STAND UP! FIGHT BACK! The chant echoed through the halls of the Missouri Capitol building in Jefferson City on Wednesday, January 21. After orders from Donald Trump in early 2025, Missouri GOP politicians drew up and hurriedly passed an illegal, racist, and sloppily drawn electoral map.

The new map seeks to destroy the seat of Emmanuel Cleaver, former chair of the Congressional Black Caucus. The GOP scheme would split the 5th District into two majority-white, majority-Republican districts to snuff out the ideas and values of those who live in Kansas City and sent Cleaver to represent them in Congress.

As it currently stands, six of Missouri’s eight seats are held by Republicans and two by the Democrats — a far cry from what might be expected given that nearly 40% of Missouri voters cast ballots for the Democratic Party in the most recent election. To echo again, this new gerrymandered map would be gerrymandering the gerrymander, so to speak, as the state’s congressional delegation is already so slanted.

In response the people across the state of Missouri joined forces to break this map and send it to the dustbin where it belongs. In a swift move, community organizations, churches, and unions have joined forces and march together in a coalition called “People Not Politicians.”

This new coalition has undertaken the fight against this undemocratic map on multiple fronts. In the courts, there is a legal battle to declare this map unconstitutional according to the language governing when the drawing of electoral maps is done. This lawsuit argues the language in the Missouri Constitution states that electoral maps are drawn according to the census done every 10 years. This new map has been drawn outside of the census, in the middle of the decade.

The second front for this fight is in the electoral arena, where Missourians have made their voices heard in unprecedented fashion. To freeze this map and break it at the ballot box, organizers and volunteers have sought to use voter referendum laws to make it the people’s choice. State referendum law requires the signatures of 5% of turnout in the most recent election – 110,000 people – to get an issue on the ballot.

Volunteers, organizers, and voters smashed the needed signatures by threefold, gathering over 300,000 signatures in record time. Yet even with this clear expression of political will, the Republican Secretary of State Denny Hoskins is yet to certify all these signatures to allow the referendum to go to the ballot and has even dismissed 100,000 of them as “not valid” due to the days they were signed on.

The third front occurred yesterday in the form of mass movement and action of Missourians. On a random Wednesday afternoon with no major vote or decision on the map, over a thousand Missourians flooded the Capitol building to disrupt and disturb business as usual. This was a show of force to demonstrate that it doesn’t matter the day of the week or the motions of the politicians – Missourians will show up any day of the week to assert our rights as working people and will not allow billionaires, politicians, or Donald Trump to divide us.

Hearing from leaders in the SEIU, UAW, Missouri Workers Center, Stand Up KC, Abortion Action and more, speakers prominently spoke of the struggles of everyday people: against the attacks on Missouri voters’ action to revoke the total abortion ban in the last election, in solidarity with attacks on the LGBTQ+ community, against the fascistic attacks of ICE in Minneapolis and across the United States and tying all these struggles all together.

As the movement for democracy in Missouri continues, Secretary of State Denny Hoskins has shown his loyalties to the Republican Party and the wider undemocratic and fascistic movement. This, however, will not stop the march of working Missourians who want fair maps, will continue the fightback, and keep making their voices heard across the entire state.

The opinions of the author do not necessarily reflect the positions of the CPUSA.

Images: Fair maps, CPUSA.