Tennessee Democrats, who on Thursday locked arms and walked out of the state House chamber as Republicans passed a new congressional map, say that the redistricting efforts in their state are just the first of more to come.

“I walked into the Capitol today, it was 2026, and when I walked out of the building it was pre 1965,” state Rep. Justin Jones told NOTUS. “What we saw today was a coordinated assault on Black voting power and Black political power that’s going to have repercussions like we have never seen since the end of Reconstruction.”

Jones said Tennessee is “leading in the wrong way.”

The state is the first to redraw its congressional lines in the aftermath of the Supreme Court decision on Louisiana v. Callais, which gutted part of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 last week. Both chambers of the Tennessee statehouse approved a new Republican-leaning congressional map that eliminates the state’s only majority-minority district. Several other states are considering taking similar steps.

In protest of the Republican redistricting, Democrats wore white when walking into the state House chamber Thursday morning, surrounded by hundreds of protesters who cheered them on.

Democrats in Tennessee hope that the energy from the protests at the three-day special session carries over to momentum in the November elections and alerts other Southern states to the efforts that could come their way.

“We didn’t come here for the play politics, we came here to defend what America has grown to be,” state Rep. Sam McKenzie, one of the Democrats who wore white to the floor, told NOTUS.

“We had 400 years of slavery, but we’ve grown from that. We had Jim Crow, but we’ve grown from that. And what this week has been is an attempt to take us backwards. They’re saying they’re doing this for partisan politics, but that’s a lie. This is strictly to create a separate underclass, to disenfranchise the African Americans in Tennessee.”

As the final votes were cast by Republican lawmakers, protests erupted on the House floor and galleries and could reportedly be heard across the chambers. State troopers were spread throughout the halls of the building, and Jones burned a paper Confederate flag in the halls of the state capitol.

Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee quickly signed off on the map approved by the state Legislature. Other Republican-led states across the South, such as Alabama, South Carolina, and Louisiana, are poised to follow Tennessee’s lead.

Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry moved quickly to suspend that state’s House primaries, saying that the state could not move forward with elections “under an unconstitutional map,” although 42,000 votes had already been cast. In Alabama, the state House of Representatives on Wednesday advanced a new congressional map, pending a court challenge that currently stops the state from using a different map.

Speaking to NOTUS from the state capitol in Nashville, Democratic state Rep. Vincent Dixie warned that Tennessee is the “training ground for what spreads across the South.”

“We have to make sure that we continue to fight,” Dixie said. “It’s not about Memphis, Memphis was just the catalyst. For you to take 40% of the people in Tennessee that voted Democrat — Democrats now have no voice in government in Tennessee, and that’s not fair. To say that it’s not race-based is disingenuous. It’s like they’re playing in our faces here.”

Republicans in the state Legislature have said that they drew the map with the goal of having an all-Republican delegation in Congress. On the state Senate floor on Thursday, state Sen. John Stevens, the Republican who introduced the legislation, said that the map was drawn to “maximize the potential Republican partisan advantage by winning and having a chance and opportunity to win all nine congressional districts for the Republican Party.”

“The maps were drawn to maximize our partisan advantage,” Stevens continued. “The goal of this legislation is to support the national Republican Party’s ability to maintain the majority in the United States Congress. It’s a razor-thin margin.”

This is not the first time in recent years that Democrats in the Tennessee state Legislature have landed in the national spotlight. In 2023, three Democratic lawmakers gained national attention for their protests for more gun control. Two of the lawmakers, including Jones, were expelled and later reinstated.

The other lawmaker, state Rep. Justin Pearson, has been running a campaign challenging the Democrat who represents the congressional district that Republicans just drew out. He was also among those protesting the changes at the Capitol on Thursday.

“We are likely going to live through within the next 12 months the greatest purging of elected officials from public office since the end of Reconstruction. People are being treated, once again, like three-fifths of a person, being counted for representation, but being denied access and agency to be able to determine who represents us,” Pearson told NOTUS on Wednesday, prior to the reveal of the maps. “This is not the way that a functioning democracy has to work or should work.”