Black Voter Suppression in the U.S.

Americans will go to the polls tomorrow for the first general election since the Supreme Court gutted the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Its decision this April in the case Louisiana v. Callais nullified Section 2 of the VRA, which had prevented states from creating gerrymandered electoral maps that had the effect of giving minority citizens' votes little or no weight for decades.

In the wake of Callais, many Southern states acted swiftly to redraw congressional maps and implement other electoral practices that seek to reduce the number of Black elected officials and diminish the power of Black political participation. Experts predict the impact of the Callais decision will extend far beyond this year's election cycle.

The VRA was one of the most consequential, successful, and hard-won pieces of legislation in American history. It was the crowning achievement of the civil rights movement in America. The VRA "was born of the literal blood of Union soldiers and civil rights marchers," Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan wrote in her Callais dissent. "It ushered in awe-inspiring change, bringing this Nation closer to fulfilling the ideals of democracy and racial equality."

The Supreme Court's decision in Callais is seen by most critics as contributing to the long history of undermining the voting rights of Black Americans.

The Broken Promise of Reconstruction

The Constitution empowered individual states to determine eligibility for voting and only a small number of states allowed free Black men to vote. No enslaved people were given this right. In the 1857 decision Dred Scott v. Sandford, the Supreme Court declared that "the descendants of Africans who were imported into this country, and sold as slaves" are not citizens, disenfranchising nearly all African Americans.

After the Union's victory over the Confederacy in the Civil War led to the emancipation of four million enslaved people, the Reconstruction era began with a promise of a healthier and more just American society. The adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868 extended equal protection of the law to Black people, and the Fifteenth Amendment, passed in 1870, gave African American men the right to vote nationwide. Together, these legal developments established the meaning of citizenship for Black people who had been denied that status by the nation's highest court.

By 1868, over 80% of Black men who were eligible to vote had registered, and courageous Black leaders overcame enormous obstacles to win elections to public office. During Reconstruction, approximately 2,000 Black men served in elected office from local and state positions all the way up to Congress.

Yet many white people remained committed to racial hierarchy, and across the U.S., mobs waged bloody massacres to prevent Black communities from exercising their voting rights.

In September 1868, white residents in Opelousas, Louisiana, resentful of African Americans' new voting rights, attacked and killed hundreds of people.

The following month, just days before the presidential election, mobs of white people massacred at least 35 Black people in St. Bernard Parish, Louisiana, successfully suppressing Black political participation in the parish. The Republican in the race, Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, who had led the Union Army to victory and championed Reconstruction, received only a single vote in St. Bernard Parish despite its Republican majority.

On Election Day in 1874, a mob of white men fired indiscriminately into a crowd of mostly unarmed Black voters in Eufaula, Alabama, leaving at least six Black people dead and injuring as many as 80 people. Numerous survivors fled, including an estimated 500 Black people who had not yet voted. The result was mass terror against Black voters and suppression. While 1,200 Black Eufaula residents voted in the 1874 election, only 10 cast ballots in 1876.

By 1877, the federal government abandoned the Reconstruction effort. The withdrawal of federal troops from Southern statehouses accelerated the rapid deterioration of political rights for Black people.

Across the South, cities and states where Black leaders held office during Reconstruction have yet to see a full revival of African American political power. Mississippi, for example, sent the nation's first two Black people to the Senate in the 1870s but has not elected a Black senator since the fall of Reconstruction.

"Race-Neutral" Racial Discrimination

Southern state governments quickly went to work altering their constitutions to disenfranchise Black citizens and codify racial hierarchy. From 1885 to 1908, all 11 former Confederate states rewrote their constitutions to restrict voting rights using poll taxes, literacy tests, and felon disenfranchisement.

In 1901, Alabama approved a new state constitution. Though its framers were explicit about the need to suppress the Black vote, they knew that, because the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments prohibited race-based disenfranchisement, discriminatory constitutional provisions intended to maintain white supremacy had to appear to be race neutral. To that end, the new constitution called for the appointment of three registrars from each county who had wide discretion when accepting registration applications and were trained to minimize registration by African Americans.

The constitution's new registration rules also required voters to be able to read and write any section of the Constitution and to have been lawfully employed for the previous 12 months. Anyone who did not meet the employment specification could still register if he or his wife owned real estate and possessions worth at least $300.

Though these requirements would have severely limited the voting rights of both African Americans and poor white people in Alabama, the constitution carved out exceptions for descendants of people who voted before the Civil War, which excluded almost every Black person.

Alabama also used criminal laws to target Black people to restrict voting rights. Provisions disenfranchising people convicted of any crime involving "moral turpitude"-which applied to misdemeanors and even non-criminal acts-were adopted after the president of the constitutional convention argued the state needed to avert the "menace of Negro domination."

By 1940, as a result of racially discriminatory voter suppression practices in the former Confederate states, just 3% of eligible Black voters in the South were registered to vote. While Black voter registration rates began to rise in the following decades as registration efforts gained momentum, racialized political violence similarly continued.

In 1955, Lamar Smith, a farmer and World War I veteran, was shot and murdered on a crowded courthouse lawn in Brookhaven, Mississippi, for urging Black people to vote.

That same year, the Rev. George Lee, a grocery store owner, was shot and murdered for organizing Black voters in the Mississippi Delta and refusing demands by White Citizens' Council members to remove his name from voter rolls.

From Selma to the Voting Rights Act

For decades, activists and community leaders worked tirelessly to register Black voters despite extensive legal barriers and brutal violence.

In 1965, tens of thousands mobilized to secure equal voting rights for Black Americans. Marching across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, peaceful protesters were brutally beaten with clubs and whips by police and deputized white citizens on what became known as Bloody Sunday. Undeterred, they marched again. Over five days, voting rights activists traversed 54 miles from Selma to Montgomery, catapulting the movement for equal access to the ballot into the national consciousness.

These efforts culminated in legislation that President Lyndon B. Johnson called "one of the most monumental laws in the entire history of American freedom." The passage of the Voting Rights Act in August 1965 renounced decades of Black political suppression.

The VRA outlawed literacy tests, paved the way for the elimination of poll taxes, and curtailed other discriminatory barriers created to disenfranchise Black voters. It prescribed federal oversight "to enforce the guarantees of the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution" and ensure that qualified Black citizens could successfully register to vote without intimidation or threats of violence.

States and counties where less than 50% of qualified voting-age Black residents had actually voted and that used one or more discriminatory "tests or devices" were required to "preclear" any changes to their voting laws with the federal government.

The effects of the VRA were felt almost immediately throughout the South. In 1964, fewer than 20% of qualified Black people in Alabama were registered to vote compared to nearly 70% of qualified white people. As a consequence of the Voting Rights Act, Black turnout reached 80% in the 1966 Alabama Democratic primary.

Ten years after the VRA, the number of Black voters in the Deep South increased by more than a million. The number of Black people elected to office in the Deep South soared from virtually none to about 1,000.

"History Repeats Itself"

The Voting Rights Act and its goal of facilitating racial parity in the political process was met with vehement backlash in Southern states. All 19 senators who voted against the VRA represented Southern states. Leaders of these states have sought to roll back the VRA ever since. In the past two decades, they have found a Supreme Court willing to cooperate with this goal.

In 2010, Shelby County, Alabama, filed a federal lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of Sections 4(b) and 5 of the VRA. Section 4(b) provides a formula to determine which counties and states with records of racially discriminatory voting practices are required to "preclear" with the federal government under Section 5.

In 2013, the Supreme Court's ruling in Shelby County v. Holder effectively ended federal oversight of state elections. Even though Congress had overwhelmingly voted to renew the Voting Rights Act in 2006, the Court ruled that the criteria used in Section 4(b) to identify counties with demonstrated histories of discriminatory voter registration processes were no longer constitutional. States and counties with the worst records of discrimination are no longer required to preclear changes to voting laws.

After the Shelby County decision, reversion to discriminatory practices designed to disenfranchise minority voters and dilute their political influence was immediate. Previously restricted states began introducing legislation requiring photo identification, ending same-day voter registration, closing polling places, and curtailing early and mail-in voting. States redrew congressional maps on the basis of race, resulting in racial gerrymandering and the dilution of Black political power.

"The sad irony of today's decision lies in its utter failure to grasp why the VRA has proven effective," Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote in a dissent in Shelby County. "The Court appears to believe that the VRA's success in eliminating the specific devices extant in 1965 means that preclear­ance is no longer needed. With that belief, and the argument derived from it, history repeats itself."

Allowing Gerrymandering That Harms Black Voters

Earlier this year, the Voting Rights Act was dealt another significant blow. On April 29, 2026, the Supreme Court's decision in Louisiana v. Callais gutted Section 2 of the VRA, which addresses racial vote dilution-a tactic commonly used to reduce the power of Black voters in the South after the Voting Rights Act.

Congress previously conditioned Section 2 liability on discriminatory effects of voting practices rather than intent. The Court's decision forces a vote-dilution plaintiff to prove that a state adopted an election rule with racially discriminatory intent-and to do so without relying on history, such as the fact that Louisiana has never had a Black congressperson elected from a non-majority-Black district. And it imposes new requirements that give states an automatic political gerrymandering defense to vote-dilution claims.

Requiring voters to prove intentional racial discrimination "renders Section 2 all but a dead letter," Justice Kagan wrote in a dissent joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson. She warned of "far-reaching and grave" consequences, including the likely elimination of districts "that in the last half-century have given minority citizens, and particularly African Americans, a meaningful political voice."

Following the Callais decision, several Southern states, including Alabama, Louisiana, and Tennessee, rushed to redraw congressional district maps. Due to these redistricting efforts, about one in 10 voters nationwide lives in a different congressional district than they did during the 2024 election.

The day after Callais was decided, Louisiana's governor canceled primary elections for the House of Representatives. Within a month, the state legislature redrew congressional maps and eliminated one of the two majority-Black districts. The same plaintiffs from the Callais lawsuit are now targeting Louisiana's last remaining majority-Black district.

"This Struggle Is Far from Over"

Callais has also energized millions of Black voters across the South who are showing up in greater numbers at the polls in protest to the attack on their voting rights.

According to recent data, Black voter turnout has increased in 80% of all U.S. counties in 2026 compared to the previous midterm cycle, with the highest surges in Southern states.

And as of six days before the November 3, 2026, midterm elections, more than 25% of Black Southerners had already cast their ballots. "That's a rate that was higher than turnout from the overall electorate," Politico reported.

"In too many places, people in power have sought to diminish, restrict, and undermine full political participation for Black people," commented EJI Director Bryan Stevenson. "In 2026, the Black community must respond by voting like never before and fight for necessary protections from racial bigotry and bias."

"This struggle is far from over."