The Supreme Court’s conservative majority ruled this week that states may not consider racial demographics when drawing congressional districts, a decision that legal experts and civil rights advocates warned will erode a cornerstone of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and reshape political representation for millions of Black Americans across the South.
The ruling, in a case challenging Louisiana’s congressional map, emerged from a challenge brought by plaintiffs including a young Black utility regulator, Davante Lewis, who argued the map unlawfully diluted Black voting strength. The court’s opinion described racism as a problem of the past, but critics from Mississippi to Tennessee called it “a defibrillator to the heart of Jim Crow,” as one Louisiana politician put it, and a step toward the kind of discriminatory redistricting the act was designed to prevent.
The Voting Rights Act, which for six decades has been the legal backbone of Black political participation, was already weakened by the Supreme Court’s 2013 Shelby County decision. Within a year of its original passage, more than 250,000 Black Americans had registered to vote. By 2024, nearly 22 million Black voters were registered nationwide, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The new ruling, legal analysts said, strips out another layer of protection by forbidding the consideration of race even when it is the central factor in achieving fair representation.
For Edward Blackmon Jr., the cycle feels familiar. At 16, he was arrested during a voting rights protest in his Mississippi hometown of Canton, loaded with schoolmates into a truck once used to haul chickens, and held for three nights in an overcrowded jail cell. He went on to become a civil rights lawyer and one of the first Black lawmakers elected to the Mississippi legislature since Reconstruction. Now 78, Blackmon said he was resigned to the reality that the fight of his youth is not over. “It’s just another cycle — an ongoing struggle without a foreseeable ending,” he said.
His son, Bradford Blackmon, a 37-year-old state senator, said the way political lines are drawn “shapes who has a real chance before anyone ever votes.” He added, “It’s just sad that we made progress and then they are always trying to roll it back.”
Other Black elected officials echoed those concerns. Congressman Jonathan Jackson, a 60-year-old Illinois Democrat and the son of Jesse Jackson Sr., said the idea that his children could grow up with fewer protections than he had was “surreal and devastating.” In Alabama, Charles Mauldin, who was beaten by law enforcement as a teenager on the 1965 Edmund Pettus Bridge protest known as Bloody Sunday, said he was disappointed but not surprised. “They’ve been chipping away at the 1965 Voting Rights Act for the last 60 years,” Mauldin said.
In Louisiana, the plaintiffs in the redistricting case warned of direct consequences. Davante Lewis, a 34-year-old Democrat who serves on the state’s utility regulatory board, said he expects districts could be redrawn to make it harder for candidates like him to win. “They can target my communities … to ensure that I can’t get to an elected office,” Lewis told the Associated Press.
Jamie Davis, a Black farmer in northeast Louisiana running for U.S. Senate as a Democrat, said the ruling risks discouraging voters already skeptical that their voices matter. “I want to be optimistic, but how can you be optimistic when voter turnout in the past election cycles has been really low,” Davis said.
In Tennessee, state Rep. Justin Pearson, who represents Memphis and is running for Congress, said people who struggled to pass the Voting Rights Act are “shocked and devastated that they’re having to relitigate the same fights that they fought 60 years ago.” But he predicted that the push to reduce Black representation could “reinvigorate a civil rights movement in the South that demands equal representation, that demands fairness, that demands justice and equality.”
Supporters of the Supreme Court ruling said it reinforces a race-neutral approach to redistricting and that political lines should not be drawn primarily based on race. Mississippi state Rep. Bryant Clark said that view ignores how race and party align in the state. With Black Mississippians making up about 38% of the population and overwhelmingly voting Democratic, he said race and party are often indistinguishable. “It’s just a roundabout way to basically legalize racially discriminatory redistricting in the state,” Clark said.
In 1967, his father, Robert Clark Jr., became the first Black lawmaker elected to the Mississippi Legislature since Reconstruction. The elder Clark’s path, like Blackmon’s, was built on the Voting Rights Act. Edward Blackmon Jr. recalled how federal officials once set up registration tables on downtown streets so Black residents could sign up to vote without facing intimidation from local authorities. He and other lawyers used the law to challenge at-large election systems that prevented Black communities from electing candidates of their choice. “Without the Voting Rights Act, Mississippi would look so much different than it looks now,” Blackmon said.