My mother has been saying it my whole life.
They will put us back in the fields.
My mother, Bishop Helen H. Washington, didn’t say it like a prediction. She said it like a woman who had already seen enough of this country to know how it operates when it thinks no one is watching. She said it the way Black mothers say things that are true before the rest of the world catches up — quietly, precisely, without drama.
Because the drama was never the point. The truth was the point.
I am 51 years old. And on May 16, 2026, in the state of Louisiana, my mother’s words were no longer a warning. They were reality.
On that same day, she passed away and left me with the torch to continue this work. So I write this for her — and for every child who ever heard their mother say something true before they were old enough to understand it.
On April 29, 2026, the U. S. Supreme Court handed down its decision in the Louisiana v. Callais case and effectively gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 — the same law that people marched for, bled for, and in some cases died for. In a 6-3 opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito, the court ruled that Louisiana’s second majority-Black congressional district — a district created because a federal court found the previous map violated the Voting Rights Act — was itself unconstitutional.
The remedy, the court said, had become the violation. As Justice Elena Kagan wrote in her dissent, the decision renders Section 2 “all but a dead letter.”
Guardrails gone
Which means the guardrails are gone. Any protection can now be reframed as overreach. Any district drawn to reflect the reality of who lives in this state can be called a gerrymander. The law that was supposed to be the floor — the absolute minimum guarantee that Black voters could elect someone who looked like them, who came from them, who answered to them — has been hollowed out from the inside by the very institution sworn to uphold it.
In the legislative chamber, Sen. Jay Morris, the Republican from northern Louisiana who seems to specialize in putting Black New Orleans judiciary out of office, noted that a majority-white district could still elect a Black candidate to office.
But Louisiana has never had a Black Congressperson elected from a non-majority-Black district, Justice Elena Kagan wrote in her dissent to the Callais decision. “The evidence showed that as few as 12% of White voters in Louisiana would support Black-preferred candidates in statewide contests, Kagan wrote. “Without that district, Black voters’ choices would be swamped.”
And Louisiana moved fast to make sure our choices were swamped.
Within days, the state Senate passed Senate Bill 121 by a 27-10 party-line vote, eliminating the majority-Black 6th Congressional District and pushing the Republican congressional advantage in this state from 4-2 to 5-1. The bill’s own author, Morris, said it plainly — these maps were drawn to maximize Republican advantage. No code. No pretense. Just the quiet confidence of men who know the guardrails are gone.
Then, on May 16, I went to my precinct and was faced with the closed primary — another layer of architecture built to manage who gets access and how much. I am a no-party voter. For weeks after April 30, when Gov. Jeff Landry suspended the congressional primaries, I did not know whether I would even be allowed to participate in my own democracy.
When I finally went to the polls, I discovered the exact consequence: I was stripped of the Senate race and the full ballot, handed a limited document, and only allowed to vote on five constitutional amendments. That uncertainty and exhaustion was not an accident. It was the design.
Add to that the fact that Gov. Landry canceled the U.S. House primary elections, making people uncertain about whether the entire election was canceled. “That means many voters will be mighty confused,” wrote LSU professor Robert Mann. “And when voters are confused, they often stay home.”
The same script, through history
Same script. Different cast. Louisiana history is filled with similar switches.
Plantation to penitentiary. Sharecropping to mass incarceration. Poll tax to closed primary. Angola — the most famous prison in America — still sits on a former slave plantation. The land didn’t change. Only the paperwork did.
And the same legislature that drew those maps in the middle of the night has spent the last two years lengthening prison sentences, charging 17-year-olds as adults, and eliminating parole — in a state where Black people are 32% of the population and nearly two-thirds of the incarcerated. The fields just have prison walls now. And somebody is getting paid to keep the prisons full.
As she cooked red beans, the physical sustenance for our family, my mother understood that we needed a different sustenance, political sustenance, to resist these systems. This is the pattern.
To the young people reading this — the very same 17-year-olds this system is eager to charge as adults and use as raw material — I need you to hear me:
It is easy to look at this exhaustion and conclude that voting doesn’t matter. I understand the feeling. I understand looking at what is happening and asking what the point is when they redraw the map while you’re asleep. I understand the exhaustion. I carry some of it myself.
But that silence and disappearance is exactly what the system is waiting for. The pipeline to the streets is waiting for you when you decide the system isn’t worth fighting. The same system that gutted Section 2, that drew those maps at 4:30 in the morning, that opened Angola on a former slave plantation to house people who look like you — that system does not fear your anger. It fears your presence. Your pen. Your degree. Your vote. Your refusal to give it your body as raw material.
Your grandmothers and grandfathers were beaten with billy clubs for the right your ballot represents. They did not go through that so you could hand it back.
Protest with a pen
A pen can be a protest. The classroom is a sanctuary from those fields — both the ones with dirt and the ones with walls. And when a ballot is handed over, even an imperfect one inside a system that has failed you in documented and undeniable ways, forcing them to count every single vote becomes an act of defiance.
Because the alternative is giving them exactly what they built all of this to produce.
Your absence.
I have seen this before in my lifetime. Twice, specifically, in ways this state will never forget.
When David Duke — former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan — ran for governor of Louisiana in 1991, Black Louisiana looked at what was on that ballot and said: absolutely not. Black voter turnout reached 80% in that runoff election. Nearly 1.73 million people voted — the highest gubernatorial turnout Louisiana had seen in decades. Duke lost.
When Barack Obama ran for President in 2008, something stirred in this community that no poll, no pundit, and no political machine had fully predicted. People who had never voted drove themselves to the polls. People who had given up found a reason to come back.
Both times the message was the same — our fight is not only about paying homage to our ancestors. It is about protecting our own democracy when it is in danger. It is about making sure our children’s freedom does not expire on our watch. It is about understanding that civic duty is not a courtesy. It is a lifeline.
That turnout happened again on May 16, 2026.
I voted on all five of those constitutional amendments. Every single one of them failed. Nearly 800,000 Louisianians showed up in the middle of a system designed to exhaust and confuse them — finding ballots that were incomplete, races that were suspended, affidavits that had to be signed just to get through the door. The Louisiana Democratic Party fielded more than 300 calls from voters experiencing irregularities across the state, beginning at 6 a.m. And still, when the results came in, every single one of Gov. Landry’s constitutional amendments was rejected. All five. Across the board.
And it was Black Louisiana that led the charge. In a state where Black people make up 32% of the electorate, they made up 35% of early voters. They outpaced their own population. They showed up bigger than the system expected.
The day before the election, hundreds of residents stood in line for hours in the Louisiana heat to sign a recall petition against Gov. Landry — white, Black, Spanish, Arabic, Indian, every background, every parish, one line. The petition, filed by two Baton Rouge women, requires 500,884 handwritten signatures from registered voters across all 64 parishes by October 31, 2026. They called one of their signature drives “Red Beans and Resistance.”
That is protest with a pen. That is exactly what power looks like.
Never underestimate the power of the vote — even when they try to tell you how much of it you’re allowed to use.
My mother has been saying it my whole life. Fifty-one years of hearing it. And on May 16, 2026, the same day she passed away and left me with the torch to continue this work, 800,000 people proved she was not just warning us.
She was preparing us.
The torch is still lit. The 800,000 people who showed up on May 16, and the ones standing in line in the Louisiana heat for the “Red Beans and Resistance” petition, have already shown us how it is carried.
The only question left is who will carry it next.
Andrea Hagan is a criminology instructor at Loyola University New Orleans and the founder of Pattern Hunters, LLC, a public scholarship platform that focuses on criminology, community engagement, and accountability. Further information is available at patternhunters.com.
