Body
Civil rights leaders and lawmakers are planning rallies and tribute events in Alabama this weekend, framing the gatherings as a new phase in the fight over Black political representation after the Supreme Court further weakened the Voting Rights Act. Organizers said the events are aimed at defending congressional and other district maps that have allowed nonwhite voters to choose more of their elected leaders for decades.
NAACP President Derrick Johnson described the message behind the Alabama effort as a call to act quickly. “We have to respond as quickly as possible,” Johnson told The Associated Press, adding that, in his view, the real question is how the country addresses what he said is an effort to shrink civil rights backwards into “a 1950s reality.” Johnson said the NAACP—founded more than a century ago and long active in legal and legislative fights over Black political rights—was among the groups joining a Saturday rally and related events planned in Selma and Montgomery.
Organizers said the Alabama schedule is deliberately connected to the Civil Rights Movement era: events in Selma, where voting rights advocates were attacked by white law enforcement officers on “Bloody Sunday,” and a rescheduled march that concluded two weeks later in Montgomery. They said, however, that this weekend’s effort is not the pinnacle of a single unified campaign but an effort to catalyze a renewed push after the Supreme Court’s most recent change to voting-rights rules on district drawing.
The activists’ focus is on the Supreme Court decision, two weeks earlier, that ended the Voting Rights Act’s race-conscious framework for drawing congressional and other districts. Organizers and leaders said they are trying to respond to a shift that, in their view, would make it harder to challenge maps where race has historically played a central role in determining whether minority voters can elect candidates of their choice.
Jared Evans, of the Louisiana-based Power Coalition for Equity and Justice, said the Voting Rights Act had been central to the civil-rights movement’s legal and legislative wins. “The VRA ‘was the foundational nucleus of the Civil Rights Movement,’” Evans said, and he argued that the recent Supreme Court changes and earlier rollbacks have removed critical tools. Evans pointed to the Louisiana case decided by the court and to the 2013 Shelby v. Holder ruling, saying those decisions weakened federal oversight of election procedures in places with a history of discrimination.
Georgia Sen. Raphael Warnock, senior pastor of Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church—where Martin Luther King Jr. once preached—told his congregation from the pulpit that the outcome amounts to “Jim Crow in new clothes.” Warnock argued that people need “political power,” “economic power” and “personal power,” and he said opponents understand that “your voice matters,” describing their actions as an attempt to diminish it.
The organizers’ lawmakers said their political objectives include both legislative action and broader mobilization. U.S. Rep. Terri Sewell, who represents Selma, Alabama, said an immediate priority for Democrats is to “reform and reintroduce” the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Act. Sewell also said Democrats want to “completely” eliminate partisan gerrymandering and that the legislation would “bring back pre-clearance,” the federal approval requirement that the court struck down in the wake of Shelby.
Sewell’s remarks reflected a concern that redistricting could threaten her own seat, as Alabama and other states act on new district-drawing rules. The AP reported that organizers said they have watched closely as Republican-led state legislatures moved after the Supreme Court’s decision—reverting to majority-Black district maps in some places while scrapping additional districts that lower federal courts had required under prior, now-reversed Voting Rights Act interpretations.
Organizers said Alabama and Louisiana lawmakers moved to a single majority-Black district each, scrapping a second district ordered by lower federal courts under the earlier VRA interpretation. They also cited Tennessee’s decision to split greater Memphis into three districts, a move Evans called a racial gerrymander the court previously forbade. In addition, organizers said Florida and Texas proceeded with redistricting before the ruling, while Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp called a June session to redraw congressional lines for the 2028 cycle, and Mississippi and South Carolina delayed action.
The leaders and activists also said the fight extends beyond congressional races. Johnson said voters should view the struggle as more than partisan conflict or a regional battle over race, while Sewell and others framed the fight over maps as connected to broader rights and access. Johnson said the issue is “not a Black problem,” adding, “That’s an American problem,” and he argued that white conservatives want to curtail civil rights across a range that he tied to the outcomes of elections.
Evans said the campaign ahead would involve a multi-level political effort, predicting conservatives would target additional legislative seats, moving from district lines to state house and state senate elections and then to local contests. Organizers also acknowledged the difficulty of coordinating many groups and galvanizing voters on redistricting and gerrymandering, but Johnson described momentum, saying he was on an organizing call in Mississippi that had 8,000 participants and Evans pointed to packed hallways in state capitols in Baton Rouge and Nashville.
Johnson said there is no single leader or modern blueprint that replicates the 1950s and 1960s civil-rights movement. He said even during the era of Martin Luther King Jr. there was “tension around strategy,” but that people still managed to “get directly in the right place.” Organizers said they are banking on a similarly sustained campaign as they seek to defend Black political representation in the wake of the court’s shift to narrower redistricting rules.