Of all the crummy things the U.S. Supreme Court majority has done including overturning Roe v. Wade and issuing the Trump immunity decision, destroying the Voting Rights Act ranks at the top. The decision in the case of Louisiana v. Callais was epically bad. It is almost Roger Taney-level bad. He was the author of the Dred Scott decision. It is like the Court has entirely lost track of the value of equality, a fundamental American value.
The Court demolished Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the only piece of the Act that had been left after earlier demolition. In 2013, in the Shelby County case, they eviscerated Section 5, the pre-clearance section. At that time, Chief Justice Roberts had reassured that Section 2 was “permanent” and would remain in place and be applied nationwide.
To appreciate how bad this decision is, it is necessary to revisit why the Voting Rights Act has been so important. Since Reconstruction until the 1960s, black people in the South were denied the right to vote. Literacy tests, poll taxes and voter intimidation were the norm, effectively preventing exercise of the franchise. Before the Voting Rights Act, only 7% of Mississippi’s Black people were registered to vote even though they comprised 40% of the state’s population. All the Southern states had very low percentage of their Black population able to vote.
No one knows how many Black bodies disappeared forever into the rivers and swamps of the South because those individuals, who were considered too uppity, wanted to vote. Nor do we know how many of those who were lynched ended up in that situation because they had tried to vote. Southern states then had no Black representation. White supremacy brutally ruled for almost 100 years.
When the Voting Rights Act passed in 1965, it was because of the Civil Rights movement. So much advocacy, effort, blood and tears went into getting that law passed. The Court majority was oblivious to that history. President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act after Bloody Sunday and people like John Lewis making “good trouble.”
The Voting Rights Act literally changed the face of Southern politics. Just three years after the Act passed, Black voters registered in the South increased by 1.3 million people. By 1968, 60% of eligible black voters were registered, up from 7% in 1965.
To stay in power in the South, white supremacists changed tactics. They still worked to suppress the black vote. They now called themselves “conservatives” and they retooled the charges of voter fraud and corruption. These were the same charges earlier generations of white supremacists, the former Confederates, had employed during Reconstruction against Black elected officials and their white allies to undermine their legitimacy.
It is forgotten now but in 1985, Jeff Sessions, then U.S. Attorney in Alabama, used the voter fraud allegation against Black defendants, including Albert Turner, a former aide to Martin Luther King Jr. who had been beaten on Bloody Sunday. Turner had been leading voter registration drives. Sessions brought a case against the Marion Three (which included Turner and his wife). When questioned that he only targeted Black people, Sessions said:
“We will respond to any substantiated charge of voter fraud against whites or blacks. I know of no charges against white election officials in our jurisdiction.”
The Marion Three were acquitted by a federal jury. Turner explained his targeting: “I stand in the way of the white power structure.” The voter fraud narrative persists as a popular Republican tactic to winnow down the Black vote. Trump has indulged the same narrative about the 2020 election complaining about places with large Black voter concentrations.
Southern white racists have also used the tactic of voter caging since the 1980s. That was a practice of sending mail to addresses on the voter rolls, compiling a list of the mail that was returned undelivered and purging voters on th list on the grounds that they don’t legally reside at their registered addresses. Republicans justified voter caging as a way to identify voter fraud but they focused their efforts on black and Latino neighborhoods only. Republicans used caging to eliminate thousands of minority voters from the rolls. They know that in close races, keeping the minority vote down could be decisive.
Contrary to the Supreme Court majority’s assumption both in Shelby County and Callais that things have changed in the South, those justices are living in a fantasy land. The Southern white power structure is getting rid of majority minority districts and they are gerrymandering like it was 1877. They fight equality tooth and nail and they never stopped fighting it. The same Jim Crow racism that ruled the South for much of American history has not gone away.
What the Supreme Court majority did in Callais was a white power grab. They did not have to decide the case this early in the term. They decided Callais to allow southern states time to re-district in 2026. In the past, the Court had said maps should not be redrawn close to an election but not this year. Callais was a gift to Donald Trump and his maximum gerrymandering scheme. Almost the minute Callais was decided, we saw a greatly expanded gerrymandering effort across many Southern states. These states are hell-bent on reducing black legislative representation to nothing.
All the Supreme Court’s anti-equality efforts are an affront to the Reconstruction era constitutional amendments, especially the Fifteenth Amendment.
In the name of colorblindness, the Supreme Court has given constitutional cover to racist policies and practices. We are seeing a counter-revolution against the civil rights movement. Never has the need for reforming the Supreme Court been more apparent.
Jonathan P. Baird lives in Wilmot.