The Voting Rights Decision Is a Warning About Women’s Political Power |
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The Voting Rights Decision Is a Warning About Women’s Political Power
Voter exclusion was never about men alone. And much is at stake for women in state and federal elections.
Black Louisiana voters and civil rights advocates call on the US Supreme Court to uphold a fair and representative congressional map in Louisiana v. Callais on March 24, 2025 in Washington, DC.
On Wednesday, in a 6–3 decision, drawn along deep ideological divisions, the United States Supreme Court gutted a major provision of the Voting Rights Act (VRA), a law passed by Congress in 1965—and reauthorized by Congress over the decades that followed—to ensure the protection of voting rights for disenfranchised Black voters. This landmark legislation, signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson, was in direct response to a nefarious (and lingering) history of voter suppression, particularly in the American South.
American history is littered with legal and extralegal policies and practices to discourage and disenfranchise Black Americans from voting; they were unabashedly vile and unapologetically violent. In Mississippi, Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and James Chaney—three young civil rights advocates—were brutally murdered in response to their efforts to register Black voters, in 1964. Their deaths were dramatized in the 1988 film Mississippi Burning. Famously, civil rights icon Fannie Lou Hamer explained that her courage to come forward and press for voting rights was inspired by these young, slain voting rights advocates.
When Hamer and a group of Black women attempted to vote, they were met by police violence. Arrested and placed in a jail with men, guards instructed the men to beat the women. Unsatisfied with the blunt force against Hamer, a guard took a weapon and began beating her on the head. As she later informed the Democratic National Convention, these practices reduced her and other women to second-class citizenship.
In Alabama, a few months before the VRA was signed into law in 1965, Jimmie Lee Jackson, Viola Liuzzo, and Reverend James Reeb were killed in response to their advocacy for Black voting rights. Jackson, a 26-year-old deacon, was shot by an Alabama state trooper. Reeb, a father of four, was beaten by a group of white men. And Liuzzo, a young white mother of five who had driven down from Detroit to join the march from Selma to Montgomery for voting rights, was killed by members of the Ku Klux Klan.
These acts and many others represented the worst instincts for a country that claimed equality and liberty for all its citizens through the 14th Amendment and the establishment and protection of voting rights for Black Americans in the 15th. The point was to make sure that Black people would not have representation in Congress or in state legislatures.
Over the course of American history, racial suppression and discrimination in voting have been undeniable and enduring features of national politics, despite legislative and constitutional efforts to stamp them out.
Louisiana has been a notorious player in racialized voter suppression through overt and covert means dating back to the ratification of the 14th Amendment. Barely two months after its ratification, on September 28, 1868, white residents of a Louisiana town murdered “hundreds of people” in a backlash to constitutional reconstruction. For two weeks, “white mobs terrorized the Black community.” According to........