The Voting Rights Act Is Still Working To Stop Racist Laws. The Supreme Court Might Not Care.

The civil rights movement has fought for equality across many battlefields, but on none so prominently and often as Alabama. 

It was there, in Montgomery, where Rosa Parks politely refused to give up her bus seat in 1955. 

Birmingham is where Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested for leading a non-violent desegregation campaign. “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” King wrote from his small jail cell there, inspiring millions. And later that same year – 1963 — the Ku Klux Klan would bomb the 16th Street Baptist Church, killing four young girls and shocking the nation. 

Alabama is also home to Selma, where 600 activists led by John Lewis linked arms to march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge as police beset them with billy clubs and tear gas. “Bloody Sunday” spurred Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act (VRA) a few months later.

And Alabama is where you’ll find the little town of Newbern, population 130. For decades, the white leaders of this overwhelmingly Black hamlet would hand down control of town hall to themselves — the sitting white mayor appointing his white successor — until one year, when a Black man by the name of Patrick Braxton filed the forms to run.

That year was 2020.

As the U.S. Supreme Court contemplates whether the VRA has outlived its usefulness, having heard oral arguments in October questioning the constitutionality of the landmark law’s most vital remaining provision, the question of racism’s grip on America remains.

Much of the attention on that lawsuit, Callais v. Louisiana, has focused on its knock-on potential to clear the way for a wave of gerrymanders across the South to net Republicans as many as 19 new, safe congressional seats. 

But, at its core, Callais is about race. And Newbern is just one of many recent examples of the VRA continuing to defend the political power of non-white communities against efforts, rooted in racial prejudice, to suppress them. 

Most of us first learn about the horror and bravery displayed by ordinary Americans in Montgomery, Birmingham and Selma in history books, alongside black-and-white photos of attack dogs and water cannons. But the struggle for civil rights — for racial equality under the law — continues to this day in places like Newbern.

Braxton was the only person who bothered to fill out the nomination paperwork in 2020, making him the automatic winner under Alabama law. But that didn’t sit well with the white town officials. Instead of recognizing Braxton’s victory, they locked him out of town hall and held a secret election to reinstall themselves.

Braxton sued under the same provision of the VRA that the Supreme Court may soon axe in Callais v. Louisiana: Section 2, which prohibits any voting law, procedure, or map resulting in the “denial or abridgement of the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color.”

Braxton won his lawsuit in 2024, with a federal judge ordering Newbern to hold its first legitimate election since 1965. And on August 26, 2025, Braxton won again by a count of 66 to 26. 

Braxton wasn’t beaten like Lewis or shot like King, but it was still racism that literally locked him out of political power. 

“Issues of race relations have been ingrained in the country since its founding, and it looks different throughout generations,” said Rep. Shomari Figures (D-Ala.). “It looked different in the 60s than it did during slavery, and it looks different now… but that’s because of the rights that have been secured via legislation and court victories.”

Like Braxton, Figures has Section 2 of the VRA to thank for his political office. After the Supreme Court struck down Alabama’s congressional map for diluting the votes of Black residents in 2023, Figures won the newly-drawn 2nd District the following year, becoming the first Black person to hold it in Alabama since 1832.

Section 2 of the VRA remains necessary, Figures said, echoing something Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote in a 2013 dissent. In Shelby County v. Holder, the court invalidated the VRA’s provisions that required states and localities with particularly racist histories to get federal approval before they changed any election laws. “Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet,” Ginsburg wrote. 

Academic studies show the racial turnout gap has increased in the wake of Shelby County, particularly in the counties once policed by the VRA’s preclearance. Figures worries gutting Section 2 would accelerate that troubling trend. 

“To say that we no longer need those rights, I think, literally sets the stage for us to possibly return to some of the actions that we fought against in days past,” Figures said. 

VRA opponents say the good people of Alabama’s 2nd District didn’t vote for Figures because he’s black, but because he’s a Democrat. Black voters switched their allegiances from the Republican party to Democrats starting with Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal, which — despite some racist policies denying minorities the same support as whites — was overwhelmingly popular. That shift was cemented after President Lyndon Baines Johnson defied the conservative southern wing of his party to enact civil rights laws — including the VRA — in the mid-1960s. In the 2024 presidential election, 83% of Black voters nationwide backed the Democrat. 

Under this theory, a majority-black district would support a white Democrat over a Black Republican, thus proving its partisanship, not race, driving the decision. But that ignores the fact that the point of the VRA is to ensure that minority voters have the actual ability to elect  representatives, whatever their race. 

It also ignores that the nation’s other minority groups have far less established voting patterns. In the 2024 presidential election, 48% of Hispanics voted for the Republican, as did 40% of Asians. The VRA protects these voters, too. 

Until 2014, no Hispanic had ever been elected to city council in Yakima, Wash., even though they made up roughly a third of its voting-age population, on account of its at-large system. A successful Section 2 lawsuit led to a new district-based council system that saw Hispanic candidates win 3 of the 7 seats in the next election.

Asian Americans are a small but growing segment of the voting population, said John C. Yang, president of Asian Americans Advancing Justice – AAJC, which is why they worry about the court throttling the VRA. 

“We care because we are a growing political force in this country,” Yang said. “Many of us came to this country because of a belief in democracy, because we’re escaping authoritarian regimes, and to have our voice through our vote be threatened is very disconcerting.

Moreover, if the court offs Section 2, other parts of the law might be next, Yang said. Section 203 requires election officials to print ballots in all of a jurisdiction’s commonly spoken languages and Section 208 allows voters to bring someone of their choosing to help them cast a vote. Naturalized Asian Americans rely heavily on both of those, Yang noted.   

Alabama isn’t the only state where Section 2 of the VRA has continued to have an impact in recent years. In Fayette County Tennessee, Black residents won a VRA lawsuit this year that should let them win at least some seats on the all-white, 19-member commission that represents a quarter Black population. After a successful VRA challenge of state legislative maps in Mississippi, Black Democrats flipped two seats in the state senate — ending the GOP’s supermajority there — and one in the house in the elections earlier this month. And in North Dakota, a VRA lawsuit led by Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, led to new state legislature maps in 2024 that allowed three Native Americans to win office.

Both the Mississippi and North Dakota cases have been appealed to the Supreme Court, with GOP officials in those states arguing that Section 2 of the VRA does not allow for a “private right of action” — in other words, only the U.S. Attorney General, not individual voters or advocacy groups, should be able to sue to enforce the VRA’s protections against discriminatory voting laws. The lower courts have split on the question — the 8th Circuit agreed there is no private right of action in North Dakota, while the 5th Circuit said there is in Mississippi — but the Supreme Court still hasn’t announced whether it’ll hear the cases or not. 

Congress beefed up Section 2 in 1982, amending the statute to block election laws with discriminatory impacts as well as those that purposefully aimed to suppress minority voters. The Supreme Court then clarified in 1986 that voting systems could be stuck down if they diluted the power of minority voters, even unintentionally.

As a result, Section 2 has literally changed the makeup of Congress. Before the 1990 Census’ round of reapportionment and redistricting, there were only 15 majority-Black congressional districts in the U.S., and only four in the South. But at the start of 2025, there were 148 majority-minority House districts, or 34% of the nation’s 435 districts. That’s closer, but still a bit shy, to matching the roughly 41% of the U.S. population that is non-white.

Black Farmers Reaped What the VRA Sowed

That representational progress translated into real policy improvements for minorities, said Eva Clayton, who became North Carolina’s first black U.S. Representative in 1992. Her district in eastern North Carolina was created to comply with the VRA. 

“Historically, there were Blacks representing this district — there is a rich history,” Clayton said. “During Reconstruction times, the majority of Black representatives came from this area.”

Reconstruction ended after the 1877 compromise, where Democrats conceded the contested election of 1876 in exchange for Republicans agreeing to remove federal troops from the south. Starting under outgoing President Ulysses S. Grant and continuing under newly elected Rutherford B. Hayes, that’s precisely what happened, ushering in the Jim Crow era. By the turn of the century, southern states had adopted various laws — literacy tests, poll taxes, residency requirements, and the like — to disenfranchise Black voters (and many poor white residents, too). 

When North Carolina’s George Henry White left office in 1901, Congress reverted back to a Whites-only institution and stayed that way for decades. North Carolina didn’t send another Black representative to the House for more than 90 years

The VRA is why Clayton got involved in politics to begin with. “When I ran [for Congress] in 1968, I was involved in trying to get people registered,” she said. 

Clayton didn’t campaign that year thinking she could win — that wasn’t the point. “It was predicated on the fact we motivated minorities to register, and we did,” she said. “I was royally beaten.” 

But soon after, Black residents began running for local offices.

“There were little towns in eastern North Carolina where, for the first time, people began to [think] ‘I can run and win,’” Clayton said. 

By the time she ran for Congress again, this time very much trying to win, she still faced opposition based on the color of her skin, but that mostly came from the political firmament, not regular voters. 

“The resistance to blacks running and getting elected was more at the power level than at the lower level — meaning the citizens, themselves,” Clayton said.

Black residents made up the majority of her district, but not the majority of registered voters. Seeing a black woman running with a real shot — thanks to the VRA-mandated redrawing of the congressional map — inspired many to finally sign up to vote, Clayton added.

That led to one group, in particular, finally getting heard after decades of neglect.

“The Black farmers, I think, felt confident or felt at ease in talking to me about problems they had that they hadn’t brought to [former Rep. Walter] Jones, my predecessor — or if they did, he didn’t do anything about it,” she said. 

The fortunes of Black farmers trailed in the wake of Black political rights. As it became harder for them to buy new land, or faced threats of violence to sell what they already owned, many gave up and moved to northern cities. New Deal programs designed to help struggling planters and ranchers were nearly impossible for minorities to access, which only drove more off their land as they were unable to compete with their subsidized white neighbors. There were more nonwhite farm owners across the South in 1900 than 1959. 

Those trends continued into the 1990s. Even then, Black farmers routinely faced slowtracked applications, suddenly missing paperwork, and outright racial slurs from the predominantly white Southerners staffing the USDA.

Clayton echoed those concerns on the Agriculture Committee and on the House floor. She spoke to President Clinton about the Dept. of Agriculture’s (USDA) practice of discriminating against Black farmers seeking loans and other assistance. 

“I listened to them. I gave them access to talk to the secretary of agriculture, to talk to the President. They felt involved,” Clayton said.

Those talks helped the farmers organize, leading them to eventually sue the department in a class action lawsuit. The 1999 settlement led to around $1 billion being disbursed to roughly 15,000 farmers, and subsequent legislation led to billions more in awarded claims. None of it would have happened without the VRA, Clayton said.

“Some of us are anxious — I know I’m anxious — that they [will] take away Section 2,” she said.

In her home state, Republican lawmakers are now looking to further gerrymander the congressional map they already gerrymandered in 2023 that gave the GOP a 10-4 edge in what was an evenly split delegation. To do so, they cut up Clayton’s old district, which is currently held by Rep. Don Davis, a Black Democrat.

“What’s happening in North Carolina borders on discrimination,” Clayton said. “It’s certainly undemocratic.”

The new map is currently being challenged for violating Section 2 of the VRA, but it’s unlikely the federal panel hearing the case will make a decision before the Supreme Court issues its opinion in Callais. Clayton now worries that her life’s work of registering Black voters and promoting political participation might be all for nought.

“If people see that they don’t have a chance of advancing, they say, ‘what’s the point?’” Clayton said.

Finishing the Race

Civil rights advocates had thought they’d dodged a bullet in 2023, when the Supreme Court affirmed Section 2 of the VRA in Milligan v. Allen, the lawsuit that led to Figures’ district being drawn. So when the Supreme Court ordered reargument in Callais specifically on the question of whether drawing a majority-minority district to remedy a VRA violation, John Cusick, assistant counsel at the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund, was shocked.

“The Supreme Court’s decision in Milligan reaffirmed that Section 2 protects exactly against the type of racial dilution that was proven in Louisiana: That under those circumstances, the creation of a majority black district was unquestionably constitutional,” said Cusick. “The constitutionality of the Voting Rights Act was never an issue brought up at the Callais district court level.”

In Milligan, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh joined the court’s liberals to affirm Section 2. But in his concurrence, Kavanaugh suggested being open to the “temporal argument” that Roberts made in Shelby County, which struck down the VRA’s preclearance rules. While the history of segregation justified preclearance in 1965, Roberts wrote, that was no longer true in 2013. 

With that, conservative opponents of the VRA saw a new opening. 

So, in Callais, the plaintiffs began echoing that temporal argument for the first time on appeal, arguing that drawing new maps to empower minorities shut out of the old maps now effectively flouts the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause. 

All of that might be precisely why the Court decided to consider the constitutionality of Section 2 when it did, Cusick noted. The plaintiffs in Callais only raised this argument on appeal, in passing. It was never litigated at the district court. 

“The argument was waived,” Cusick said. “There was no factual record created,” for the “deeply factual question,” raised by an as-applied challenge. 

It is “not something that can simply be answered by law,” Cusick added.

To accept the temporal argument — that it was once constitutional to redraw maps with more majority-minority districts, but today it no longer is — one must believe that America has smothered the flame of racism, leaving only a few smoldering traces on the fringes of society. 

But to believe that, you’d need to turn a blind eye to a country where the president has dined with a white supremecist and where the leaders of a housing development in Arkansas aren’t afraid to publicize their whites-only policy, confident that neither state nor federal authorities will care to enforce the numerous laws that violates. You’d have to ignore the racist motivations of mass shooters in Charleston, El Paso, Atlanta, Buffalo, and Jacksonville. You’d have to look past the now common reports of young Republican aides texting racial slurs and paeans to Adolf Hitler to one another. 

Without a developed factual record, the Supreme Court will decide Callais without a full account of the role race played in the drawing and redrawing of Louisiana’s maps and how much it continues to impact electoral politics there — even though race still seems dispositive in many races. As NAACP’s Janai Nelson noted during the oral arguments, Louisiana has still never elected a Black person to statewide office, even though nearly a third of the state is Black.

So, will this court buy the temporal argument, that societal racism no longer justifies a governmental response? 

In an unsigned order in September, the Supreme Court blessed the DHS’s racial profiling, with Kavanaugh writing in a concurrence that ethnicity can be a “relevant factor” authorizing federal agents to detain suspected illegal immigrants. Since then, these “Kavanaugh stops” have led to the violent arrest of dozens of Hispanic Americans for the color of their skin, even after many provided proof of their citizenship. 

Six decades ago, black-and-white images of police violence against Black civil rights activists in the South shocked the nation’s conscience. Today, the videos are in HD: federal law enforcement officers teargassing children, shooting citizens, pepperballing pastors, roughing up shoppers, smashing car windows, beating protestors. 

But close court observers, like AAJC’s Yang, don’t think the conservative justices are paying much attention to all that. 

“This Supreme Court has, frankly, a hostility to recognizing that race plays an important role in our community today, and that we are not yet a race blind society,” he said.  

Maya Bodinson contributed to this report.