Since the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, activists across the South believe the Black vote is being erased.
The April 29, 2026 ruling struck down Louisiana’s congressional map containing two majority-Black districts, effectively gutting Section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA) which prohibits voting procedures that dilute minority representation.
Already since the ruling, state legislatures across the South have called emergency redistricting sessions.
Florida’s legislature passed a map drafted by Governor Ron DeSantis within hours of the decision, potentially creating a 24-4 Republican advantage in the state’s delegation; Louisiana’s governor passed an executive order April 30 suspending a congressional primary election already underway so lawmakers could pass a new congressional map; the Tennessee House approved a redrawn map May 7 eliminating a majority-Black district around Memphis after a special redistricting session; Mississippi’s governor called for a special congressional redistricting session to begin May 20; and the Alabama House voted May 6 to approve a new map amid an active election.
Voting rights advocates and community organizers on a May 4 Alabama Values briefing argued the decision was the latest move in a decades-long pattern of dismantling Black voting power.
‘They couldn’t wait’
“Like clockwork … they couldn’t wait,” said Rhyane Wagner, policy and narrative director at Alabama Values, of state legislatures’ redistricting sessions. “It reminds me of the Dobbs decision overturning Roe, where you had states in the South with ‘trigger bans’” — laws quickly enacted across 13 states, designed to totally or near-totally ban abortion.
Wagner called the sessions “a coordinated effort by the super-majority legislatures to deeply entrench their power. Dare I say it — white-minority rule.”
Over 26% of Alabama is Black. The new map passed by the legislature would eliminate one of the state’s two Black-majority, currently Democratic districts.
This map was originally drafted by Republican lawmakers in 2023, but blocked by federal courts for diluting Black voting power.
While the state is under a federal court order not to change its current remedial map until 2030, Alabama lawmakers are now asking the Supreme Court to lift this block, arguing that the federal landscape has changed since the Callais ruling gutted the Section 2 precedent which had restricted racial gerrymandering and discrimination.
The Supreme Court “has all but said that Section 2 is nullified,” said Mitchell Brown, voting rights senior counsel at the Southern Coalition for Social Justice.
Under the new standard, he explained, plaintiffs can no longer argue that a redistricting map gives Black voters less opportunity to elect candidates of their choice; instead, they must prove that a legislature intentionally discriminated — a far greater burden, and one made harder still because the court’s majority suggested that if a legislature can point to partisan motivation for a map, including race-based justification, that effectively shields against a Section 2 claim.
“We basically have to have what is known as ‘smoking gun’ racial discrimination evidence,” said Brown.
Noting the court’s observation that “times have changed, that racism of the past is not the same as racism today … we’ve made great strides,” he said “the reason why we’ve made great strides is statutes like the Voting Rights Act … and now the court has taken that away.”
The historical through-line is a pattern of “white retrenchment,” he explained: After Reconstruction, Black political power was dismantled through Jim Crow-era violence. After the Civil Rights Movement produced the VRA, the legal gains held for decades, but after President Barack Obama’s election in 2008, the chipping began again, with Section 5 of the VRA struck down in 2013 and Section 2 effectively nullified now.
‘Back to Jim Crow’
For Beverly Cooper, co-founder of Stand Up Mobile in Alabama, the ruling arrived amid the voter registration work her all-volunteer team does daily.
Describing recent talks with community members ahead of the state’s May 19 primary election, she said “I’ve just started being very honest with them and suggesting that we’re at a point where we’re back to Jim Crow … Last night, I had a couple of conversations with some youth groups, and they’re so upset and concerned that they’re ready to go to the polls right now.”
Louisiana v. Callais, formerly named Callais v. Landry, was the culmination of a different 2022 lawsuit, Robinson v. Landry, where Black voters and civil rights groups argued that the state’s new congressional map violated Section 2 by not having a second majority-Black district.
Following Supreme Court orders, the legislature passed a map adding a second majority-Black district, but a group of non-Black plaintiffs countersued in Callais v. Landry and won in the April 2026 ruling, having argued that the map was a racial gerrymander not mandated by the VRA.
“We brought the original case with the intent to restore and to create fair and just maps in Louisiana, just to have Callais make this case about further disenfranchising Black and other minority voters,” said Ashley Shelton, president and CEO of the Power Coalition for Equity and Justice in Louisiana.
One-third of Louisiana is Black.
With the governor having attempted to suspend the House race mid-election after the Supreme Court deemed the state’s map unconstitutional, Shelton was unwavering: “We are telling voters here in the state of Louisiana to vote your complete ballot.”
What’s next
Shelton pushed back on the idea that the ruling’s harm is racially limited.
“After Reconstruction is when we got public schools, because of Black people,” she said. “The Voting Rights Act did not just provide voting rights for African Americans. It provided voting rights for all minorities” and opened a door, she argued, that disability rights, LGBTQ rights and women’s rights protections eventually entered.
“This isn’t just about Black people,” Shelton added. “This is about anyone that has found themselves on the other side of an agenda that does not include them.”
Kathy Sykes, executive director of the Mississippi Immigrants Rights Alliance, framed the immigrant community in the same lineage.
“Before the Voting Rights Act, we had to count on our allies to stand in the gap for us, and the immigrant community — they’re in that space right now,” she said. “This administration is denaturalizing folks who are legally present … Our votes really do matter. If they did not matter, they wouldn’t work so hard to prevent and dilute them.”
Speakers agreed that this is not the end for the voting rights fight.
Wagner pointed to state-level voting rights acts as a path that can exceed the current federal version — allowing proportional demographic representation, banning partisan gerrymandering and restoring “preclearance,” a process in Section 5 of the VRA that, before 2013, required states and jurisdictions with an “extensive history of racially discriminatory voting practices” to submit any proposed changes in their voting laws or maps to the federal government.
Brown described one effective strategy in Edgecombe County, North Carolina where over 200 community members, by organizing around existing neighborhoods, geographic dividing lines and economic ties without invoking race, successfully produced six majority-Black school board districts and one majority-white district —and drew overtly racist opposition from two white board incumbents that ultimately cost them their seats.
“A hit dog always hollered,” he said.
“My liberation was never coming from the courts,” Shelton added. “You’re never going to get anything that you don’t fight for.”
“No matter what they do at the legislative and the House level, they can’t change where we live,” she said. “No matter what they try to draw … we can elect a Congress that can restore so much of what has been lost this year.”
