Through the looking glass

What follows is a fun story about a city, a court and a cause. I am moved to write about it because it’s important and few Springfieldians younger than 35 will have heard of it. I was tempted to quote Faulkner about how the past isn’t dead, it isn’t even past – until I realized that young folks haven’t heard of Faulkner, either. So you’ll have to trust me.

The dead part goes back to 1908. Much of white Springfield concluded that the ultimate motive of the white mobs that burned and lynched their ways through the Black neighborhoods that year was not race hatred but outrage about corrupt city hall politics. The remedy was to purge the body politic of the corrupt white aldermen who ran Black wards by throwing out the wards the aldermen served. For the next 70 years the capital city was run by five commissioners picked in nonpartisan elections in which candidates ran at-large. Black voters, sufficiently numerous to carry a ward or two, were too few to affect most citywide races. They thus became invisible in political terms.

“OK by us,” said white Springfield. (I’m paraphrasing.)

At-large voting of this kind was a popular progressive-era prescription for sick municipalities trying to digest unpalatable racial and ethnic populations. It became popular again in the 1960s in the socially regressive South. The Civil Rights Act in 1964 had prevented Jim Crow from denying Black citizens access to the polls so white folks down there switched to at-large voting systems that drowned Black ballots in a sea of white ones. 

Until 1982. That year Congress amended the 1965 Voting Rights Act so plaintiffs alleging discrimination only had to prove that a suspect voting system had discriminatory results even if they couldn’t prove discriminatory intent. Thus, it happened that in 1985 attorney James Craven filed suit on behalf of five Black persons in federal court alleging that municipal elections Springfield-style resulted in “a denial or abridgement of the plaintiffs’ right to vote on account of race or color” under the VRA. 

That suit, McNeil v. City of Springfield, was the first such challenge to an at-large election system in a northern city. That this was necessary in Lincoln’s home town sparked the same kinds of comments about the city heard in 1980, but we were used it by 1985.

Speaking for myself, I thought the principle and the premises of case were dubious. However, the test in such cases was not rightness or efficacy but legality, and in 1987 the presiding judge ruled that Craven had proved his contention that Springfield’s commission government was illegal. A consent decree worked out the details, the voters approved the resulting plan and in 1991 Springfield abandoned its by-then venerable commission government and handed over the running of the city to alderpeople elected from 10 city wards. That didn’t improve city government but it made it more democratic – please note the lower-case “d” – and in politics you take what you can get.

Now for the “past” part that won’t stay dead. Having been told by the federal courts in 1987 that its commission government did bad things to good Black people, Springfield in April was told, in effect, that its now-35-year-old aldermanic system with its majority-Black gerrymander did bad things to good white people. In Louisiana v. Callais, the six GOP appointees on the nation’s top federal court traded their black robes for Confederate gray and ruled that taking race into consideration in undoing the effects of racial discrimination constitutes racial discrimination. 

You just can’t please some people.

Springfield’s system would seem to be vulnerable to legal challenge under the new rules but it’s too early to begin remodeling the city council chamber. Black voters tend to be Democratic voters, and the Ward 2 gerrymander thus created a safe seat for that party. Under this court, gerrymandering with the intent to privilege one race or another – white or Black – is still illegal but privileging one party over another is not. Chief Justice John Roberts in a 2023 ruling was sad that extreme partisan gerrymandering was “unjust” and “incompatible with democratic principles” but explained – don’t try to read this if you’re about to sip your morning coffee – that federal courts have nothing to do with party politics.

Today’s Democratic-controlled council thus can simply draw up a Ward 2 map in 2030 that will guarantee that Democrats enjoy the full exercise of their right to a safe seat. Of course, any party that gains a majority of seats in future councils – the GOP or the Socialists or the Atheists (I should live so long) or the Free Parkers Party – could redraw all the ward boundaries to favor their guys, however unjust it might be, because, well, “democracy.” Which puts us back where we started in 1987. 

Told you it was fun.  

James Krohe has written often about the 1980s’ change of government. See “One’s Own Sort” [https://www.jameskrohejr.com/voting-rights-issues-it] and “Form over function.” [https://www.illinoistimes.com/news-opinion/form-over-function-11452892/

This article appears in May 28-June 3, 2026.