Written By Irving Joyner
The April 29, 2026, decision by the US Supreme Court in Louisiana v. Callais has added a fatal nail in the coffin of the 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA). In that 6-3 decision, authored by Samuel Alito, the Court determined that the addition of a majority-minority congressional District in that state was not supported by evidence that its enactment resulted from intentional racial animus by that State’s Legislature. The Louisiana Legislature’s action was in response to a prior determination by the Federal District Court that the failure to add a second majority-minority district within the State was a violation of the VRA. That prior decision concluded that 1/3 of Louisiana’s population was composed of African Americans and the failure to create a second majority-minority district constituted voter dilution.
In a separate legal challenge to the creation of this second district lodged by White plaintiffs, the Supreme Court now concluded that the State Legislature did not have legal authority to create a second majority-minority district and that the “effects test,” which was created by the VRA, would not support this districting enactment. Based on its population, Louisiana is presently allocated six seats in Congress and now has only one majority-minority district.
In reaching this decision, Alito relied upon the unsupported myth that the political climate for African Americans in the South is materially different today than it was in 1965 when the VRA was enacted. Alito credited the presence of the VRA for changing the political reality for African Americans, where States, particularly southern states, do not continue to engage in “an insidious and pervasive evil” defiance of the federal constitution by denying the right to vote to African Americans. According to Alito, the VRA “led to ‘great strides’ in the ensuing decades: ’voting tests were abolished, disparities in voter registration and turnout due to race were erased and African Americans attained political office in record number.” Because of this progress, Alito determined that the significant legal protections provided by the VRA were no longer necessary and would allow a litigant to easily exploit Section 2 of the VRA by “repackaging a partisan-gerrymandering claim as a racial-gerrymandering claim.”
Alito is certainly correct about the success of the VRA in allowing wide-spread participation in the political process by African Americans and other racial minorities, but that reality does not justify the gutting of the VRA. It is worth mentioning that when the VRA was enacted, only four African Americans were elected members of Congress. No racial minority had served on the US Supreme Court and none had been elected as a Governor of a State nor as President of the country.
In North Carolina, the electoral reality was more pronounced and revealing than within the national government. Since the 1898 Wilmington racial massacre, when the right to vote was first taken from African Americans in this State, no African American had been elected to serve in Congress, and none had been elected as a member of the North Carolina General Assembly or as a Judge at any level of the Judiciary. Since 1898, the first African American to be elected to any position in North Carolina was Rev. Kenneth William, who was elected as a City Council member in Winston Salem, and he only served two terms because the General Assembly outlawed single-member voting districts. By 1965, only ten African Americans had been elected to any official position in the State and then they were only elected to serve on a town council or as a member of a Board of Education. In fact, when the VRA was enacted in 1965, only 21% of eligible African Americans were registered to vote due to discriminatory conduct by White voting officials and the reality and threat of physical violence. It would not be until 1968 that a lone African American, Henry Frye, was elected as a member of the General Assembly.
I grew up in “Jim Crow” North Carolina and witnessed my grandparents in their futile efforts to register to vote prior to the enactment of the VRA. I was a “front row” observer of the pain that they endured as they sought to be treated and appreciated as a “first class” citizen, and able to fully benefit from the privileges which are associated with citizenship. During those days, there were no laws which sought to promote or protect the right of African Americans to vote or to participate as a full citizen within this State. Those were legally dark days in this State when African Americans possessed no rights which Whites respected or required to adhere. As was articulated by Judge Jim Wynn in the successful NC NAACP v. McCrory litigation, if you don’t have the right to vote, you can’t protect any of the other constitutional rights or benefits of the democracy to which you are entitled.
The VRA slowly changed that dark reality for African Americans and other racial minorities. Political success, as promised by the Constitutions and laws of this Country and State, was slowly obtained. But for African Americans to achieve even a modicum of success in the political arena, the struggle required constant legal and organizing challenges to counter systematic efforts by right-wing conservative legislators and Judges who stubbornly and vigorously fought every day to continue their racist actions to prevent African Americans from enforcing provisions of the VRA.
The progress that was achieved by African American resulted from hard-fought organizing and bruising litigation battles, which were fought every day and which continues today. At no point did these battles suggest that the political environment had become less racially “entrenched” in its discriminatory intentions to minimize voting rights for African Americans or more accepting of equal voting opportunities as Alito suggested in his misplaced opinion. African Americans were never able to relax, sit back and enjoy the benefits of the pursuit of a full participatory citizenship. It is that continuing fight for full citizenship that Alito and his concurring colleagues were unable or unwilling to understand and accept. That includes the long-serving and racially antagonistic Clarence Thomas.
While promoting the myth of voting progress, the Supreme Court created several legal “slippery slopes” that were designed to destroy the VRA. This effort to defang the VRA picked up steam with the Shelby County v. Holder decision which was issued by the Court in 2013. That decision gutted Section 5 of the VRA. That slippery slope became more perilous and unyielding when the Court decided Rucho v. Common Cause in 2019 when it determined that claims of partisan gerrymandering were not justiciable in federal court and then the North Carolina Supreme Court endorsed and adopted that barrier in 2024 to insulate redistricting decisions from challenge under the North Carolina Constitution. Unlike Alito unsupported assertion in Callais, this ruling now allows a Legislature to mask its racial bias, preference and animus by merely rebranding it and articulating that its discriminatory conduct is now an exercise of “partisan decision-making” in order to defeat a Section 2 VRA claim.
Immediately after Callais was announced, several State Legislatures, Louisiana, Tennessee, Florida, South Carolina, Alabama, and Mississippi, are already engaged in efforts to re-district their congressional maps. In addition, local municipalities in North Carolina have joined the fray and begun discussions about re- districting towns, cities, counties and school boards.
Applying Alito’s legal reasoning announced in Callais will allow these challenges to prevail merely by articulating that the boundary changes are necessary to achieve a partisan result. It is extremely difficult to establish intentional racial animus and discrimination in the face of legislative immunity and other legal protocols which protect and surround the discovery of race-related comments and motivations exhibited or expressed by legislators during the districting process.
For the 60 years that the VRA was utilized, it provided many successes for African American, racial minorities and the quest for justice and racial equality. Today, more than 70 racial minorities presently serve in House of Representatives (four are Republicans), three presently serve in the U.S. Senate, three have been elected as Governors, one has been elected as President and thousands have won elections at the State and local levels. In North Carolina, three African Americans have presently been elected to serve in Congress, 25 have been elected to serve in the State House and ten elected in the State Senate.
If these successes are to continue, it will be necessary to organize a robust campaign to register every eligible African American and racial minority in the State and then to ensure that each of them return to a polling site to vote in November. After that occurs, it will be necessary to monitor every County Board of Election meeting to ensure that those votes are counted. During this election process, it will be necessary to provide education and advocacy for those voters who encounter problems when they seek to register and to vote.
As an organization, the North Carolina Association of Black Lawyers should be a leading voice in this battle to protect the right to vote. There is the old adage in our community which says: “To whom much is given, much is expected.” In part, this effort is “self-protecting” as it is those of you who have achieved much by obtaining your positions as attorneys and have so much to lose. To those who have gained much, much is expected, but there is also much that can be taken away.
Because of your professional and political attainment, your community is in need of your active leadership and services to protect the community from the harm that was inflicted upon it in the aftermath of 1898. Now is the time to stand up since many legal protections which were designed to buffer our communities are at serious risk of, once again, being taken away!
