A federal judge shined a spotlight Tuesday on state House Democratic Leader Robert Reives’ comments about a black colleague earlier this year. Testifying during a trial, Reives appeared to question whether Rep. Dante Pittman should count as black for purposes of a racial gerrymandering case.
US District Judge James Dever highlighted the comments on pages 108-109 of his 126-page decision in Pierce v. North Carolina State Board of Elections. Dever ruled in favor of legislative leaders and against two black plaintiffs who challenged two state Senate districts in northeastern North Carolina.
Reives, who is black, testified against the districts during a five-day trial in February.
“Representative Reives has been elected five times to the House,” Dever wrote. “He currently holds a seat in Chatham County and Randolph County that has a BVAP [black voting-age population] under 12%.”
“Representative Reives undermined his own credibility at trial by downplaying the success of a black elected official in northeast North Carolina,” Dever wrote. “Specifically, Representative Reives was asked about Representative Dante Pittman from House District 24 in Nash and Wilson Counties. Representative Pittman defeated a black Republican incumbent in 2024 in a House district that is not majority black.”
Pittman unseated Republican incumbent Ken Fontenot last year with 51% of the vote. The BVAP in the district was 38.5%.
“Representative Reives discounted Representative Pittman, his family, and his electoral success by stating that Representative Pittman was ‘I guess by legal definition’ black, but ‘he is half white and half black and he was raised by a white family.’ Representative Reives then paused,” Dever wrote.
“He seemed to realize how insulting his testimony was about Representative Pittman, his family, and his electoral success. Representative Reives then stated that ‘we would identify [Representative Pittman] however he identifies,’” Dever added.
In siding with Republican state lawmakers who drew the challenged election districts, Dever stressed that black voters had repeatedly demonstrated the ability to elect candidates of choice in crossover districts without needing districts engineered to be majority-black.
“The evidence shows substantial crossover voting,” Dever wrote, pointing to multiple contests in which black-preferred candidates prevailed in districts with a BVAP well under 50%.
Dever’s ruling emphasized that partisanship, not race, best explained voting behavior in the challenged districts. He cited election data showing that black-preferred candidates frequently won with comfortable margins in both crossover and coalition districts.
For Dever, such outcomes demonstrated that North Carolina voters, according to the US Supreme Court’s Allen v. Milligan (2023) decision, must “pull, haul, and trade to find common political ground,” undermining arguments for race-driven mapmaking.
“The evidence shows North Carolina (including northeast North Carolina) as a place ‘where racial animosity is absent although the interest of racial groups diverge’ and that politics—not race—explain the voting patterns,” Dever wrote.
“It is not 1965 or 1982 in North Carolina. It is 2025,” he wrote. “Due in part to societal progress on race and due in part to the VRA, North Carolina is a very different state politically and socially than it was in 1965 or 1982. Black voters in northeast North Carolina and throughout North Carolina have elected candidates of their choice (both white and black) with remarkable frequency and success for decades. Black elected officials in North Carolina are at or near-parity with their share of the statewide population.”
“North Carolina’s African-American voting age population is approximately 21.37% of the State and its total population is 22% of the State,’ he explained. “The North Carolina House has 23.3% African-American Representatives (28 out of 120). The North Carolina Senate has 20% African-American Senators (10 out of 50). Thus, African-American legislators hold 21.7% of the seats in the North Carolina General Assembly. These legislative election results arose without race in the computer or the odious practice of grouping voters by race.”
“Throughout North Carolina, black voters regularly join with their white counterparts to support common causes and candidates in local elections, state elections, and federal elections,” Dever wrote. “Plaintiffs ignore the progress that North Carolina has made over the past 60 years and seek to use Section 2 to sort voters by race in order to squeeze one more Democratic Senate district into the map. Congress did not amend Section 2 in 1982 for that purpose.”
