A federal lawsuit filed on behalf of Black voters and groups like the NAACP accuses North Carolina lawmakers of drawing racially biased state legislative and Congressional maps.
The Southern Coalition for Social Justice says it warned leaders in the GOP-majority legislature that they needed to comply with the federal Voting Rights Act - and conduct Racially Polarized Voting analyses.
These tests help determine whether political boundaries around high concentrations of Black voters need to be preserved to avoid diluting their voting power.
But Coalition attorney Hilary Klein says Republican legislators purposely ignored those warnings--and in places like North Carolina's northeastern Black Belt broke up minority voting populations and spread them out over more districts.
"No principled map drawer would ever draw a map in this manner."
Two other federal lawsuits are also challenging GOP redistricting plans on racial grounds.