Democratic ones for the first time since Reconstruction, 73 to 64. In 1990...