On Wednesday, in a 6-3 decision, drawn along deep ideological divisions, the United States Supreme Court gutted a major provision of the Voting Rights Act (VRA), a law passed by Congress in 1965—and reauthorized by Congress over the decades that followed—to ensure the protection of voting rights for disenfranchised Black voters. This landmark legislation, signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson, was in direct response to a nefarious (and lingering) history of voter suppression, particularly in the American south.  

American history is littered with legal and extra-legal policies and practices to discourage and disenfranchise Black Americans from voting; they were unabashedly vile and unapologetically violent. In Mississippi, Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and James Chaney—three young civil rights advocates—were brutally murdered in response to their efforts to register Black voters, in 1964. Their deaths were dramatized in the 1988 film Mississippi Burning. Famously, civil rights icon Fannie Lou Hamer explained that her courage to come forward and press for voting rights was inspired by these young, slain voting rights advocates. 

When Hamer and a group of Black women attempted to vote, they were met by police violence. Arrested and placed in a jail with men, guards instructed the men to beat the women. Unsatisfied with the blunt force against Hamer, a guard took a weapon and began beating her on the head. As she later informed the Democratic National Convention, these practices reduced her and other women to second-class citizenship.

In Alabama, a few months before the VRA was signed into law in 1965, Jimmie Lee Jackson, Viola Liuzzo, and Reverend James Reeb were killed in response to their advocacy for Black voting rights. Jackson, a 26-year-old deacon, was shot by an Alabama state trooper. Reeb, a father of four, was beaten by a group of white men. And Liuzzo, a young white mother of five who had driven down from Detroit to join the march from Selma to Montgomery for voting rights, was killed by members of the Ku Klux Klan.

These acts and many others represented the worst instincts for a country that claimed equality and liberty for all its citizens through the Fourteenth Amendment and the establishment and protection of voting rights for Black Americans in the Fifteenth Amendment. The point was to make sure that Black people would not have representation in Congress or in state legislatures.

Over the course of American history, racial suppression and discrimination in voting have been undeniable and enduring features of national politics, albeit with legislative and constitutional efforts to stamp them out.

Louisiana has been a notorious player in racialized voter suppression through overt and covert means dating back to the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment. Barely two months after its ratification, on September 28, 1868, white residents of a Louisiana town murdered “hundreds of people” in a backlash to constitutional reconstruction. For two weeks, “white mobs terrorized the Black community.” According to reports, “the fear was so great that Black people….tied red strings around their arms to signify to white patrols that they had surrendered” from voting. In the end roughly “200 Black people were dead,” along with six white people.

Now, in Louisiana v. Callais, a decision authored by Justice Samuel Alito, the court has effectively eviscerated Section 2 of the VRA, what many constitutional law and voting rights experts consider the last remaining cudgel against voter suppression in the United States. While the court did not rule Section 2 to be unconstitutional—its continued existence may be more illusory than real. 

Specifically, Section 2 prohibits “voting practices or procedures that discriminate on the basis of race, color, or membership in one of the language minority groups.” Until Wednesday, the Supreme Court had consistently affirmed its constitutionality and importance in American democracy, including most recently in its 2023 decision Allen v. Milligan, in which the court ruled that gerrymandered maps that dilute Black voting power violate Section 2 of the VRA and are unconstitutional.

The underlying facts of Callais date back to the aftermath of the 2020 census, when the Republican-controlled legislature redrew voting maps that created only one majority Black district, despite Black people comprising one-third of the state’s population. Such maps have been tossed out in the past under Section 2. Louisiana redrew the map, creating a second majority Black district. However, the new map was challenged by a self-described “non-African American” group that claimed it violated the Constitution’s prohibition on racial discrimination.

The Supreme Court originally heard the case last term. However, in a highly unusual “departure from their normal practice,” the justices declined to rule on the merits, instead requesting that the lawyers reargue the case, including answering the specific question regarding the constitutionality of Section 2.

Justice Alito’s majority opinion now places an onerous burden on those who would challenge maps that dilute all Black voting power. According to Justice Alito, “allowing race to play any part in government decision-making represents a departure from the constitutional rule that applies in almost every other context.” In other words, short of a smoking gun proving racial intent to exclude Black voters or lawmakers engaging in overt racism in connection with redistricting, the court is unwilling to perceive or remedy voting practices such as drawing maps to exclude Black votes as discriminatory or discrimination worthy of a legal fix. 

Over the long term, we can anticipate such a ruling will have widespread repercussions, absent Congressional action to resurrect and strenghten voting rights protections. 

Most pundits read Callais as a strike against racial enfranchisement. It is. But all women should be concerned too, especially given state and federal efforts to disenfranchise women’s voting power.  

Women’s equality and full citizenship depend on their political force, authority, and power. In fact, voter exclusion was never about men alone. And much is at stake for women in state and federal elections, including reproductive rights, the environment, housing, childcare affordability, fair pay, protections for caregivers, immigrant rights, and healthcare access. Further, as the National Women’s Law Center has pointed out, “voting restrictions often go hand in hand with other rollbacks.”

In the past, voter suppression tactics looked like the so-called “all-white primaries” that circumvented the Fifteenth Amendment, by declaring in various southern states that primaries were “for white voters only”; literacy tests that barred those who could not read or write from voting (notably it was a criminal act in most southern states for Black people to read or write or to be taught to do so prior to the Civil War); poll taxes that required citizens to pay a fee to vote; and grandfather clauses—that protected illiterate white people’s ability to vote if their grandfathers could vote prior to the Civil War.

No longer are Black people subject to Jim Crow-era extra-legal practices of guessing the number of jelly beans in a jar in order to cast a vote. Nor are Black people pressured to estimate the number of bubbles on a bar of soap, or recite states’ constitutions by memory as a condition of voting. 

Today’s voter suppression includes kicking people off of the voter rolls when their names are “Hispanic-sounding,” disenfranchising them when they are in college through voter identification laws, or shuttering thousands of polling places across the nation, disenfranchising people without access to transportation and making it more difficult for primary caregivers to easily and accessibly vote. Or look no further than the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act (SAVE Act), which would require that voter registration match birth certificates or passports, essentially disenfranchising millions of women who use their spouse’s last names or do not have passports.  

As the National Women’s Law Center notes, the VRA “transformed” Black women’s political power. That power helped to “fuel some of the most important advances for gender equity in our country’s history, including stronger civil rights in the workplace, policies to help women gain financial independence, and protections for women and girls in schools.” But as we have seen with recent Supreme Court rulings, those protections are not permanent, and sustained pressure and activism is necessary. 

I’ve called for a Third Reconstruction that secures important rights for women, including a Reproductive Justice Bill of Rights. But, we must not wait for those legislative actions to come to pass. The midterm elections in the fall will offer the next opportunity for voters to have their concerns heard—we must show up and send the message that our votes matter.