In 1773, a group of Boston colonists dressed as Mohawks dumped 342 chests of British tea into the harbor. They were not protesting the tax itself so much as the principle behind it: to be taxed by Parliament where they had no real representation was, in their telling, a form of political bondage they described without irony as slavery. 

They wrote a declaration about that principle three years later. They went to war over it. They built a republic on the proposition that a free people cannot be governed without their consent.

On April 29, 2026, the U.S. Supreme Court of that same republic ruled in Louisiana v. Callais that the congressional districts Louisiana drew to give Black voters a meaningful opportunity to elect a candidate of their choice was unconstitutional racial gerrymandering. 

In a 6-3 decision authored by Justice Samuel Alito, the court struck down the state’s second majority-Black congressional district and, in the process, hollowed out the core remedial promise of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act: to insist on the very principle the founders fought a war over is, when Black people insist on it, treated as a constitutional offense.

Read that twice. Then read it once more.

Black Louisianans are roughly one-third of this state’s population, yet the Supreme Court has made clear that even a district designed to reflect that reality is suspect if Black political representation is too visible. 

Black families in Louisiana have helped build the roads, levees, courthouses, ports, schools and public institutions that make this state function. They have paid the tax of citizenship in cash and in blood for generations. And now the Supreme Court tells us that the principle which built this country does not fully extend to us. 

The same court that has spent years insisting it is color-blind has decided that when Black voters seek representation rooted in our communities, our geography and our lived experience, the constitutional violation is ours. 

The remedy becomes the harm. The franchise becomes the gerrymander. The wronged party, somehow, is the structure of inequality itself.

Justice Elena Kagan, dissenting, called the ruling what it is: a decision that renders Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act “all but a dead letter.” The doctrinal framework that has anchored federal vote-dilution enforcement since Thornburg v. Gingles in 1986 has not been formally overruled, but it has been weakened from the inside. The statute still sits on the page. Much of the remedy is gone.

What this means in Louisiana is immediate. The 6th Congressional District that elected Cleo Fields in 2024 — a 250-mile arc from Shreveport through Alexandria and Lafayette into north Baton Rouge — is gone.  

Gov. Jeff Landry declared an emergency Thursday and suspended Louisiana’s May 16 congressional primary to give lawmakers time to redraw the state’s congressional districts. Mail and overseas ballots had already gone out, and early in-person voting was about to begin. Voters who had already cast ballots were told their votes in the congressional races would not count. Multiple lawsuits were filed in state and federal court within roughly 36 hours challenging the suspension.

What this means regionally is even larger. NPR’s reporting identified at least 15 majority-Black or near-majority-Black congressional districts, from Louisiana through the Carolinas, that are now vulnerable under the logic of Callais. Advocacy groups have projected that as many as one in three seats in the Congressional Black Caucus could be placed in jeopardy in a single redistricting cycle if the most aggressive redraw scenarios materialize. 

NPR also noted that the post-Civil War record drop in Black U.S. House representation was four seats at the end of Reconstruction. Callais could approach or exceed that mark.

What this means morally is what every Black Louisianan already knows. Justice in this country is not colorblind. It is blind, period. Blind to the lived weight of being Black in this state. Blind to the patterned harm its rulings keep producing. Blind to its own foundational hypocrisy.

Black folk in this country have been given empty promises since slavery, through sharecropping, through tenant farming, through every century when this state’s economy ran on Black backs and this state’s law ran around Black bodies. 

Black Americans have shed blood on battlefields from the Revolutionary War era forward while still being forced to fight, at home, for the most basic democratic recognition. We have done the work.

And the questions being asked in 2026 are the same questions colonists asked in 1773:

Have we not contributed to this country enough? Have we not shed enough blood? Were our ancestors not enslaved enough? What will it take for us to be seen, to be heard, to be respected?

The Supreme Court has given its answer. Not yet. Perhaps never.

But the court is not the country. The country is the people, and the people of Louisiana — Black, white, Brown, Native, and newcomer alike — have a choice to make in the weeks ahead about which American era they want to live in: 

• the 1776 of the founders, who called blind representation tyranny;
• 1898, when leaders of Louisiana’s constitutional convention openly sought to “perpetuate the supremacy of the Anglo-Saxon race in Louisiana”; or 
• the 2026 of Justice Samuel Alito, who has somehow reconciled the two.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965, considered the crown jewel of the Civil Rights Movement, has been pried loose. The pattern is visible. And Black Louisiana — taxed, bled and built into the foundation of this state — is not going anywhere.