The Day They Dimmed Our Light: How the Supreme Court Betrayed the Promise of the Voting Rights Act

My name is not important. What is important is where I come from. I was born and raised in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, in a house where my grandmother kept a Bible on the kitchen table and a list of poll tax receipts in a shoebox under her bed — proof that she had paid, again and again, for a right that should have been free. She voted anyway, every chance she got, dressed like she was going to church, because she said democracy deserved your best.

 I was small when Dr. King came through Alabama. I remember my father coming home from a community convening with Dr. King, and though I was small, I remember exactly what was in his eyes. Not fear. Pride. The kind of pride that fills a room. I did not fully understand then what he had been part of. I understand it now with every cell in my body. He was fighting so that I would never have to beg permission to be counted. 

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was the answer to his sacrifice and the sacrifice of thousands like him. It was not charity. It was a debt this nation finally, partially, paid. And for a season — my season, the season I came of age in — it worked. I watched Black officials take seats in chambers that had been barred to us since this republic was founded. I felt, for the first time, that the arc really was bending. Then the Supreme Court began dismantling it, ruling by ruling, year by year. 

In Shelby County v. Holder (2013), the Court killed the preclearance requirement — the provision that required states with a documented history of racial discrimination to get federal approval before changing voting laws. The majority decided, in effect, that the history of racial voter suppression was no longer relevant enough to justify the remedy. Within hours of that ruling, states began passing voter ID laws, purging rolls, closing polling locations, and redrawing maps. They had been waiting. In Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee (2021), the Court raised the bar so high for proving voting discrimination that the remaining enforcement tools became nearly toothless. 

And then, just this month — May 2026 — came Callais v. Landry. If Shelby was the wound and Brnovich was the salt poured into it, Callais is the door slamming shut while we are still inside the burning house. In this ruling, handed down in our own lifetime, in our own present moment, the Supreme Court dealt what voting rights scholars are already calling the most crippling blow to minority voting power in a generation. The Court severely curtailed the ability of voters to bring Section 2 claims challenging racially discriminatory maps — effectively shielding legislatures that draw lines to dilute Black political power from any meaningful legal accountability. The last real enforcement teeth the VRA had left were pulled. Louisiana's congressional map, drawn to diminish Black representation despite a prior federal court order, sat at the center of the case. The message from the Court's majority could not have been plainer: the era of federal protection for Black voting power is, for all practical purposes, over. The ink is barely dry. 

The wound is that fresh. I have spent my adult life as an advocate for racial and social justice, and I will tell you plainly: I have never felt a series of legal defeats the way I have felt these rulings. Not as policy matters — as wounds. Because I know what they mean in practice. I have seen it before. I have lived the before. The polling place closures came first — disproportionately in Black counties. Then the lines, hours long, in communities where people work double shifts and cannot afford to stand in them. Then the maps, redrawn with a precision that would have been admired by the architects of Jim Crow, cracking Black neighborhoods into irrelevance or packing them into single districts stripped of broader influence. Now, with Callais, even the courts that once offered refuge have largely closed their doors. 

I think about the children. I think about the little girl I was — full of possibility, watching the adults around me try to build a world worth inheriting. The children growing up right now are watching us too. They are watching to see whether we accept this quietly or whether we fight.

Every Black candidate who cannot win a fairly drawn race is a leader we will never know. Every policy made without Black representation is a harm we cannot fully count. This is not abstract. This is the shape of their futures being carved without their consent. And for the children not yet born — they will inherit whatever we allow to be taken from us without resistance.

But I did not grow up in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, watching my father come home with pride in his eyes after sitting in a room with Dr. King, to write an obituary for Black political power. I am writing a battle cry.

The midterm elections this year are a turning point. When the courts close their doors, the ballot box becomes the courtroom. Turnout in numbers that overwhelm suppression is the most powerful remedy left to us. Register. Recruit. Drive someone to the polls. Make noise that cannot be gerrymandered away.

The marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge did not wait for perfect conditions. Neither should we.