Within hours of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Louisiana v. Calais, state legislators across the South were calling emergency redistricting sessions.
What has unfolded, voting rights advocates say, is one of the most concentrated assaults on Black political power since Reconstruction.
The April 29, six-three majority ruling by Justice Samuel Alito 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.
The ruling’s new standard requires plaintiffs to prove that a legislature actively practiced intentional racial discrimination — a nearly impossible burden compared to the previous standard of proving that a redistricting map gives Black voters less opportunity to elect candidates of their choice.
“You have to have smoking gun evidence, essentially, of a legislator or legislative body saying ‘I drew this map to disenfranchise and to discriminate against Black, Brown, AAPI voters,’” said Mitchell Brown, voting rights senior counsel at the Southern Coalition for Social Justice. “These legislators and legislative bodies are very cunning people, and they’re not going to say the quiet part out loud.”
“This has been the party line for a very long time,” he continued. “When there are periods of increased participation for voters of color, there’s this white retrenchment that seeks to take it away. It took us decades to get voting rights and other civil rights … and now partisanship is taking the day rather than racial justice.”
Just 10 years after the VRA passed, over one million Black people registered to vote in the Deep South, and the number of Black U.S. House members grew from six in 1965 to 16 in 1975.
A pattern decades in the making
Amir Badat, a voting rights attorney and political strategist at Fair Fight Action, placed backlashes to advances in Black political power in an even longer historical arc.
“This is the same move that was made in the late 1800s after Reconstruction, where the 14th and 15th Amendments said you cannot discriminate on the basis of race, and so states in the South said ‘We won’t say that we’re intentionally discriminating, but that will be the effect of what we do,’ and so that’s why they passed these colorblind, race-neutral things like poll taxes and literacy tests,” Badat said.
More recently, “This is the culmination of attacks that we’ve seen against the Voting Rights Act, which started in 2013 with the Shelby County case,” he added.
In 2013, the five-four Supreme Court ruling in Shelby County v. Holder eliminated a process in Section 5 of the VRA that had previously 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.
Regarding Calais, Fair Fight Action and Black Voters Matter Fund released a report estimating that 19 Republican House seats could be secured as a direct result of the new Section 2 legal standard, and 27 House seats total when accounting for Republicans’ mid-decade redistricting gerrymandering — “enough to cement one-party control of the U.S. House for at least a generation.”
A follow-up analysis found that up to 191 currently Democrat-held Southern state legislative districts could be redrawn — including 127 Black-majority districts, more than half of all Black-majority districts in those states.
“Section 2 also protects the districts at the local level,” Badat said. “Think about your city councils, your school boards, your county boards of supervisors and boards of elections, all of those local governmental bodies that often make decisions that have the most impact on someone’s day-to-day life.”
‘Mass confusion and chaos’ in Louisiana
Nowhere has the post-Calais moment played out more chaotically than in Louisiana, with state Public Service Commissioner Davante Lewis describing the situation as “mass confusion and chaos,” with “lawsuits everywhere.”
Gov. Jeff Landry, citing the Calais ruling, used an emergency executive power ordinarily reserved for natural disasters to suspend a congressional election already underway — one in which 42,000 Louisiana voters had already cast ballots by mail or absentee.
“The governor said those votes will not count, that he’s going to throw those votes out,” Lewis said, adding that “the legislature then added an amendment to prevent those ballots from being publicly disclosed, allowing the secretary of state to keep them hidden.”
Meanwhile, the state senate passed a new congressional map that would reduce Black representation from two majority-Black districts to one, packing Black voters between Baton Rouge and New Orleans.
“We can’t even say what the racial makeup of our new six congressional districts would be,” Lewis said, because legislators “directed staff not to even include that information — information that has always been included in the redistricting analysis for the last 50 years in Louisiana.”
“Now that Calais is here, we know it’s going to be … an onslaught on Black political power here in Louisiana,” he added.
Alabama: A test case
In Alabama, Southern Poverty Law Center Policy Director Jerome Dees described the state as a test of whether Calais forecloses remaining legal avenues to fight this onslaught.
In 2023, the Supreme Court ruled in Allen v. Milligan that Alabama’s congressional map violated Section 2 by packing Black voters — who comprise 27% of the state’s population — into one district, and ordered the state to draw a second majority-Black district.
Alabama drew a new map, which a federal district court ruled was also unconstitutional, violating Section 2 and intentionally discriminating against Black voters. The court struck this 2023 map down and ordered a special replacement, which was used in the 2024 elections and was already in use this year in Alabama’s ongoing May 19 primary when, on May 11, the Supreme Court vacated it.
This Supreme Court order opens a path for Alabama to reinstate the 2023 map that the district court had already ruled discriminatory, sending the case back to the district court to reconsider in light of Calais.
Plaintiffs have returned to the district court seeking a temporary restraining order to keep the court-drawn map in place, arguing that the intentional discrimination finding — made on 14th Amendment equal protection grounds, not Section 2 — is thus untouched by Calais and should still hold.
“That 14th Amendment claim, even though Calais came down, should still be a viable legal argument,” said Dees.
Rhyane Wagner, policy narrative director at Alabama Values, characterized what is happening as a continuation of Jim Crow disenfranchisement.
“You cannot separate it from this country’s history,” she said. “The goal remains to limit the political power and representation of Black communities, and frameworks that claim to be colorblind only make that harder to confront.”
Nevertheless, advocates point to signs of mobilization.
Black voters comprised 34% of Louisiana’s early vote since Calais and Landry’s order, compared to a typical 25%.
“People are recognizing the moment and the movement, and they’re saying ‘You didn’t take my vote away,’” said Lewis. “‘You may have tried to take my representation away, but my vote is still here.’”
