We need May Day every day to defeat the oppression the latest Supreme Court decision on Voting Rights Act codifies

Last week, the majority right-wing U.S. Supreme Court dealt the last death blow to the 1965 Voting Rights Act, a seminal piece of civil rights legislation that tried to right the centuries of wrong we have committed against fellow Black and nonwhite Americans. While slavery supposedly ended in 1865, Black citizens were effectively unable for 100 years to exercise their Constitutional right to have a say in their representation by being able to vote and participate in the political process openly and without fear, obstacles, or retribution. The Voting Rights Act's critical protections were fought for and won through tireless organizing and even bloodshed and death of labor and civil rights activists, such as on the infamous Bloody Sunday Selma-to-Montgomery march, but over the past decades have been eroded.

The court pounded the last nail in the coffin with this latest decision, saying that lawmakers can draw whatever boundaries they want when creating voting maps as long as they do not explicitly base the lines on race. But redistricting based on political party affiliation is legal. This means that in Republican-controlled areas, including large swaths of the South, lawmakers can gerrymander voting districts where Democrats have effectively zero chance of winning. Black voters, who largely tend to vote for Democrats, will not only be blocked from electing a Black or nonwhite representative, but lose by a historic number the Black representatives they have now. With this ruling, the Supreme Court has basically recodified white supremacist oppression of tens of millions of Black voters and further undermined our democracy.

Just days after this decision, hundreds of thousands of students and workers took to the streets in more than 4,000 events across the United States as part of protests celebrating May Day, an international day of solidarity among working people. As union nurse members of National Nurses United, the country's largest union and professional association of RNs, we marched and rallied as part of May Day Strong events, as well as picketing, protesting, and even striking at some of our hospital workplaces.

But we union nurses understand that our right to protest and organize collectively, not just in our workplaces but in our communities, is inextricably tied to our democratic right to vote and to elect leaders who represent our interests. That's why the Supreme Court's decision is so outrageous and shameful; it allows white, Republican, and largely male lawmakers to shut out tens of millions of Black citizens from the democratic process and to, once again, relegate them to the status of second-class citizens. Nurses, who advocate for all patients, say no.

To defeat these fascist attacks on our democracy, we need to invoke the people power of May Day every day. Union nurses and our allies will step up our fight to ensure every working person's voice is heard. We will also continue advancing our own vision of a healthy society - one that ends the brutality against workers and immigrants at the hands of masked ICE agents, one that strips corporations of their unchecked power grab and truly redistributes wealth in the hands of workers to fund a dignified and free life for all, one that refuses to allow technofascists to play with our democratic freedom, and one that puts health care over warfare.

And as we see regularly from the strike line to our state houses to the White House, when working people fight together in unbreakable solidarity, we win.

National Nurses United is the largest and fastest-growing union and professional association of registered nurses in the United States with more than 225,000 members nationwide. NNU affiliates include California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee, DC Nurses Association, Michigan Nurses Association, Minnesota Nurses Association, and New York State Nurses Association.