A new Out of Bounds campaign asks Black college athletes, families, alumni, and fans to cut support for state-funded universities across eight Southern states tied to racial gerrymandering after the Supreme Court’s Louisiana v. Callais decision. But the push h
On a Capitol Hill stage in May, members of the Congressional Black Caucus stood alongside NAACP president and CEO Derrick Johnson and framed a boycott as a matter of political survival.
The Out of Bounds campaign asks Black athletes. families. alumni. and fans to withhold athletic and financial support from state-funded universities in Alabama. Florida. Georgia. Louisiana. Mississippi. South Carolina. Tennessee. and Texas. The campaign is directed at schools in states that. in the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Callais v. Louisiana, have moved to dilute Black political representation through racial gerrymandering.
Johnson tied the call to a direct moral claim. “I want to thank all of the members of the CBC for standing on integrity. ” he said at the press conference. “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.”.
He then sharpened the metaphor. “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 said. “We will not tolerate a Confederate mentality on our labor. on our ability to contribute. and our ability to have representation.”.
Organizers say the boycott will continue until states adopt a Voting Rights Act, repeal maps that dilute Black voting power, and restore congressional or judicial districts that reflect Black population and its voting strength.
But almost immediately, the initiative ran into a parallel controversy—one rooted in what the CBC has not challenged publicly.
The campaign’s moral language is aimed at “racial apartheid” inside American political lines. Yet the CBC and NAACP leadership have remained silent on a separate. long-running boycott movement—divestment and sanctions (BDS)—that targets what organizers describe as the displacement and disfranchisement of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories.
That silence has drawn fresh attention to the role of Israel-focused lobbying and its reach into mainstream Democratic politics. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the group’s U.S. lobbying arm. has helped finance Republican lawmakers hostile to Black voting power while also contributing to the 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 targeted by Out of Bounds. In the same timeframe, AIPAC dispersed at least $265,355 to 13 of the 18 CBC House members representing those same Southern states. The expenditures are described as bipartisan and conditioned on recipients’ proven fealty to AIPAC’s Israel-first agenda.
Even as CBC leaders champion the Out of Bounds effort, the campaign faces questions about how far “moral conscience” reaches when political leverage is aligned with an advocacy network that draws sharp condemnation from critics of Israel’s policies toward Palestinians.
Supporters of the Out of Bounds boycott argue it is aimed in the right direction—at the Callais fallout on racial representation. But the lack of an accompanying stance against BDS has kept the spotlight on a contradiction that, for critics, damages credibility.
Democratic Representative Richie Torres, a CBC colleague, was explicit in opposing BDS in the past. In a 2020 interview, Torres said, “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.” In 2024. Torres told an audience. “I am a Zionist. Always have been and always will be.”.
Hakeem Jeffries. the Democratic leader and the first Black leader of either major political party in Congress. is tied to the issue through legislation and through his response to lobbying influence. Jeffries cosponsored the Israel Anti-Boycott Act. a 2017 bill that would criminalize support for. or furnishing information about. boycotts that target Israel.
The criticism sharpened during Jeffries’s alignment with AIPAC’s political agenda. The account of his record in the material says Jeffries has refused to condition aid to Israel’s military even as Israel wages war in Gaza. After AIPAC spent millions to defeat Jeffries’s CBC contemporaries during the 2024 election cycle. Jeffries’s response was described as muted: “The voters have spoken.”.
In 2025, he 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.
At the May press conference, Jeffries condemned schools in the Southeastern Conference for what he described as institutional 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.
But critics say his public posture has not matched the same urgency toward AIPAC itself. They argue that the Out of Bounds campaign is asking Black athletes and families to risk their careers and livelihoods to pressure universities over voting rights—while many of the lawmakers spotlighting the boycott remain embedded in a money network tied to political battles over Israel-focused boycotts.
Nowhere does that tension show up more clearly than in Louisiana. where the Callais ruling provided state legislators cover to redraw congressional maps. The material highlights Louisiana’s situation in numbers and steps. Black Americans make up approximately 32 percent of Louisiana’s population. Yet Republicans fought to confine Black voters to 16 percent of the state’s representation in Congress. cutting Black Louisianans’ voice in Washington in half. The approach. as described. packed Black voting-age Louisianians into one Black-majority district. creating a 1–5 partisan map ensuring Republican 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 the Callais ruling this spring. 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.
Two weeks after Johnson called for new map work—saying. “We want constitutional maps. ” and urging states to look at “unconstitutional maps” before the midterms—the Louisiana Senate and Governmental Affairs committee approved Senate Bill 121. The bill. described here. eliminated Louisiana’s second Black-majority district. confined Black-bloc voting power into one district. and restored what the material calls the previously illegal 5–1 gerrymander in the state.
During a May Senate and Governmental Affairs Committee meeting about Senate Bill 121, State Senator Jay Morris testified that the measure’s authors eliminated the state’s second Black-majority district with the partial aim of protecting House Speaker Mike Johnson’s seat.
AIPAC’s role is central to the contradiction being pressed. The account states that AIPAC hasn’t funded the campaigns of Louisiana state legislators who author or vote for redistricting bills. but it does fund those who stand to benefit from the GOP’s impact on the Voting Rights Act. One beneficiary named is Mike Johnson, described as a central figure in Republicans’ redistricting scheme.
The day after the Callais ruling, Johnson called for Republicans to ramp up redistricting efforts, saying, “We want constitutional maps.”
It adds that since January 2024, AIPAC has contributed at least $794,269 to Johnson. The material characterizes Johnson as a Trump ally who voted to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. It also says AIPAC contributed $26. 250 to CBC member Representative Troy Carter (LA-02) during the same period. and that AIPAC has not directly contributed money to Louisiana’s second CBC representative. Cleo Fields (LA-06). whose district was eliminated by Senate Bill 121.
Even so. it argues that AIPAC sought to integrate Fields’s staff into its propaganda machine through the American Israel Education Foundation (AIEF). The material says AIEF sponsored a $12. 729 nine-day trip to Israel for Carter’s deputy chief of staff. and later bankrolled a $51. 366 10-day trip for Carter and his wife to Israel and Rwanda “to cultivate the U.S.-Israel relationship.” It also notes that Carter voted for HB245 in 2019. Louisiana’s anti-BDS bill. which allows a public entity to reject a procurement contract if a vendor engages in a boycott of Israel.
From there, the material broadens the scope beyond Carter. It says that. 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. It states that Jeffries is among the biggest beneficiaries. receiving at least $950. 126 from AIPAC. and that he and members of his staff have clocked six AIEF-sponsored Israel junkets totaling $93. 849 since 2022.
The material also points to unease from progressives inside Democratic politics. In 2024, a group of progressive organizations cosigned a letter addressed to Jeffries. The letter expressed concern about AIPAC’s interference in Democratic politics. cited AIPAC’s support for the Gaza genocide. and pointed to AIPAC’s record on Black political representation. urging Jeffries to reject AIPAC’s endorsement and contributions.
Jeffries, it says, has not addressed the substance of that letter while continuing to receive significant AIPAC contributions. According to FEC data cited in the material, AIPAC has contributed at least $229,677 to Jeffries’s campaigns since 2024.
This is where the Out of Bounds campaign’s stated target—universities in eight Southern states—intersects with a larger fight over who can afford to take on powerful interests. The material lays out a blunt theory: renouncing AIPAC influence is “expensive” in a money-dominated system. and many CBC members rely on AIPAC’s fundraising network for reelection campaigns. It further argues that AIPAC money helps protect incumbents from primary threats from the left and maintain seniority in Washington.
The NAACP’s complicity is described differently—less direct, but not absent. The material says NAACP president Derrick Johnson and NAACP leadership have condemned international atrocities before and that in 2024 the NAACP released a statement urging the Biden administration to stop shipping weapons to Israel that target civilians. But it argues that NAACP should be held to the same standards it publicly insists on.
It also connects the BDS debate to the NAACP’s own history with boycotts as a tool. In the 1982 Supreme Court decision NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware Co., the high court unanimously affirmed that political and economic boycotts are constitutionally protected free speech. The material recounts that in the mid-1960s the NAACP led a boycott of white business owners in Claiborne County. Mississippi; some business owners sued; and a Mississippi court held the NAACP and individual boycott participants liable for $1.25 million in losses. In Claiborne. the Supreme Court overturned the decision. ruling that nonviolent elements of a politically motivated boycott are protected under the First Amendment.
Johnson often reiterates that the eight states targeted by Out of Bounds were part of the Confederacy. The material argues those same states share another trait: they have passed legislation to suppress BDS. It says 38 states have adopted anti-BDS laws, including Mississippi. It highlights Mississippi’s Israel Support Act of 2019: the bill required the executive director of the Mississippi Department of Finance and Administration to develop and publish a list of companies that boycott Israel. and prohibited the Mississippi retirement system and the state treasurer from investing in companies on that list. It adds that in the wake of the law. Bennie Thompson—a CBC member and the representative of Mississippi’s only Black-majority district—voted alongside 92 percent of the CBC in favor of H.Res.246. a House resolution opposing the global BDS movement. It notes that New Jersey Senator Cory Booker cosponsored a similar measure in the Senate.
It then ties anti-BDS legislative history to the immediate political reality facing CBC members as gerrymanders threaten seats. It lists several CBC members described as at risk: Representative Emanuel Cleaver II (MO-05) and Representative James Clyburn (SC-06). It also says Marc Veasey (TX-33). who opposed the BDS movement. decided not to run again because the newly drawn map of his district would all but ensure his defeat at the polls.
The material adds a historical nuance: it says John Lewis. 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. It says that of the 17 cosponsors of that bill, only six were CBC members.
By the time the campaign asks teenagers and young athletes to act, the critique in the material becomes particularly pointed. The argument is that it is hard to square a demand for “uncompensated or newly compensated” young people to weaponize their livelihoods in a boycott for voting rights while the caucus’s political elders take money tied to opposing boycott efforts targeting Israel.
The Out of Bounds campaign’s focus on the aftermath of Callais remains—and in the material. the Louisiana example is meant to make that case stark. Yet its public ask also forces a question the movement may not be able to dodge for long: how those same institutions and lawmakers can claim a moral mandate against “apartheid” at home without addressing the boycott movement some of their critics say targets apartheid abroad.
As the report frames it, the stakes go beyond athletes’ schedules or university contracts. For critics. the real test is whether the CBC and NAACP that speak in the language of conscience are willing to change what fuels their political power—before the campaign they’ve launched becomes. in their view. a one-way sacrifice.
MISRYOUM Politics News Congressional Black Caucus Out of Bounds NAACP Derrick Johnson Louisiana v. Callais racial gerrymandering Voting Rights Act AIPAC Israel Anti-Boycott Act BDS Hakeem Jeffries Richie Torres Mike Johnson Troy Carter Cleo Fields anti-BDS laws