North Carolina's Suffrage Amendment (1900) disfranchised blacks and, while Smith v. Allwright (1944) overturned the white primary and revived black suffrage, southern African Americans did not vote widely until after the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA). Civil rights groups also sued to broaden North Carolina black political participation, resulting in the state's 1991–92 Congressional redistricting. Whites comprised the majority in ten of its twelve districts, whose shapes and sizes varied considerably. Accordingly, the Democratic legislature created the black-majority First and Twelfth districts, whose voters elected the first blacks to Congress since 1898.

But the election of Melvin Watt and Eva M. Clayton (who broke a gender barrier too) was challenged successfully. Suing for Republicans, a Duke Law School professor claimed that the First and Twelfth Congressional Districts were “bizarre looking” and racially discriminatory. He never established any violation of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. But in a 5–4 decision the Supreme Court upheld his claim. It ruled “that neither race-conscious efforts to comply with the VRA nor attempts to correct past discrimination were acceptable justifications for creating the particular minority opportunity districts at issue.” The Court's ruling weakened a quarter century of electoral protections for underrepresented racial and ethnic minorities.