For generations, Black Americans were told the right to vote was settled. We were told emancipation settled it. Then Reconstruction collapsed. We were told the Constitution settled it. Then states found new ways around it.

We were told the Fifteenth Amendment settled it. Then came literacy tests, poll taxes, white primaries, violence, intimidation, and massacres. We were told the Voting Rights Act of 1965 settled it.

And now, once again, the protections around Black voting rights are disappearing.

Recently, the United States Supreme Court handed down another major decision involving Black voting rights in a case called Louisiana v. Callais. And while the legal details of the case are complex, the deeper story is not. The right to vote for Black Americans has never been secure. It has always been contested, restricted, weakened, and redefined.

This is not a new story.

It is an old one.

The Long Fight for the Ballot

The fight for Black voting rights stretches back to the end of slavery itself.

After emancipation, Black Americans briefly gained political power during Reconstruction. Black men voted. Black lawmakers were elected. Black communities began participating in American democracy in ways that had once been unimaginable.

But backlash came quickly.

Southern states created Black Codes and vagrancy laws designed to criminalize Black freedom. White supremacist organizations used violence and terror to suppress Black political participation. Poll taxes, literacy tests, white primaries, racial massacres, intimidation campaigns, and lynchings became tools of political control.

Voting rights were not denied accidentally. They were denied systematically.

By the middle of the twentieth century, Black voter suppression remained deeply entrenched across the South. In many counties with large Black populations, few or no Black citizens were registered to vote at all.

That reality helped produce one of the defining moments of the civil rights movement.

Selma, Bloody Sunday, and the Voting Rights Act

On March 7, 1965, hundreds of civil rights activists attempted to march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, demanding voting rights for Black Americans.

As the marchers crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge, they were met by Alabama state troopers and law enforcement officers.

The violence that followed shocked the nation. Television cameras captured peaceful protesters being beaten, tear-gassed, trampled, and attacked while marching for the right to vote.

Days later, President Lyndon B. Johnson addressed Congress and called for federal voting rights legislation.

On August 6, 1965, Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law. The law became one of the most important civil rights statutes in American history.

Among other things, the Voting Rights Act prohibited racial discrimination in voting and created federal oversight mechanisms designed to stop states from passing discriminatory voting laws. Congress repeatedly renewed those protections over the decades, reaffirming the belief that voter suppression and racial discrimination in elections had not disappeared.

But almost immediately after the law was passed, legal challenges began.

The Supreme Court and the Slow Weakening of Voting Rights Protections

For decades, the Supreme Court was repeatedly asked to decide cases involving the Voting Rights Act.

And over time, the Court increasingly narrowed how parts of the law could be used. One of the most important turning points came in 2013 with Shelby County v. Holder.

In that case, the Supreme Court effectively dismantled Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act — the provision requiring certain states and jurisdictions with histories of voter discrimination to obtain federal approval before changing voting laws.

Without that federal oversight, states quickly began passing new voting restrictions.

North Carolina enacted a voter ID law that a federal court later said targeted Black voters with “almost surgical precision.” Texas advanced voter ID requirements previously blocked for discriminatory impact. Alabama required photo IDs while later closing driver’s license offices in heavily Black counties.

Between the 2013 Shelby decision and the 2018 election, twenty-three states implemented new barriers to voting.

And now, more than a decade later, the Court has once again reshaped voting rights protections.

Louisiana v. Callais

After the 2020 Census, Louisiana redrew its congressional district maps.

The original map included only one majority-Black congressional district despite Black residents making up roughly one-third of the state’s population.

Civil rights groups challenged the map under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, arguing that Louisiana had diluted Black voting power.

A federal judge ruled that the map likely violated the Voting Rights Act. Louisiana then created a second majority-Black district. That revised map was also challenged. This time, opponents argued that using race to create the district amounted to unconstitutional racial gerrymandering.

In a 6–3 ruling, the Supreme Court sided with those challengers. The Court concluded that Louisiana’s map relied too heavily on race and violated constitutional equal protection principles. The decision reflects a larger shift that has been developing for years.

The very laws designed to protect Black Americans from discrimination are increasingly being challenged as discrimination themselves. The Court’s conservative majority argued that America has changed. That the racial conditions which originally justified the Voting Rights Act no longer exist in the same form.

But critics argue the Court is ignoring how modern voter suppression actually functions. Because discrimination does not always announce itself openly.

Historically, many discriminatory voting laws were written in race-neutral language. Literacy tests and poll taxes did not explicitly mention Black people. Yet everyone understood who those laws targeted and what they were designed to accomplish.

The same argument now surrounds voting maps, voter ID laws, and districting decisions.

The Present Crisis

In 1954, before he became one of the most recognized leaders of the civil rights movement, a young Martin Luther King Jr. stood before the congregation of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama.

As part of his plans for the church, King included a simple but powerful priority: “Every member of Dexter must be a registered voter.”

He said this at a time when fewer than five percent of Black Alabamians were registered to vote.

Why?

Because King understood something fundamental: Voting was not symbolic. It was power. Representation. Protection. Access. Justice.

The struggle over voting rights was the present crisis then. And for many Americans, it remains the present crisis now. The fight over Black political power in America did not end in 1965.

It never truly ended at all.