North Carolina Republicans passed a redistricting map in 2021 that took away two counties in his district carried by Joe Biden and added two counties carried by Donald Trump, reducing the number of Black voters from 48 percent to 35 percent. But last year, he became one of the victims of the Supreme Court’s gutting of the law. Like so many prominent Black lawmakers, Fitch owed his political career to the Voting Rights Act. After 16 years in the state house, he served as a state judge for 17 years, then rejoined the legislature as a member of the state senate in 2018.
He drew the map that led to the election of North Carolina’s first Black member of Congress since Reconstruction. Fitch joined the state house in 1985 and rose through the ranks, becoming the state’s first Black House Majority Leader and chair of the redistricting committee. The latter effort finally bore fruit in the early 1980s when the courts ordered the state to create new legislative districts that would give Black voters the opportunity to elect their preferred candidates. “I realized and understood early on in life what people were able to achieve when they participated in the process,” Fitch tells me.Īfter becoming a civil rights lawyer in 1975, Fitch filed a range of lawsuits to desegregate schools, workplaces, and all levels of government in North Carolina. Fitch protested and succeeded in registering. When Fitch tried to register to vote after the law’s approval, an election official threatened to make him recite the Declaration of Independence, an example of one of the many ways Southern white officials kept Blacks from voting. At the time, one in four North Carolinians were Black but there wasn’t a single Black member in the state legislature. In 1965, the monumental Voting Rights Act passed, striking down the suppressive devices that prevented African-Americans from voting in the South for so many years. “All the young kids were mad as hell at me,” he recalls. The police escorted him out and the city drained the water. One day, Fitch-whose father was the first Black mail carrier in Wilson and the North Carolina coordinator for Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference-snuck in through the men’s showers and jumped in the pool. Like so many places in the Jim Crow South, Wilson, a tobacco town of roughly 50,000 people one hour east of Raleigh, was heavily segregated one study described it as two cities divided by a railroad track. wanted to swim in the Olympic-sized pool on the prosperous East side of town-a pool that only white people could use. Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.Īs a Black teenager growing up in Wilson, North Carolina, in the 1950s, Milton “Toby” Fitch Jr.
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