When Robert C. “Bobby” Scott was elected to Congress in 1992, he was Virginia’s only black representative, chosen by voters in a serpentine district designed to include most of the state’s heavily African American neighborhoods.
Nearly 20 years later, in a rapidly diversifying state, Scott remains Virginia’s only non-white congressman. He still represents a district that stretches from Hampton Roads into Richmond with squiggly boundaries, drawn to maximize black votes.
Is that a problem?
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In the 1970s and 1980s, civil rights leaders pushed to increase the number of African Americans in Congress, said David Bositis, senior research associate at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies and an expert in black representation.
Because voting was so racially polarized, particularly in the south, that meant creating districts with high percentages of black voters, he said.
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