South Carolina's 7th congressional district
| South Carolina's 7th congressional district | |
|---|---|
South Carolina's 7th congressional district - since January 3, 2013.
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| Current Representative | Tom Rice (R–Myrtle Beach) |
| Ethnicity | |
| Cook PVI | R+7 |
The 7th Congressional District of South Carolina is a congressional district for the United States House of Representatives in South Carolina, established in 2011 following apportionment of another seat to the state following the 2010 census. It includes all of Chesterfield, Dillon, Georgetown, Horry, Marlboro and Marion counties and parts of Florence county. The first US representative from this new district, Tom Rice, was elected in 2012 and took office on January 3, 2013.
The 7th Congressional District of South Carolina existed in the 19th century but it was eliminated in 1853 as a result of the 1850 Census. After the 1880 Census, Congress apportioned the state another seat, and the state legislature re-established the district.
By that time, the Reconstruction era had ended and the state legislature was controlled by Democrats, who wrested control by a mixture of violence and fraud. They defined the boundaries of the 7th district, which was called the "shoestring district" because of its long, narrow shape that included many black precincts. In 1892 and 1894 the majority-black voters of the district elected George W. Murray to Congress; he was the only African American to serve in Congress in those sessions and, following disfranchisement and demographic changes, the last elected from the state until Jim Clyburn in 1992.
In 1895, the Democrat-dominated state legislature passed a new constitution, disfranchising black voters by changes to voter registration and electoral rules that were applied against them in a discriminatory way. For decades after 1896, only white Democrats were elected to Congress from the state. (Such disfranchisement occurred among all the states of the former Confederacy, and their use of poll taxes, literacy tests, grandfather clauses, and white primaries survived several US Supreme Court challenges.)
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