644
Opinion of the Court
upon an extraordinary justification. Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U. S. 483; McLaughlin v. Florida, 379 U. S. 184. This rule applies as well to a classification that is ostensibly neutral but is an obvious pretext for racial discrimination. Yick Wo v. Hopkins, 118 U. S. 356; Guinn v. United States, 238 U. S. 347; cf. Lane v. Wilson, 307 U. S. 268; Gomillion v. Lightfoot, 364 U. S. 339." 442 U. S., at 272.
B
Appellants contend that redistricting legislation that is so bizarre on its face that it is "unexplainable on grounds other than race," Arlington Heights, supra, at 266, demands the same close scrutiny that we give other state laws that classify citizens by race. Our voting rights precedents support that conclusion.
In Guinn v. United States, 238 U. S. 347 (1915), the Court invalidated under the Fifteenth Amendment a statute that imposed a literacy requirement on voters but contained a "grandfather clause" applicable to individuals and their lineal descendants entitled to vote "on [or prior to] January 1, 1866." Id., at 357 (internal quotation marks omitted). The determinative consideration for the Court was that the law, though ostensibly race neutral, on its face "embod[ied] no exercise of judgment and rest[ed] upon no discernible reason" other than to circumvent the prohibitions of the Fifteenth Amendment. Id., at 363. In other words, the statute was invalid because, on its face, it could not be explained on grounds other than race.
The Court applied the same reasoning to the "uncouth twenty-eight-sided" municipal boundary line at issue in Gomillion. Although the statute that redrew the city limits of Tuskegee was race neutral on its face, plaintiffs alleged that its effect was impermissibly to remove from the city virtually all black voters and no white voters. The Court reasoned:
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