How One Supreme Court Ruling Is Rewriting 60 Years of Voting Protections

Black voters in Southern states fear the recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling that weakened voting rights protections has set the stage for a return to the 1950s and ’60s in terms of representation and the weakening of Black voting power.

Alabama on Monday became the latest state at risk of losing a seat in Congress after the Supreme Court’s conservative majority cleared the way for the state to revert to a map with one majority-Black district. It threatens the seat held by U.S. Rep. Shomari Figures, a Democrat first elected in 2024 under a court-ordered map. His victory had given Alabama, where Black residents comprise more than a quarter of the population, two Black representatives in its congressional delegation for the first time in history.

“My hope is that this is a temporary setback and that three Republican-appointed judges will again find what they found the first time: that the State of Alabama intentionally discriminated against Black voters in drawing its congressional district lines,” Figures said. “I ran for this seat to be a voice for all of Alabama, and I’m not backing down from that mission now. The fight must and will go on.”

The ruling is the latest fallout from the Supreme Court’s April 29 decision eroding a key provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The 6-3 ruling struck down a majority-Black congressional district in Louisiana. Within two weeks, several states rushed to redraw their own maps.

“The court has essentially put the death knell into our nation’s most singularly important federal civil rights law,” Kristen Clarke, general counsel of the NAACP, told Capital B. The decision, she added, has emboldened lawmakers in former slaveholding states to dismantle majority-Black districts. “They will do so with the blessing of this court.”

Most Black Americans reside in the South, and such a shift, advocates caution, could change the balance of power and the complexion of leadership in this country.

Which states are trying to redraw their maps?

Alabama: Gov. Kay Ivey, a Republican, called a special legislative session to begin on May 4 to bring back Alabama’s previous map, which didn’t include the seat for the majority-Black district currently held by Figures.

“The conservative justices on the Supreme Court just literally substituted themselves in to be the defense lawyers for the State of Alabama,” Figures said. “The Court just gave the state the benefit of an argument the Supreme Court acknowledged just a week ago that the State did not even present in defending its maps.”

In 2024, he won his race to represent Alabama’s 2nd Congressional District, which had recently been redrawn to be majority Black after the U.S. Supreme Court decided in 2023 that the previous map likely violated the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Tennessee: Similarly, Gov. Bill Lee, a Republican, has called for a special legislative session to begin on May 5 to review the state’s map. Redrawn lines would have a large impact on Memphis, which is included in Tennessee’s only majority-Black district.

On May 7, Republican state lawmakers approved a new U.S. House map that carved up a majority-Black district in Memphis, reshaping it to the GOP’s advantage as part of President Donald Trump’s strategy to hold on to a slim majority in the November midterm elections.

“I was here when we first fought with the Department of Justice to get this district drawn so that the African American minority could win it,” Memphis resident Fred Dorse, 81,  told MLK 50. “It hurts my heart, at almost 81 years old, to see us lose this again. The same fight we had then, back in the late ’60s and ’70s, now we’re fighting it in 2026, and we have to preserve it.

Days after the Tennessee legislature changed state law and redrew congressional districts, the new 9th District seat is drawing a race between two legislative Republicans.

South Carolina: Gov. Henry McMaster, a Republican, said that it would be “appropriate” for the General Assembly to review whether South Carolina’s map complies with the law, given the Supreme Court’s decision. Any changes to the map could have affected the heavily Black district whose seat U.S. Rep. Jim Clyburn has held since 1993.

On May 12, the Republican-led state Senate rejected a measure to take up a redraw of the state’s congressional map despite pressure from Trump.

Virginia: On May 8, The Virginia Supreme Court struck down the state’s April 21 redistricting ballot measure that voters had approved. The measure would have helped Democrats pick up four additional seats and bolstered Black political power in Congress.

The 4-3 ruling came just two days after the FBI raided the offices of Democratic state Sen. L. Louise Lucas, a vocal proponent of the measure. 

Florida: Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, was moving to redraw the state’s map before the Supreme Court’s decision, but he viewed the development as further justification for signing a new map into law. 

Why has the conservative bloc undercut Black voting power?

Alito wrote that it was necessary to revisit Section 2, a provision created to combat racially discriminatory map-drawing. He cited gains in ending racial discrimination, the ease with which plaintiffs can “exploit” Section 2 by “dressing their political-gerrymandering claims in racial garb,” and the ability to use technology to draw lines that balance partisanship and race.

Now, he wrote, plaintiffs must demonstrate, using only “current” conditions, that minority groups faced intentional discrimination in the redistricting process.

“Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was designed to enforce the Constitution — not collide with it,” Alito wrote. “Unfortunately, lower courts have sometimes applied this Court’s [Section] 2 precedents in a way that forces States to engage in the very race-based discrimination that the Constitution forbids.”

This decision breaks with decades of precedent holding that Congress designed Section 2 to address not only intentional discrimination but also maps that lead to discrimination, regardless of whether intent could be proved.

Joining the majority opinion, which has significantly raised the bar for Voting Rights Act plaintiffs, were Alito’s fellow conservative justices, including Chief Justice John Roberts. He wrote the majority opinion in the landmark 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision, which gutted a separate Voting Rights Act provision and led to an increase in the racial turnout gap, according to an analysis by the Brennan Center for Justice. Roberts has been critical of the Voting Rights Act since he was a young attorney in the U.S. Department of Justice.

How are the liberal justices warning that this will harm democracy?

Justice Elena Kagan delivered a muscular rebuke of Alito’s opinion. In her dissent, which was joined by her fellow liberal justices, she denounced the court’s decision as the “latest chapter in the majority’s now-completed demolition” of the Voting Rights Act and the law’s deeper goal of expanding democracy.

“It is the rare legislature, as the history of voting discrimination shows, that cannot camouflage racial targeting with race-neutral justifications,” she wrote, criticizing Alito’s new requirement that plaintiffs prove racially discriminatory intent.

Kagan also warned that representation of Black communities in elected office could drop — and precipitously so.

“The consequences are likely to be far-reaching and grave,” she wrote. “[This] decision renders Section 2 all but a dead letter. In the States where that law [the Voting Rights Act] continues to matter — the States still marked by residential segregation and racially polarized voting — minority voters can now be cracked out of the electoral process.”

Kagan was pointing to familiar — and controversial — redistricting tactics: “cracking” Black voters across multiple districts to minimize their influence, and “packing” them into as few districts as possible to contain that influence.

Which districts could be next on the chopping block?

While finding a definitive number is difficult, groups have offered estimates of which districts might be affected by the kind of decision that was delivered April 29.

In an October report, Fair Fight Action and Black Voters Matter said that 33 House districts could be targeted in midcycle redistricting, and that 27 of them could become safe for Republican candidates. Of those districts, 19 would result from overturning Section 2.

“It’s enough to cement one-party control of the U.S. House for at least a generation,” according to the report.

But Janai Nelson, the president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, cautioned following the decision against focusing only on Congress.

“State legislatures, city councils, school boards, water boards, any entity that requires redistricting will be impacted by the decision,” she said. “We don’t have the numbers across the board for every district in this country — because there are so many that have benefited from the protections of Section 2 — but we do know that it will have a direct and potentially immediate impact on some of the upcoming elections, and certainly on elections going forward.”

What’s the new battleground for protecting Black voting rights?

Some advocates are attempting to create state-level alternatives to what they consider the now-defanged federal Voting Rights Act.

“At the LDF, we’re pushing for state Voting Rights Acts across the country,” Nelson said. “We’ll use that tool where possible and be as aggressive as we can in trying to get them passed in even the most unlikely states, like Louisiana, Mississippi, and other states known for their rampant racial discrimination.”

Nine states have their own Voting Rights Acts: Colorado (2025), Minnesota (2024), Connecticut (2023), New York (2022), Virginia (2021), Oregon (2019), Washington (2018), Illinois (2011), and California (2002). Louisiana state Sen. Royce Duplessis recently introduced similar legislation for the Bayou State, but it never made it out of committee.

Ambrose Sims, who lives in Louisiana’s West Feliciana Parish and has also challenged the state in court over its maps, shared Nelson’s enthusiasm for pushing back. He described the court’s April 29 decision as at once disappointing and reinvigorating.

“This ruling should really be a call to order,” said Sims, who grew up during the era of segregation and underscored that he doesn’t want to return to that time. “We’ve got to be vigilant. We have to look at what’s happening at the local level, in the state legislature, and in Congress. We have to let our voices be heard at the voting booth. We just need to fight — and not give up.”

Read More:

• The Voting Rights Act Turns 60. Its Future Has Never Looked More Fragile.
• Why Voting Is Becoming Harder for Black Americans in Southern States

This story has been updated.

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