SCOTUS ruling has effectively gutted the Voting Rights Act

By Ryan Whirty

Contributing Writer

With its ruling last week rejecting Louisiana’s proposed new congressional district map, the U.S. Supreme Court has eliminated the voices of millions of Black Americans by effectively gutting the landmark Voting Rights Act, say civil rights activists in New Orleans and the rest of the state.

However, they also say they will continue the fight for fairness, justice and equality, in Louisiana and beyond.

“Today, we lost one of the last seatbelts of our democracy,” said Alanah Odoms, executive director of the ACLU of Louisiana. “The Supreme Court has gutted the last pillar of the Voting Rights Act. This decision doesn’t just weaken voting rights, it obliterates them.

“Black Louisianans fought, bled and died for generations to gain fair representation. Today, the Court stripped it away. But Louisiana’s Black and brown communities will not be silenced. We will not accept this quietly. The fight for representation continues in the legislature, and in the streets, and in every election where our voices refuse to be silenced.”

On April 29, the Supreme Court issued its ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, striking down the state’s redrawn voting district map that had added a second Black-majority district. By calling unconstitutional the efforts to provide better proportional representation for people of color, the Court effectively nullified the last key remaining tenet of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which helped end the Jim Crow laws and policies imposing segregation and relegating Black Americans, especially in the South, as second-class people.

Critics say last week’s SCOTUS ruling sets the ongoing fight for Civil Rights back by decades, if not centuries, and essentially snuffs out the voting rights of millions of Americans of color.

Dr. Robert A. Collins, a professor of Urban Studies and Public Policy and the Conrad N. Hilton Endowed Professor at Dillard University, said the Court’s Louisiana v. Callais decision “basically guts section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and destroys a lot of the original intent of Congress when they passed the bill.

“It basically takes out all of the enforcement provisions,” he added. “Now you can no longer look at [election] results and say that racial discrimination is taking place. Now you would actually have to prove direct racial discrimination, which is almost impossible to do these days.”

Collins said that in the wake of the SCOTUS ruling, state legislators in multiple states, particularly in the South, will now redraw election district maps to eliminate Black-majority districts.

“Now, those [largely Republican] state legislators will say that they’re not going in for racial reasons,” Collins added, “they’re doing it for partisan reasons to eliminate Democrats. Because political gerrymandering is lawful, according to the Supreme Court.”

But, he said, “[t]he reality is that in the South, it’s hard to separate race and party. Most of the Democrats that get eliminated [by partisan redistricting] will end up being Black.”

Collins said the potential resulting election of additional white, Republicans could lead to greater anti-Black public policies.

“That’s always a risk,” he said, “simply because you will have less Black representation in positions of power. There’s no way around that.”

U.S. Rep. Troy A. Carter Sr. (D-La.) said in a statement that the Supreme Court’s ruling will have a disastrous effect on voting rights, civil rights and American democracy.

“[Last week’s] decision by the Supreme Court is a devastating blow to the promise of equal representation in our democracy,” Carter stated. “This ruling is about far more than lines on a map – it’s about whether Black Louisianians will have a meaningful opportunity to make their voices heard.

“For decades, the Court’s majority has steadily chipped away at the Voting Rights Act of 1965,” he added. “The consequences of this decision are immediate and severe: the hard-fought progress that led to the creation of two majority-Black congressional districts in Louisiana is now in jeopardy.

“Let’s be clear: this is not about so-called ‘colorblind’ principles. History has shown us time and again that policies claiming neutrality, from literacy tests to poll taxes, have been used to silence Black voices. Louisiana knows this history all too well. Without the protections of the Voting Rights Act, there is no evidence to suggest that Black voters in our state will be able to elect candidates of their choice.”

Following the ruling, the Urban League of Louisiana issued a similarly sharp rebuke to the Court’s decision.

With the ruling, according to the Urban League statement, “the Court has not simply reinterpreted the law, it has redefined it in a way that strips power from Black communities and shields discriminatory outcomes from accountability.

“This decision is not about neutrality. It is about power. It is about who gets to shape the political landscape, whose voices are amplified, and whose votes are diluted. By imposing new, nearly insurmountable barriers to proving violations of the Voting Rights Act, the Court has effectively told states that they may systematically weaken Black voting strength – so long as they avoid leaving behind explicit evidence of intent.

This article originally published in the May 4, 2026 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.