The new initiative enlists Black college students and athletes to face down Jim Crow rule in the South, while the group remains silent on boycotts targeting Israel’s apartheid rule.
House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries and members of the Congressional Black Caucus at a May press conference denouncing the US Supreme Court’s ruling in Louisiana v. Callais.
(J. Scott Applewhite / AP Photo)
During a May press conference on Capitol Hill, members of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) stood in solidarity with NAACP president and CEO Derrick Johnson to launch the Out of Bounds campaign. The initiative is a boycott targeting state-funded universities in eight Southern states that seek to dilute Black political representation through racial gerrymandering.
The boycott call followed the Supreme Court’s ruling in Callais v. Louisiana, which gave conservative state legislators legal cover to redraw congressional maps that eliminate Black-majority districts. “I want to thank all of the members of the CBC for standing on integrity,” Johnson said. “In this moment, when Black representation is under attack, it is important for the CBC to keep in their tradition of being the moral conscience of Congress and the moral conscience of this country.”
“No one Black should be on a playing field of institutions that’s living off of our labor and yet in states that are seeking to reinstitute a sharecropping reality,” Johnson continued. “We will not tolerate a Confederate mentality on our labor, on our ability to contribute, and our ability to have representation.”
The campaign urges Black athletes, families, alumni, and fans to withhold athletic and financial support from universities in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas—all states that have already redrawn majority-Black districts in the wake of Callais. Organizers of the boycott say it will continue until states adopt a Voting Rights Act, repeal maps that dilute Black voting power, and restore congressional or judicial districts that reflect their Black population and its voting strength.
But the campaign draws renewed attention to a glaring contradiction that continues to damage the moral standing of the CBC in challenging the renewed rule of apartheid in American politics: its passive support for the apartheid state of Israel. Israel’s US lobbying arm, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), has helped finance Republican lawmakers hostile to Black voting power even as it has contributed to the campaign coffers of CBC leaders. Since January 2024, AIPAC has contributed at least $5,788,171 to 75 of the 80 Republican House representatives across the eight states the Out of Bounds campaign targets. Within that same timeframe, AIPAC also dispersed at least $265,355 to 13 of the 18 CBC House members representing those same Southern states. AIPAC’s expenditures are bipartisan, conditioned on the recipient’s proven fealty to AIPAC’s Israel-first agenda.
The Out of Bounds campaign is properly targeting the baleful impact of the Callais ruling on racial representation in the South—but the CBC is conspicuously silent on the long-standing boycott, divest, and sanctions (BDS) campaign that targets the displacement and disfranchisement of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. While the organization has not issued any formal statement addressing the BDS movement, its high-ranking members have left a compendium of words denouncing the BDS movement as an illegitimate form of political opposition.
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“What is beyond the pale is BDS—is the attempt to delegitimize Israel. That’s extremism. That’s hate. And we as a Democratic Party should be against hatred and extremism,” said Democratic Representative Richie Torres (NY-15), in a 2020 interview. In 2024, Torres expressed his devotion to Israel’s imperial enterprise, telling an audience, “I am a Zionist. Always have been and always will be.”
Torres’s CBC colleague, Representative Hakeem Jeffries (NY-05), the first Black leader of either major political party in Congress, cosponsored the Israel Anti-Boycott Act, a 2017 bill that would criminalize support for, or furnishing information about, boycotts that target Israel. Jeffries has abided by AIPAC’s agenda, refusing to condition aid to Israel’s military—even as the apartheid state wages genocidal war on Palestinians. After AIPAC spent millions to defeat Jeffries’s CBC contemporaries during the 2024 election cycle, Jeffries offered an impassive response: “The voters have spoken.” In 2025, Jeffries refused to join the Reject AIPAC Coalition, an alliance of Democrats and grassroots organizations aiming to protect Democrats targeted by AIPAC. “I’m going to continue to raise money in the way I’ve been raising money since my arrival in the United States Congress,” Jeffries said.
Swearing off AIPAC support within the caucus would be a critical first step toward addressing this moral imbalance. If Out of Bounds is asking Black athletes to withdraw their labor from institutions that benefit from attacks on Black political representation, how can a morally consistent CBC lend its de facto support to AIPAC? The powerful Israel lobby is using its vast resources to advance support for Israel’s brutal campaign of dispossession and genocidal warfare in the Middle East while funding Republican politicians who are presiding over the resurgence of Jim Crow rule in the former Confederacy. No athlete or Black American should participate in the Out of Bounds boycott unless the CBC and NAACP also boycott AIPAC, unequivocally condemn Israel’s genocide of Palestinians, and mount principled opposition to the US government’s massive outlays for military aid to Israel—including funds to replenish its defense systems.
For years, the NAACP and the CBC have sat idle and silent as AIPAC has laid siege to progressive Black political representation. Israel’s super PAC has funneled millions of dollars into congressional races to oust Black politicians who oppose Israel’s political agenda—while simultaneously financing and endorsing Republicans with anti-Black views who are also ardently pro-Israel.
The NAACP and the CBC said nothing when AIPAC spent on a record-breaking scale to remove CBC members Jamaal Bowman, Cori Bush, Summer Lee, and Donna Edwards from their seats in 2022 and 2024. Yet now that the GOP is drawing racially gerrymandered districts, in a direct threat to CBC members who are tethered to the establishment wing of the Democratic Party, both groups have cynically sought to make Black athletes the public face of their Out of Bounds initiative. That allows CBC members to continue lining their pockets with AIPAC money. This unsustainable posture leaves college athletes, who are already prey to exploitation at the hands of the NCAA, jeopardizing their livelihoods to fight American apartheid, as the CBC quietly benefits from the Israeli variety.
A look at Louisiana’s hastily redrawn congressional map sanctioned by the Callais ruling allows us to see this hypocrisy in high relief. Black Americans make up approximately 32 percent of Louisiana’s population, yet Republicans have fought to confine Black voters to 16 percent of the state’s representation in Congress—cutting Black Louisianans’ voice in Washington in half. They achieved this aim by packing Black voting-age Louisianians into one Black-majority district, creating a 1–5 partisan map ensuring GOP dominance of the state’s congressional delegation. When federal courts forced Louisiana’s Republican legislators to add a second Black-majority district for the 2024 cycle, “non–African American” conservative plaintiffs sued, alleging racial gerrymandering. In this spring’s Callais ruling, the Supreme Court agreed, creating legal cover for Louisiana’s conservative-dominated state legislature to strip away Black representation from all district maps in the state.
AIPAC hasn’t funded the campaigns of the state legislators who author or vote for redistricting bills in Louisiana, but it does fund those who stand to benefit from the GOP’s desecration of the Voting Rights Act. One such beneficiary is House Speaker Mike Johnson (LA-04), a central figure in Republicans’ redistricting scheme.
The day after the Callias ruling, Johnson called on Republicans to ramp up redistricting efforts. “We want constitutional maps,” Johnson said. “All states that have unconstitutional maps should look at that very carefully, and I think they should do it before the midterms.” Two weeks later, Louisiana’s Senate and Governmental Affairs committee approved Senate Bill 121, which eliminated Louisiana’s second Black-majority district, confining Black-bloc voting power into one district, and restoring the previously illegal 5–1 gerrymander in the state.
During a May Senate and Governmental Affairs Committee meeting discussing Senate Bill 121, State Senator Jay Morris, the bill’s author, testified that the measure’s authors had eliminated the state’s second Black-majority district with the partial aim of protecting Johnson’s seat. Since January 2024, AIPAC has contributed at least $794,269 to Johnson, a Trump lackey who voted to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. As AIPAC funded Johnson, aka “Maga Mike,” it also contributed $26,250 to CBC member Representative Troy Carter (LA-02). According to FEC data, AIPAC has not directly contributed money to Louisiana’s second CBC representative, Cleo Fields (LA-06), whose congressional district was eliminated by the passage of Senate Bill 121. Still, seven months after Fields assumed office in January 2025, the lobby sought to integrate Fields’s staff into its propaganda machine through the American Israel Education Foundation (AIEF), a wing of the AIPAC network that sponsors luxurious trips to Israel for lawmakers, their staffers, and family members.
While Fields himself has not participated in AIEF’s sponsored trips, Troy Carter is a well-established cog in AIEF’s indoctrination apparatus. According to July 2023 gift-travel disclosures, AIEF sponsored a $12,729 nine-day trip to Israel for Carter’s deputy chief of staff, and, months later, bankrolled a $51,366 10-day trip for Carter and his wife to Israel and Rwanda “to cultivate the U.S.-Israel relationship.” And before AIEF had rewarded Carter with lavish “educational” excursions to Israel, he had staked out a hard-line pro-Israel profile during his time as a state legislator: In 2019, he voted for HB245, Louisiana’s anti-BDS bill, which allows a public entity to reject a procurement contract if a vendor engages in a boycott of Israel.
Carter is not alone. According to gift travel filings, 22 members of the current CBC roster or their staffers have embarked on AIEF trips and received money from AIPAC. House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries, one of the most prominent Israel supporters in the House caucus, is a prime beneficiary, receiving at least $950,126 from AIPAC. He and members of his staff have also clocked six AIEF-sponsored Israel junkets totaling $93,849 since 2022.
In 2024, a group of progressive organizations cosigned a letter addressed to Jeffries, the highest-ranking Congressional Black Caucus member in the House, expressing concern about AIPAC’s interference in Democratic politics. The letter cited AIPAC’s support for the Gaza genocide as well as its retrograde record on Black political representation, and urged Jeffries to reject AIPAC’s endorsement and contributions.
Jeffries hasn’t addressed the substance of that letter over the ensuing two years, and continues to be a major recipient of AIPAC money. According to FEC data, AIPAC has contributed at least $229,677 to Jeffries’s campaigns since 2024. At the May press conference announcing the Out of Bounds boycott, Jeffries condemned schools in the Southeastern Conference for their reticence in speaking out against the South’s violation of the Voting Rights Act. “We believe the silence of these institutions is complicity,” Jeffries said. It’s likewise difficult to interpret Jeffries’s conspicuous silence on AIPAC’s interference in Democratic politics as anything else.
The rationale for such complicity is straightforward; renouncing it is expensive in a money-dominated system of electioneering. For most members of the CBC, it’s standard practice to rely on AIPAC’s massive fundraising network in their reelection campaigns. AIPAC’s largesse also helps to protect CBC incumbents from primary challenges from the left, and maintain seniority in Washington. The same logic ensures AIPAC’s hold over many other members of Congress; any lawmaker who would reject AIPAC money would be sundered from a chief tributary of financial support.
The NAACP, which launched the Out of Bounds campaign, isn’t as directly implicated in AIPAC’s legislative reign as the CBC is. But the civil rights group has condemned international atrocities before, and in 2024, it released a statement urging the Biden administration to stop shipping weapons to Israel that target civilians. At a minimum, the NAACP should be held to the same standards they advocate for—particularly as the group continues to tout the CBC as “the conscience of Congress.”
The NAACP also has played an outsize role in organizing boycotts against segregationist institutions—the same pressure campaign that the BDS movement is using against Israel. In the 1982 decision NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware Co., a unanimous Supreme Court affirmed that political and economic boycotts are a form of constitutionally protected free speech. In the mid-1960s, the NAACP led a boycott of white business owners in Claiborne County, Mississippi. Some of those business owners sued the group, and a Mississippi court held the NAACP and individual boycott participants liable for $1.25 million in losses incurred by white merchants. In Clairborne, the high court overturned the decision, ruling that the nonviolent elements of a politically motivated boycott are protected under the First Amendment.
When promoting the Out of Bounds campaign, NAACP President Derrick Johnson often reiterates that the eight states targeted by the boycott were all part of the Confederacy. That’s true, but they also share another affinity: they have all passed legislation to suppress the BDS movement seeking to withhold economic support for Israel’s apartheid regime.
As of this writing, 38 states have adopted anti-BDS laws—including Mississippi, where CBC member Bennie Thompson represents the state’s only Black-majority district. In March 2019, the Mississippi state legislature passed the Israel Support Act of 2019. The bill requires the executive director of the state’s Department of Finance and Administration to develop and publish a list of companies that boycott Israel, and prohibits the Mississippi retirement system and the state treasurer from investing in companies on the list. Months after the bill passed the Mississippi state legislature, Thompson voted alongside 92 percent of the CBC in favor of H.Res.246, a House bill opposing the global BDS movement (Also in 2019, New Jersey Senator Cory Booker cosponsored similar legislation in the Senate.)
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Some of the 32 CBC members who cosponsored H.Res.246 are now in danger of having their seats eliminated by Republican racial gerrymandering. Among them are Representative Emanuel Cleaver II (MO-05) and Representative James Clyburn (SC-06). Marc Veasey (TX-33), who also opposed the BDS movement, decided not to run again, given that the newly drawn map of his district would all but ensure his defeat at the polls.
It’s important to note that John Lewis, the civil rights icon who died in 2020, cosponsored H.Res.246 while also cosponsoring H.Res.496, Ilhan Omar’s resolution affirming that Americans have the right to participate in boycotts in pursuit of civil and human rights at home and abroad. Of the 17 cosponsors of that bill, only six were CBC members.
How can the NAACP and the CBC ask Black youth to risk their dreams and future financial gains in the name of protecting Black political representation, when their political elders refuse to do the same when it comes to taking a stand against AIPAC? Asking an uncompensated or newly compensated teenager to weaponize their livelihood in a boycott for voting rights while receiving AIPAC money to vote for legislation against boycotts targeting Israel badly damages the integrity of the Out of Bounds campaign.
The efforts to dilute Black political power are not confined to the South or the Republican Party. And it goes without saying that Republicans and Democrats are not remotely equivalent in weakening the Black vote. Racial gerrymandering is an egregious violation of voting rights. However, Black Americans still find themselves in a grievous political double bind. As a simple matter of political survival, they must combat the blatant racism emanating from the GOP, which wants to eviscerate Black voting power. But they also must stand up to the passive racism from the Democratic Party, which supports Black political power and Black political representation so long as Black politicians bend the knee to the Democratic Party establishment and its benefactors—notably the pro-apartheid AIPAC lobby.
Both the CBC and the NAACP have a venerable history of fighting racial injustice. But that’s precisely why it’s so important to highlight the blatant, shameful hypocrisy of both groups hiding behind the sacrifices of teenage Black student athletes. For political and movement leaders to take civil rights seriously, they must reclaim basic political representation not just in the former Confederacy but also in Gaza and the Occupied Territories. Until they do so, their silence will continue to be deafening—particularly as prominent Black lawmakers continue to cash hush-money checks from AIPAC behind the scenes.
With the midterm elections now firmly upon us, the question is whether Democratic candidates will do more than merely occupy ballot lines as mild alternatives to the red-hot crisis that is Donald Trump.
As Trump spends over $1 billion a day on a globally destabilizing war on Iran and admits that he doesn’t “think about Americans’ financial situation,” millions across the country are struggling with the surging costs of essentials. Democrats must seize this moment and advance bold, small-“d” populist ideas—not settle for cynical caution that once again snatches defeat from the jaws of victory.
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Onward,
Katrina vanden Heuvel
Editor and Publisher, The Nation
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