BATON ROUGE — A bill creating new congressional maps has been approved with minor changes to the districts in the Louisiana House of Representatives on Thursday, sending the bill back to the State Senate for a final vote before it heads to Gov. Jeff Landry's desk.

SB 121 passed the House with an amendment authored by Rep. Beau Beaullieu after more than seven hours of discussion. 

Changes to the maps were minor, keeping five Republican-leaning districts and one Democratic-leaning district.

Even before the map was discussed on the House floor, hundreds of concerned voters gathered at the Capitol, expressing their dismay at the creation of new maps, which civil rights activists and Democratic politicians say have disenfranchised Louisiana's Black voters. 

The scramble for redistricting started at the end of April when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled a congressional map with two majority-Black districts as unconstitutional due to an over-reliance on race. Of several proposed maps, SB 121 has advanced through the legislature over the past month of the already-active legislative session. 

Other states, including Alabama, have also taken up new maps in their legislatures.