A crowd gathering at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, on March 9, 2025. The U.S. Supreme Court Wednesday gutted a key portion of the Voting Rights Act, passed after law enforcement attacked civil rights marchers on the bridge on March 7, 1965, an event known as Bloody Sunday. (Anna Barrett/Alabama Reflector)
Think of the millions of Alabamians who lived, loved and died under an apartheid government, a regime that lasted nearly a century, presiding over lynchings and mass disenfranchisement.
And now think of the thousands of men and women who fought, who spent decades battling to bring democracy to Alabama.
It’s a long list. There’s Jackson Giles, a postal worker making $500 a year who in 1903 took Alabama’s disenfranchisement all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. There’s Amelia Boynton Robinson, who registered Black voters in Selma in the 1930s. There’s Arthur Madison, who had his law license stripped for daring to organize voter registration efforts in Montgomery in 1944.
E.D Nixon, quietly building a movement in the Capital City. Rosa Parks, challenging Jim Crow in a dozen ways before she stepped on that city bus. Martin Luther King, Jr. and John Lewis. And so many more.
All risked their lives fighting for their clear constitutional rights. Most were denied victory. Many faced the wrath — and the assaults — of white mobs.
But those long, thankless efforts led to the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Democracy came to Alabama. At a very high cost.
A cost the U.S. Supreme Court now deems irrelevant.
Wednesday’s ruling in Louisiana v. Callais is another shameful link in a chain of tendentious and fatuous readings of black-letter law by the Roberts Court. Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion turns democracy into a ritual detached from results. Under the Callais ruling, Black southerners can vote. But white governments can drain those votes of meaning.
Voting in Alabama and throughout the South is racially polarized. Black southerners tend to vote for Democrats. White southerners tend to vote for Republicans. Majority-minority districts aim to ensure that Black Alabamians — who make up 27% of Alabama’s population — aren’t swamped by bloc voting.
Maps that give Black voters a chance to elect their preferred leaders are key to this. Until Wednesday, four decades of case law held that plaintiffs challenging political maps for racial discrimination had to show that a map had discriminatory effects, whether that was the purpose or not. Alito and five of his colleagues, though, ruled that future plaintiffs would have to show discriminatory intent in challenging maps. That’s almost impossible to prove.
Alito, though, would have you believe that southern governments — in some cases presently spewing hate about Muslims — are color-blind and have the best intentions. In his view, it seems Black voters’ struggles are a thing of the past.
“Black voters now participate in elections at similar rates as the rest of the electorate, even turning out at higher rates than white voters in two of the five most recent Presidential elections nationwide and in Louisiana,” he wrote.
Coming from anyone other than a Supreme Court justice, this would sound toddler-like in its naivete. As Justice Elena Kagan noted in her dissent, Republican governments can easily draw maps to dilute Black voting power and shut people out of government, no matter how much they vote. In this light, the only way for Black southerners to participate in government is to support a party that has neglected or belittled their concerns for six decades.
It’s hard to predict the immediate effects of the ruling. It’s likely that Republican governments in the South will pantomime democracy. They might not get rid of every majority-minority district. But so long as their cartographers don’t look into a camera and say “We are discriminating against Black voters; please put that in your lawsuit,” the U.S. Supreme Court will let them demolish as many of those districts as necessary to maintain control of government. And shut Black southerners out of their governance.
This is essential to understanding southern politics: State governments work against democracy. Alabama operates under a constitution framed in 1901, written by a fraudulently called convention, enacted by ballot-box stuffing by white elites, and promoted by men who viewed Black Alabamians and poor whites as threats.
Another key fact of southern politics: All that matters is power. Not public service. Not representation. Only the ability of those wielding authority to shape the world to their will.
The Voting Rights Act led us a few steps from that genteel nihilism. But the fact is, the Supreme Court has again put privilege before democracy and let southern governments decide what the U.S. Constitution actually says. It could be a long time before we repair the damage.
The only comfort is that southerners who came before us would not accept a pale simulacrum of freedom. And if we have any portion of their courage, Callais will not be the final word on democracy.
From Alabama Reflector Post Url: Visit
Author: Brian Lyman