Court OKs district redrawing

WASHINGTON - A largely black congressional district can be constitutional if drawn to satisfy political rather than racial motives, a divided Supreme Court ruled yesterday.

Just in time for the new round of congressional redistricting, the 5-4 ruling states a roadmap for drawing boundaries that acknowledge race.

The court upheld the crazy-quilt outline of a North Carolina district drawn after the 1990 Census. Rep. Mel Watt won the seat in 1992 as one of two blacks sent to Congress that year from a state that had not sent one since 1901.

North Carolina said it redrew the district in 1997 to concentrate Democrats, not blacks. The state wanted to maintain an even split between Democrats and Republicans in its congressional delegation. That goal may be political, but it is also constitutional, state officials argued.

"The evidence ... does not show that racial considerations predominated in the drawing of District 12's boundaries," Justice Stephen Breyer wrote for the majority. "That is because race in this case correlates closely with political behavior."

The majority, led by the court's more liberal members, said that North Carolina legislators were within their rights to draw a district that strings several city centers along skinny ribbons of countryside.

"After all, the Constitution does not place an affirmative obligation upon the Legislature to avoid creating districts that turn out to be heavily, even majority, minority," Breyer wrote. "It simply imposes an obligation not to create such districts for predominantly racial, as opposed to political or traditional, districting motivations."

State legislatures can follow North Carolina's lead and provide alternative justification for drawing a heavily black district, while acknowledging that race is part of the equation, national participants in the current redistricting said.