Anger, confusion as Louisiana Republicans move to erase majority-Black US House dist

Baton Rouge, Louisiana: As a child, Leona Tate was one of the "New Orleans Four," the first Black students to desegregate a public school in the deep South, enduring racial slurs and death threats as armed US Marshals escorted them to class.

On Friday, more than six decades later, Tate told Republican state lawmakers that their proposal to dismantle at least one majority-Black congressional district brought back harrowing memories. "I need you to understand what it feels like to stand here, to have walked through that mob as a child, and to now watch elected officials do the same thing that mob was trying to do -- just with better suits and a parliamentary procedure," she told a senate committee hearing at the state capitol in Baton Rouge.

For more than eight hours, Black members of Congress, pastors, activists and voters delivered testimony that was at times emotional, angry and deeply personal. Outside the hearing room, protesters cheered them on. "Let him speak!" they chanted at one point, after Republican committee chairman Caleb Kleinpeter cut the microphone of a Democratic colleague in the middle of a fiery exchange.

Mike McClanahan, president of the state chapter of the NAACP, the country's largest civil rights organisation, was forcibly blocked from entering the room by security.

The tumultuous hearing reflected the electoral chaos gripping Louisiana after last week's US Supreme Court decision that hollowed out a landmark civil rights law, giving Republicans the chance to draw a new congressional map that erases one or both of the state's two Democratic-held majority-Black districts. Black voters make up one-third of the electorate in Louisiana and typically support Democrats. Republicans already control the other four districts.

The unprecedented national redistricting arms race that began last year, when President Trump pushed Texas Republicans to redraw the state's congressional map and take aim at five Democratic seats.

With inputs form Reuters and Associated Press