The Voting Rights Act Survived Sixty Years. The Supreme Court Just Hollowed It Out.

By Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson

The Supreme Court did the cowards’ thing today.

In a 6–3 decision along party lines in Louisiana v. Callais, the Court ruled that Louisiana’s congressional map, which created a second majority-Black district, is an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. Justice Samuel Alito wrote the opinion. Chief Justice Roberts joined him, along with Justices Thomas, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett. Justice Kagan wrote a dissent, joined by Justices Sotomayor and Jackson, and read it aloud from the bench. Justices only do that when they want a ruling marked, in the historical record, as deeply wrong.

She was right to mark it.

Here is what the Court did. They did not strike down Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. They left it on the books, which lets a lot of people in suits go on television and say the law is still standing. What they did instead was empty it out. From here on, if we want to challenge a redistricting map under Section 2, we cannot present an illustrative map that accounts for race. We have to prove that a race-neutral computer-drawn map would have produced the same district we are asking for. We have to prove the state acted with intentional racial discrimination. We have to do all of this against a backdrop where, as Justice Kagan put it from the bench, the majority is “making the world safe for partisan gerrymanders.”

This is the same intent test the Court tried to impose forty-six years ago in City of Mobile v. Bolden. Congress saw what the Court did and overruled it. In 1982, on a bipartisan vote, Congress amended Section 2 to make it clear: a redistricting plan that results in vote dilution, that has the effect of diluting Black political power, is enough. Intent is not the standard. Effects are the standard. That is what Congress wrote, and that is what every federal court has applied for forty-three years.

The six justices in today’s majority decided they get to overrule Congress.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965, and especially Section 2 as Congress amended it in 1982, is the most successful instrument Black people in this country have ever had for getting fair elected representation in government. Not the only one. The most successful one. Every majority-Black congressional district in the South, every majority-Black state legislative seat in Alabama, Louisiana, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas, every city council seat that exists because someone organized, sued, and won, traces back to that law. The New York Times estimates that as many as twelve House seats currently held by Democrats, most of them held by Black members of Congress, could flip under what the Court did today. That is before the Republican-controlled state legislatures get their hands on the maps. Which they will. Which they are already doing.

The South will lose the most (which is incredibly frustrating considering we ran the alarm about attacks on voting rights ages ago…folks should listen when we say “As goes the South…”).

The story we are about to be told is that the Court was forced into this by the Constitution. That race-conscious remedies for race-based harm are themselves unconstitutional. That the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments somehow forbid the very thing they were written to make possible. This is a lie, and it is not a small one. The men who ratified the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments passed race-conscious legislation in the same breath. The Freedmen’s Bureau was race-conscious. Reconstruction was race-conscious. The whole point of those amendments was to permit, and to require, race-conscious remedies for centuries of race-based harm. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying.

The second story we will be told is that the Voting Rights Act was a gift. That it was given to us. That the Supreme Court, having given it, can now take it back.

This is also a lie.

Nobody gave us the Voting Rights Act. Our people fought and made it happen.

We won it because Fannie Lou Hamer, a Mississippi sharecropper who had been beaten so badly in a Winona jail cell that she carried kidney damage and a limp the rest of her life, sat down in front of the Credentials Committee at the 1964 Democratic National Convention and in detail the country had never been forced to hear, described what white men did to Black women who tried to register to vote. She asked the country, on live television, “Is this America?” President Johnson tried to cut her testimony off the air with a press conference. The networks played it that night anyway. People in the North watched it in their living rooms. The country couldn’t unsee it. The Voting Rights Act was eleven months away.

We won it because Amelia Boynton Robinson, a sixty-year-old organizer with the Dallas County Voters League who had been registering Black people to vote in Selma since the 1930s, marched in the front rows on the Edmund Pettus Bridge on March 7, 1965. They beat her unconscious. They tear-gassed her. They left her body on that bridge for the cameras to find. Two weeks later, she was on the platform in Montgomery when the third march arrived. Fifty years later, in 2015, she crossed that same bridge holding hands with a Black president. She lived to be a hundred and ten.

We won it because Diane Nash kept organizing after Birmingham. We won it because John Lewis, twenty-five years old, had his skull fractured on the Edmund Pettus Bridge and walked back across it every year for the rest of his life. We won it because Bob Moses, Charlie Cobb, and all the badass women of SNCC sat in Mississippi when nobody else would. We won it because Ella Baker built the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and SNCC and trained more Black freedom workers than anybody else in the country. We won it because hundreds of organizers whose names you do not know sat in church basements and freedom houses and back porches across the Black South, and they did the work, and the work was the building of political power inside a system that had spent three hundred years trying to keep Black people out of it.

The Supreme Court did not give us that. The Supreme Court cannot take what was never theirs to give.

Six lawyers in robes do not get to decide whether Black people in Tennessee, Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, the Carolinas, or anywhere else in this country have political power. The Court has been telling us for thirteen years what they think of our power. Shelby County v. Holder in 2013 gutted preclearance. Brnovich, in 2021, weakened Section 2’s vote denial protections. Allen v. Milligan in 2023 looked like a reprieve. It was a feint. They were waiting for Callais. They’re not done. Anyone paying attention knows they aren’t done.

The thing nobody in those robes seems to understand is that we have been here before.

We have been here when the Court told us in Plessy that segregation was the law of the land. We were here when the Court told us in Cruikshank that the federal government could not protect us from racial massacres. We have been here when the Court told us our votes didn’t count, our marriages didn't count, our schools didn't count, our bodies didn't count.

Every time, together, we organized our way out.

Not because the courts came around. Because we built the political power that made the courts irrelevant to the question of whether we would be free. We built it in churches. We built it in unions. We built it in HBCUs. We built it in tenant associations, beauty shops, barbershops, rural co-ops, freedom schools (shoutout to Septima Clark), and Black mamas’ kitchens. We built it in the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which forced the country to see what Mississippi was, the power of the Black Freedom Movement, what the Democratic Party would protect (the all-white delegation), and what it wouldn’t (Black political participation in Mississippi).

We are going to build political power again.

The Civil Rights Movement didn’t start in the Supreme Court. It won’t end there either.

What we do now is what we have always done. We organize. We register voters wherever we can. We run candidates. We build mass movements that the Court cannot rule against because the power is in the streets, in our precincts, in our places of worship, in our union halls, in the group chats, in the WhatsApp threads of Black women who have always been the ones holding this country together.

We talk to the eighty-nine million people who did not vote in 2024. Not to shame them. To organize with them. To build with the ones who were locked out, the ones who were structurally blocked, the ones who concluded the system was not for them, and were, in significant respects, correct. The Court just confirmed it. Our job is to build something worth showing up for.

We protect the people who are about to be redistricted out of representation. We support the legal fights that are still possible under what is left of the law. We back state and local fights, where most of the action will be.

And we tell the truth, the whole truth, about what happened today. The Supreme Court took the most successful instrument of Black political power in modern American history and broke it on purpose, on a Wednesday in April, on a 6–3 party-line vote, while most of the country was scrolling past. They wanted us to miss it. They wanted us tired. They want us to feel scattered, overwhelmed, demobilized, and powerless.

But we remember…

We’ve been here before.

We get to work.

Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson is a movement strategist, public speaker, facilitator, and consultant. She is the founder of Utopian Visions LLC, runs Experiments4Good, and built WeAct (weactnow.com). She is rooted in Black liberation, Southern and Appalachian organizing traditions, and faith-rooted community work. She is based in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

P.S. — Tonight, while this post is fresh: tomorrow night, April 30, at 8pm ET, LDF, Transformative Justice Coalition, ACLU, Indivisible, and a coalition of voting rights organizations are convening an emergency mass call. Hold the time. **REGISTER FOR THE CALL →**