Throughout the American South is an archipelago of majority-Black congressional districts that provide some measure of Black representation in Congress. These districts owe their existence to a combination of basic electoral math, federal court orders, and legislative compromises. If Republicans have their way, all or nearly all of them will be gone in the next few months.The Supreme Court’s ruling last week in Louisiana v. Callais kicked off a legislative frenzy as Republicans in more than a half-dozen states race to redraw their congressional maps—in some cases, in the middle of ongoing elections. Their goal is to eliminate as many majority-Black districts as mathematically possible, bolstering the GOP’s midterms chances in November and endangering the future of multiracial democracy in the South.Leading the charge is Louisiana itself. A federal district court had struck down the state’s revised congressional map after the 2020 Census and ordered the state to create a second majority-minority district to comply with Section 2 of the VRA. A group of “non-African American” plaintiffs, as they described themselves, then sued on the grounds that the court-ordered map also amounted to racial gerrymandering and was therefore unconstitutional under the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause. In last week’s 6-3 ruling, the Supreme Court agreed—and gutted Section 2 in response.It was easy to predict what would happen next. “After today, those districts exist only on sufferance, and probably not for long,” Justice Elena Kagan warned in her dissent. “If other states follow Louisiana’s lead, the minority citizens residing there will no longer have an equal opportunity to elect candidates of their choice. And minority representation in government institutions will sharply decline.”Early voting was already underway in Louisiana’s congressional primaries when the ruling was released, with more than 40,000 ballots reportedly already cast by mail. That did not stop Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry from issuing an executive order to halt the state’s elections so that state lawmakers could draw a new map that eliminates at least one of the majority-Black districts.A group of Louisiana voters filed a lawsuit last week to resume the election, but have not yet succeeded at having the executive order stayed by a court. The Supreme Court, for its part, does not seem interested in delaying the inevitable. Earlier this week, the justices voted to immediately issue the court’s mandate for the lower courts instead of waiting the usual month, drawing a rare dissent from Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.“Not content to have decided the law, it now takes steps to influence its implementation,” she wrote, referring to the internal rule that governs this specific process. “The court’s decision to buck our usual practice under Rule 45.3 and issue the judgment forthwith is tantamount to an approval of Louisiana’s rush to pause the ongoing election in order to pass a new map.”Justice Samuel Alito, the author of Callais, issued a separate statement joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch to attack Jackson’s dissent. He claimed, among other things, that her preference for “unthinking compliance” with the court’s usual rule itself would create the “appearance of partiality” on “behalf of those who may find it politically advantageous to have the election occur under the unconstitutional map.” The irony of making this argument to ensure a state could racially gerrymander Black voters out of electoral power eluded Alito.The court’s swiftness in issuing the Callais mandate is a clear signal to every Southern state to wipe out majority-Black districts as quickly as possible ahead of this year’s midterms. Louisiana Republicans are reportedly planning to keep at least one of its majority-Black districts intact, likely because eliminating both districts would make it easier for Democrats to contest some of the majority-white seats.Alabama, which also has two majority-Black districts, also took steps to unwind one of them this week. The second district was created after a federal court upheld a racial-gerrymandering challenge in Allen v. Milligan. The Supreme Court upheld the current revised map in 2022 by ruling that the court’s order was lawful under existing precedent a the time. Since the Callais decision changed that precedent, Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall asked the lower court to lift an injunction prohibiting the state from changing its maps again until the next census in four years.Other Southern states are going all-in on erasing majority-Black districts. In Tennessee, lawmakers released a new congressional map on Wednesday that would gerrymander the state’s ninth congressional district out of existence by splitting Memphis between three majority-white districts.