There’s a cruel kind of magic to how power redraws a line.

Not with a gun. Not with a bomb. But with a pen. A line drawn in the dark, behind closed doors, in state houses thick with lobbyists and thin on conscience. They call it redistricting. But when that pen curves just enough to corral Black voices into silence — when that curve becomes a cage — it becomes something else entirely.

Gerrymandering. And like so much of American history, it starts with a lie and ends with stolen breath.

The origins go back to 1812 — Elbridge Gerry, the Massachusetts governor who lent his name to the tactic, twisted a voting district into the shape of a salamander. But let’s not be polite and call this history a curiosity. Gerrymandering isn’t a quirky footnote. It’s a weapon. A scalpel used to cut Black

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