By April England-Albright
Word in Black
The Supreme Court’s October 2025 session may be its most consequential yet in the long fight for Black freedom.
Louisiana v. Callais, which was reargued on Oct. 15, is the latest case testing the Voting Rights Act — a law the court has steadily weakened over the past decade and a half. Now, Section 2 — which allows race to be considered when creating majority-Black voting districts to address decades of discrimination — is next on the chopping block.
It’s impossible to know definitively how the SCOTUS will rule. However, this ruling, more than any other this term, will tell us exactly where it stands on the value of Black voices in American democracy. It can either defend what’s left of this nation’s only federal voting rights protections or it can continue its dismantling of democracy, Black autonomy and freedom.
A long history of judicial betrayal
Unfortunately, throughout the past 222 years, SCOTUS has used its power to strike down laws and federal actions it deemed unconstitutional through judicial review, to disenfranchise and diminish the power of Black people. Beginning with the infamous 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford ruling, the Court essentially nationalized the disenfranchisement and enslavement of Black people by declaring that the “Black Man had no rights that the White Man was bound to respect, even if they lived in a state where Black people were permitted to live free.”
This disenfranchisement didn’t end when the Constitution was amended to end slavery, to grant the formerly enslaved citizenship and equal protection under the law or give the formerly enslaved protection to vote, via the 13th through 15th amendments. Despite these allegedly revolutionary amendments, SCOTUS ensured White supremacy and its terror would reign for another century.
The Court went on to strike down the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which sought to enforce the equal promise of the 14th Amendment. Instead, for years after its passage, it upheld segregation, kept poll taxes and literacy tests in place designed to deny Black people equal access to the ballot, and determined that Black children did not have to be educated at all. It even agreed that Jim Crow laws were bad, but it was not going to do anything about them.
In 1954, attorneys with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, propelled by a movement for civil rights led by Black people and allies in the Jim Crow South, ushered in change at last. They successfully argued that segregation was inherently unequal, prompting SCOTUS to reverse its earlier decision ruling that segregation was legal. And after the Brown decision, SCOTUS, under the leadership of Chief Justice Warren, released a floodgate of decisions that seemingly reversed course on the White supremacy and racism it had embedded into our nation’s laws and society.
Callais and the future of black political power
For 50 years to follow, SCOTUS rendered decisions that ended bans on interracial marriages, prohibited private businesses from denying services to Black people or discriminating against Black people in lending, employment and public spaces. SCOTUS played a role in protecting the efforts of school systems to provide Black people access to higher education and employment opportunities that were once unattainable. And finally, in 1966, the Court upheld the Voting Rights Act in its full potency, prohibiting discriminatory maps and practices by states aimed at limiting Black political power.
For this reason, despite its ugly origins, Black people have come to see the Court as a vital ally in keeping this country from returning to the worst version of itself: a place where lynchings were the norm and went unprosecuted, voting and ballot access were denied systematically and meaningful employment, educational and lending opportunities were out of our reach.
Present-day SCOTUS feels vastly different. It has destroyed decades of what was already tentative goodwill in just a matter of years, by putting politics over the rule of law and methodically removing critical and fundamental protections for Black people by dismantling preclearance protections in Sections 4 and 5 under the Voting Rights Act, allowing states and jurisdictions to change voting requirements and restrictions capriciously, with little to no oversight. It has permitted states to create modern-day versions of Jim Crow laws that suppress voters, and determined that affirmative action is no longer a constitutional method to remedy past discrimination, despite the existence of present-day racism.
Callais could catapult America further down this dangerous path if the Court deems Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act unconstitutional. It would throw existing maps into disarray by erasing needed guardrails that restrict racist and power-hungry majority-White statehouses, who are presently conducting mid-century redistricting that is diluting and removing Black and Brown congressional districts. It would disproportionately harm Black, rural and Southern communities — the very people our organization, Black Voters Matter, works 365 days a year to build lasting political power for.
So, SCOTUS and Chief Justice Roberts, who will you be this term? Will you follow the legacy of Chief Justice Roger Taney and the Dred Scott SCOTUS, and signal again that Black and marginalized people have no rights that White supremacists have to respect? Or will you follow the legacy of Chief Justice Earl Warren and the Brown SCOTUS, who finally determined that Black People and other marginalized people are indeed citizens in this country deserving of a seat in all of America’s institutions, including the state and federal legislative chambers?
We still have hope that the Court will make the right choice. And we at Black Voters Matter, along with scores of Black, Brown, White, Asian, Indigenous and LGBTQ+ people of different faiths and political ideologies, will be standing in front of the Supreme Court on Oct. 15, and in our communities nationwide, to remind you that we matter in this country. Join us on Oct. 15th in D.C., organize a rally in your hometown, or simply sign the petition.
Let’s show the Court that the nation is watching, and that we will fight back — because we are not returning to an America that did not recognize our rights as citizens in this country.
The opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the writer and not necessarily those of the AFRO.
