Cite as: 521 U. S. 74 (1997)
Breyer, J., dissenting
trict 2 in the court's plan (Appendix, 1995 Court Plan, infra); and second, the creation of the majority-minority district in southeastern central Georgia—in approximately the area labeled District 11 in the Justice Department's Illustrative Plan (Appendix, Illustrative Plan, infra).
The first possibility could have involved a compactly shaped district. Regardless, the DOJ's Illustrative Plan (which the District Court considered on the merits, 922 F. Supp., at 1561, n. 4) suggests a newly drawn District 11 with an African-American population of 54.60 percent, an African-American voting age population of 51.04 percent, and a population deviation of 0.10. (This deviation percentage—the highest in the Illustrative Plan—was still lower than the deviation in two of the districts contained in the Court Plan.) It suggests that the District Court's statement that "the only way Georgia could create a majority-minority district out of the minority concentrations in east-central Georgia was to link" rural and urban communities by using "land bridges and appendages" similar to those used in the unconstitutional 1992 plan, 922 F. Supp., at 1566, n. 15, was erroneous. The proposed district is different from its unconstitutional predecessor. It does not try to build a land bridge linking southern Atlanta with Savannah. Cf. Miller, supra, at 908. And its boundaries are far more regular.
Moreover, it strikes me that the District Court's finding that a district in east-central Georgia that encompassed both rural and urban African-American communities could not be "compact" confuses a number of issues. Shaw v. Reno and Miller compactness, which concerns the shape or boundaries of a district, differs from § 2 compactness, which concerns a minority group's compactness. Additionally, where (as here) the racial minority group is geographically compact, see Appendix, Illustrative Plan, infra, the fact that communities are rural or urban has more to do with political cohesiveness—whether communities share common interests— than with § 2 compactness. To my knowledge, no case has
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