“The first thing we’ve got to do is use political campaigns again as the way to establish dialogue and a way to paint a view or a vision of where we ought to be.”

Political campaigns happen to be the ideal place to talk about what your vision for a place ought to be. If, in fact, you can make these debates take shape, considering the whole make-up of a community, racially and otherwise, it doesn’t make sense to say that you absolutely have to go in and create independent black districts everywhere.

I think that we have to be very careful not to allow the Voting Rights Act to be used as a way to stack all the black votes in a district. That has happened too many times. You simply put everybody who thinks alike in the same district, and it significantly affects the dialogue—the quality of discourse that will go on within those districts about the key issues.