Otis Wilson had enough with talking and decided to go to court.

His Louisiana town of St. Francisville, north of Baton Rouge, had long elected alderpersons as at-large representatives for a single, town-wide district. In places where elections are racially polarized, that kind of voting system can result in a white majority's votes drowning out the ballots of voters of color, courts have found .

"I filed a lawsuit because we had no Blacks at all on the council. And I tried to talk to the council and the mayor to work something out, and it didn't," says Wilson, a now-retired school bus driver, who led a group of other Black voters to sue St. Francisville officials in 1992.

Their lawsuit was among the hundreds of cases that private individuals and groups have brought to enforce protec

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