(AP)  ATLANTA — Black lawmakers have lost clout in Southern state capitols as their overwhelming allegiance to the Democratic Party has left them without power in increasingly GOP-controlled state legislatures, a new report says.

The nonpartisan Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies in Washington says in a report issued Friday that despite Barack Obama's election as president, black voters and elected officials have less influence now than at any time since the civil rights era.

"Since conservative whites control all the power in the region, they are enacting legislation both neglectful of the needs of African Americans and other communities of color ..." writes senior research associate David Bositis in a paper titled "Resegregation in Southern Politics?"

Bositis points out state legislatures are increasingly divided along racial lines — making Republican synonymous with whites and Democrat and black interchangeable. According to the report, a majority of Democrats in both chambers in Alabama, Georgia and Mississippi are black. In half of the southern state legislative chambers, blacks are a majority or near-majority of Democratic members.

Read more at CBS News.