In W.E.B. Du Bois’ book of history “Black Reconstruction,” about the broken promises of emancipation and the decades of terror that followed the withdrawal of federal troops that had been sent to protect the South’s freedmen, that period of American history is distilled into a single devastating sentence: “The slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery.”
I argued the Louisiana v. Callais case before the U.S. Supreme Court on behalf of Black voters.
In October, I argued the Louisiana v. Callais case before the U.S. Supreme Court on behalf of Black voters in Louisiana. My argument was simple: Louisiana had denied Black voters a fair chance at electing representatives of their choosing by deliberately “packing and cracking” them across congressional districts. The map that remedied this discrimination was both constitutional and legally required.
The Supreme Court’s conservative majority disagreed. Its 6-3 decision, rendered at the end of April, reminds us that Du Bois was not just writing about one chapter of history. He was observing a pattern that has come to define Black Americans’ long struggle for civil rights in America: short bursts of progress followed by long periods of setbacks and retrenchment. Expansion of rights followed by efforts to claw them back. Moments of hope followed by massive betrayal.
The passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965 was a watershed moment — one that finally made real the promise of American democracy. For the first time since Reconstruction, Black Americans had the opportunity (on relatively equal footing) to decide who represents them and what policies govern their communities. And they seized it.
When the Voting Rights Act was passed, there were only six Black members of Congress. Within a decade, there were 18, including Republican Sen. Edward Brooke of Massachusetts, the first Black senator since Reconstruction. Similar gains occurred downballot as well. Fewer than 100 Black Americans held elected office in the South in 1965; within five years, that figure ballooned to more than 500. During the 1960s and ’70s, the racial gap in voter registration across the South fell from almost 30 percentage points to 8.
That progress was not accidental. It was the direct result of the Voting Rights Act, especially Section 2, which prohibited voting practices that diluted the power of Black voters. This meant that states could not use voting maps that fractured or packed communities of color to minimize their political power. Crucially, in order to challenge discriminatory maps, voters did not have to prove discriminatory intent. It was enough to show their pernicious, discriminatory effect.
But in Louisiana v. Callais, the Supreme Court erected such an inordinate barrier to access that protection as to render it meaningless. The conservative majority raised the bar for proving racial vote dilution, making it almost impossible for voters to challenge discriminatory maps. Under the new framework, voters can only successfully challenge a discriminatory map if they prove intent — an impossibly high standard to meet in a time when lawmakers no longer say the quiet part out loud, a standard Congress rejected outright in 1982 when the Supreme Court first attempted to distort the meaning of the VRA. In practice, this means states can use partisan goals as a wholesale excuse to deny Black voters a voice in their government.
The most consequential voting rights law in American history has been reduced to ashes.
The most consequential voting rights law in American history has been reduced to ashes, and the Supreme Court’s increasingly extremist majority wielded the blowtorch — first in 2013 in Shelby County v. Holder, then in 2021 in Brnovich v. DNC, and finally in Louisiana v. Callais.
As I warned in oral arguments, the consequences of this arson attack would be swift and dire. Within hours of the decision, Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, advanced a map that redrew 21 of its 28 congressional districts and signed it into law.
Thursday, Tennessee Republicans passed a new map that breaks up Memphis, a majority-Black city, into three different congressional districts, a deliberate effort to eliminate the state’s one Democratic-held seat. Alabama is poised to do the same. And the governor of Louisiana has postponed congressional primary elections that began with the mailing of absentee ballots on April 1.
Dozens of majority-minority districts are already or at risk of being wiped off the map.
This is what America looks like when it fails to protect its progress: fierce backlash, partisan retrenchment, brass knuckle tactics. Enemies of that progress are clawing back the gains Black and brown communities have made by whatever means necessary.
Instead of poll taxes and literacy tests, we have gerrymandered districts and a process of packing and cracking voters of color. But make no mistake, the goal is the same: dilute the power of Black and brown voters. Shrink the electorate. Ensure the outcome before a single vote is cast.
But although the Supreme Court has diminished our power, it has not extinguished it. Our fundamental right to vote remains — and with it, the most powerful tool a citizen possesses in a democracy. The Voting Rights Act was a product of the halls of Congress, but it was not born there. It was born on a bridge in Selma, Alabama, where the sight of peaceful marchers met with billy clubs and tear gas shocked the conscience of a nation and forced its leaders to act.
The power of the people will always be greater than the people in power.
It has always been the ordinary Americans who have bent the arc of this country toward justice — yes, on a bridge in Selma and at so many other places throughout history: a lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina; a shirtwaist factory in New York City; a bar in Greenwich Village.
That is the tradition we inherit. And it is the one we must now honor and harness. Our collective power — the power of the people — will always be greater than the people in power. The only question is, how will we use it?
Will we join the proud tradition of our ancestors in shared struggle and shared sacrifice as we shape this country into a better version of itself — one more aligned with its democratic ideals? By agitating and mobilizing and organizing for fair maps, equal protection and the full promise of a multiracial democracy? Or will we let Louisiana v Callais be the end of the story, the final chapter in a short-lived saga of a fledgling multiracial democracy?
The Supreme Court has made its decision. Now we, the people, must make ours.
Janai S. Nelson is president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.