The 15th Amendment (1870)
"The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude."
During the Civil War of the 1860s, more than half a million blue-clad soldiers (40,000 of them Black) died in bloody battle to bring forth a, "... new birth of freedom that government of the people, by the people for the people shall not perish from the earth." Their sacrifice won the 15th Amendment granting the vote to nonwhite Americans.
In response, the forces of white-supremacy schemed, maneuvered, litigated, legislated, and terrorized, to evade and circumvent the 15th. During the Reconstruction Era after the war, freed slaves risked Klan lynchings and fire-bombings to exercise their new-won franchise. The Republican Party betrayed Reconstruction in 1877, ushering in the 88 year long Jim Crow era of segregation, exploitation, and systemic denial of basic human rights.
One hundred years after the Civil War, the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s marched, organized, bled, and endured, to enact the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA) that once again restored voting rights to nonwhite Americans.
Initially, VRA enforcement VRA focused on eliminating barriers designed to prevent nonwhite individuals from voting or participating in the political process. In 1982, Congress amended Section 2 of the VRA to specifically bar schemes — such as racial gerrymandering — that gave nonwhites, "less opportunity than other members of the electorate to elect representatives of their choice." In other words, protecting the right of Black, Latino, and Native communities to elect officials who would represent their interests. For 44 years, Supreme Court (SCOTUS) rulings upheld the constitutionality of that provision.
Racially-motivated white voters in the South (and elsewhere), however, reacted by switching from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party; which, under the southern strategies articulated by Nixon and Reagon, increasingly became the party of white grievance. In 2005, Bush-II appointed John Roberts to be Chief Justice. Roberts, the Republican Party, and right-wing think tanks, initiated a two-decade legal and legislative campaign dedicated to circumventing the 15th Amendment and nullifying the VRA. Last month's highly-partisan SCOTUS decision in Callais v Louisiana is the latest in a long series of rulings, federal and state legislation, and government policies to that end.
The fundamental purpose of Callais, in combination with SCOTUS' 2019 decision in Rucho v. Common Cause, is to overturn Section 2 and to specifically enable racial gerrymandering — so long as the stated purpose is partisan advantage rather than racial power. Since as everyone knows, electoral politics in the South (and more than a few other places) are racially polarized — whites overwhelmingly voting Republican and nonwhites favoring Democrats in congressional, state, county, and local elections — the court's distinction between race and partisanship is a disingenuous fig-leaf of Owellian proportions.
The effect of Callais has been immediate, obvious, and will soon grow worse. Tennessee, for example, is 16% Black and 7% Latino, most of whom live in the Memphis urban area. In compliance with Section 2 of the VRA (now nullified by SCOTUS), the Memphis urban area had a congressional district that was 60% Black and 9% Latino. Tennessee currently has 11 members of Congress, only one of whom is a Democrat elected from that Memphis district. As it happens, he is white, but he was overwhelmingly elected by Black and Latino voters. Immediately after the Calais decision, the Republican-dominated state legislature redrew the state's congressional map to split the Memphis urban area among three majority-white districts to dilute and nullify Black and Latino voting power. It's widely expected that this November the nonwhite voters of that former district will lose their representation in Congress.
Immediately after Calais, Louisiana eliminated one Black-majority congressional district, Alabama is about to do the same, and everyone expects Mississippi (which is 37% Black and 4% Latino) to soon kill off its one nonwhite-majority district in the Delta area. So too, the writing is on the wall for the Latino-majority districts along the Rio Grande River in Texas. Similarly, urban-centered districts with nonwhite majorities in Republican controlled states outside of the South are also on the chopping block. Today, 28% of all House members are nonwhite. Within four years, it's expected that the Callais decision will drastically reduce those numbers. Perhaps by as much as half.
The impact of Callais will be even greater on the state, county, and local level. Black, Latino, and Native legislators, supervisors, council members, judges, and elected law enforcement officials, will be gerrymandered out of office. The political power of nonwhite communities to seek justice and redress on race-related issues of taxes, education, jobs, housing, policing, labor-rights, discrimination policies, zoning, environment, culture, and so on — to say nothing of inequalities in income, wealth, and political power — will be significantly diminished.
And that, of course, is the ultimate purpose and goal of circumventing the 15th Amendment and nullifying the VRA.
For more information and background, see:
What Happens in the South Doesn't Stay in the South, Fair Fight Action and Black Voters Matter [PDF file]The Southern State Legislature Effect, Fair Fight Action and Black Voters Matter. [PDF]
Copyright © Bruce Hartford, 2026
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