This story was originally produced by Alabama Reflector,
The Southern Poverty Law Center Thursday commemorated the 61st anniversary of the Voting Rights Act amid ongoing attacks on the landmark legislation.
Speakers at the event celebrated the impact of the law, which reversed decades of disenfranchisement across the South, but warned of recent attempts to roll back progress on voting rights.
“For generations, Black people were denied full participation in our democracy,” said Tafeni English-Relf, state director of Alabama for the SPLC. “And it was the passage of the Voting Rights Act that allowed those barriers to be broken down.”
The Voting Rights Act was passed months after peaceful voting rights marchers were attacked on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, an event known as Bloody Sunday. The attack led to the Selma-to-Montgomery March and sparked congressional action.
The law abolished barriers such as literacy and qualification tests, and allowed the U.S. Attorney General to challenge poll taxes in state and local elections. Within six months of President Lyndon Johnson signing the measure on Aug. 6, 1965, the number of Black registered voters in Alabama doubled from 110,000 to about 228,000.
After the VRA prohibited tests and devices used to discriminate against Black voters, including poll taxes and literacy tests, the number of Black registered voters in Louisiana skyrocketed too, though a bit more slowly. Registration rates of Louisianans of color nearly doubled within three years.
However, the U.S. Supreme Court’s rulings in Shelby County v. Holder in 2013 and Louisiana v. Callais this spring wiped out key enforcement provisions of the law and allowed states to erect new barriers to voting.
The Holder ruling eliminated Section 5 of the law, which required states with histories of voting discrimination to have election law changes reviewed and approved by the U.S. Department of Justice. Callais made challenges to legislative maps under Section 2 considerably more difficult.
“While we are celebrating today, we must also tell the truth, that the progress we celebrate has not always been protected,” said Shalela Dowdy, a plaintiff in Allen v. Milligan that sought to add a second congressional Black district in Alabama. “The Voting Rights Act has been weakened. Section 5 has been gutted. Section 2 has been narrowed.”
Since Shelby County v. Holder, the disparity in voter participation between Black and white voters in Alabama has increased.
Associate U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito wrote in the Callais majority opinion that those who would challenge election laws as racially discriminatory must prove there was intent to discriminate against minority voters, instead of showing discriminatory effects of a law.
The decision allowed Alabama to use a 2023 congressional map previously ruled racially discriminatory by the courts. The move substantially redrew Alabama’s 2nd Congressional District, currently represented by U.S. Rep. Shomari Figures, D-Mobile, and reduced its Black Voting Age Population from about 49% to under 40%.
Similarly, Louisiana legislators redrew Louisiana’s 6th Congressional District, represented by Cleo Fields, D-Baton Rouge, flipping its Black majority to a white majority.
“Just shameful stuff. Totally anti-democratic,” said state Sen. Royce Duplessis, D-New Orleans.
Also, in late April, despite thousands of ballots cast in Louisiana’s primary election for the U.S. House of Representatives, Louisiana’s governor and secretary of state issued an executive order that suspended Louisiana’s primary election for the U.S. House of Representatives, giving a chance for the legislature to draw new maps.
At the event in Montgomery, Ala., SPLC announced the “We Decide” campaign to mobilize voters and increase voter participation in Alabama. This includes multiple days of canvassing starting in late August, along with community block parties in September.
“The Voting Rights Act was never meant to be a final chapter in American democracy,” said Jerome Dees, policy director for the SPLC. “It was the foundation for what could come next. So today, we honor that legacy by recommitting ourselves to the ongoing work of ensuring that every Alabamian has both the opportunity and the power to help shape our future.”
In Louisiana, the Power Coalition for Equity and Justice (PCEJ), which fought the Callais case as intervenors, also pledged its continued commitment to fair voting maps. “The court’s decision on the map will not slow our fight, because this fight has never been about a single map,“ said Ashley Shelton, the coalition’s president-CEO. “Our work is about ensuring that communities who have historically been sidelined are finally afforded a fair opportunity to participate in the democratic process. It is about affirming that every vote carries equal weight, and that representation is not a privilege reserved for some, but a right guaranteed to all.”
This article includes added Lens reporting to provide Louisiana context.
