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The frontline for voting rights is the rural South

More than 60 years ago, the rural South was the epicenter of voting rights organizing for Black Americans. Marches and government violence in Selma, Alabama, turned the nation’s attention to the violence Black voters faced, inciting the passage of the  (VRA), a signature accomplishment of the Civil Rights Movement.

Now, the Supreme Court has weakened these legal protections, and underrepresented voters all over the country, but particularly in the rural South, are again confronting inequalities in voting rights and fair representation in state, local, and federal government. 

“You’re going to see … very limited judicial and congressional oversight of what states are doing, on how they draw districts,” said John Cusick, assistant counsel at the  (LDF), in an interview with the . “And the real concern is that we’re going to see the same history repeat itself, where Black voters and other voters of color are going to have their voting rights trampled on.”

In April of this year, the Supreme Court gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act in its Louisiana v. Callais decision. Section 2 protected voters of color from racial discrimination in congressional apportionment, or legislative mapmaking.

But the Callais decision was not made in a vacuum. It came after years of Supreme Court case law that gutted key protections. In June of 2013, the Supreme Court decided the landmark Shelby v. Holder, which dismantled a provision that prevented states and municipalities from implementing harmful electoral policies. Since Holder, 29 states have passed  voting laws like strict photo ID policies and restrictions on mail-in voting. Holder and Callais administered a “death by 1,000 cuts” to the VRA, Cusick said.

The Rural Origins of the Voting Rights Act

In 1962, three years before Congress passed the VRA, only . In the spring of 1965, in Dallas County, Alabama, where Selma is the county seat, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) sought to increase registration among Black residents. They formed the , an effort to register Black residents to vote by funneling national attention to the issue through a series of marches. Civil Rights organizer Reverend Andrew Young told the Birmingham News in 1965 that the “voting bill is being written in Selma,” referring to the coming VRA. 

In February of 1965, activists aimed to march to the Marion Courthouse from Zion United Methodist Church in Marion, Alabama. But demonstrators were met with violence from law enforcement officers, who killed 26-year-old deacon Jimmie Lee Jackson.  

In response to Jackson’s murder, the SCLC organized a  from Selma to Montgomery on March 7, 1965. But the protesters only traveled two-thirds of a mile before police, under the leadership of Dallas County Sheriff Jim Clark,  the crowd on the Edmund Pettus Bridge near downtown Selma. Many demonstrators were injured and hospitalized during the attack, which came to be known as “Bloody Sunday.”

On the following day, Civil Rights leaders Hosea Williams, John Lewis, and Amelia Boynton filed a class action lawsuit against Alabama Governor George Wallace, claiming violations of Black Alabamians’ voting rights. In Williams v. Wallace, the Supreme Court required the U.S. Army and the Alabama National Guard to escort the protestors on another Selma-to-Montgomery march, led by Martin Luther King Jr., from March 21 to March 25, 1965. 

Voting rights historian Alexander Keyssar, Ph.D., of Harvard University, said that, although most voting legislation has historically been at the state level, the VRA was one of the first significant pieces of voting legislation at the federal level. 

“If you left the South on its own, it was not going to eliminate racial discrimination in voting,” Keyssar told the Daily Yonder in a phone interview. “You couldn’t assume that over time things would get better.”

While Black Americans fought for voting rights at home, the United States faced pressure from abroad to create more equitable voting systems. During the Cold War, Soviet forces influenced other countries, including African countries, to consider how Americans were treating their own people of color. 

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Scott Olson // Getty Images

“Why do you want to align with the United States? Look at the way they treat their Black and brown people,” said Keyssar.

With pressures both from home and abroad, President Lyndon B. Johnson  five months after Bloody Sunday. The law has been reauthorized since its passage because certain provisions were time-limited. This  under President George W. Bush and a Republican-controlled Congress. But in recent years, in the landmark cases of Shelby v. Holder and Louisiana v. Callais, the Supreme Court has taken a sharp diversion from protecting voting rights for all Americans. 

Shelby v. Holder

Over the last 13 years, the  has grown the most in states previously beholden to the VRA’s preclearance clause, which prohibited states and local governments with histories of voting discrimination from making voting policy changes without federal approval. That’s because the Supreme Court gutted the preclearance clause in their 2013 decision, Shelby v. Holder.

“Section five, which was the preclearance provision, was designed to prevent states from circumventing the intent of the Voting Rights Act by changing some aspects of the electoral system in a way that would harm the interests of minorities,” Keyssar said.

But this clause became unenforceable when the Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice John Roberts, determined that the formula used to determine which places were beholden to the clause was . 

“That flies in the face of a very powerful pattern — very visible in the South — of basically racially segmented voting patterns,” Keyssar said. 

A data analysis from the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan law institute, found that the turnout gap between Black and white voters in places previously beholden to the preclearance cause was about five  points greater than it would have been if the clause were still in effect. “The turnout gap grew almost twice as quickly in formerly covered jurisdictions as in other parts of the county with similar demographics and socioeconomic profiles,” the Brennan Center reported. 

“A lot of people who are experiencing challenges and who felt disadvantaged for their whole lives, they often don’t feel like their votes matter,” said James Sutton, director of operations of Foot Soldiers Park, a nonprofit voting rights advocacy organization based in Selma, Alabama. 

In a rural area, feelings of apathy can be compounded by other challenges, like access to reliable transportation or childcare, according to Sutton. And when those challenges are exacerbated by restrictive voting measures like photo ID laws, it can make it extra hard to get to the polls, especially if you live in a rural area far away from a Driver’s License office. 

A new wave of , one of the many state-level policy changes enabled by the Holder decision, also disproportionately hurts rural voters, according to previous reporting by the Daily Yonder. That’s because there are fewer poll sites in rural areas than there are in urban areas, making travel distances more arduous for rural voters. Limited access to reliable public transportation can exacerbate these challenges.

“Some people have only a small window that they can really be gone for health challenges, or the amount of time they can actually stand,” said Sutton. Long lines at the polls might make it impossible for older populations — particularly those in rural areas — to vote. “People don’t really necessarily have quick access to medicines, hospitals, without having to travel. All of the elements that require somebody to move —  it creates a barrier and a challenge for people,” Sutton said.

Louisiana v. Callais

In Louisiana v. Callais, the Supreme Court made it nearly impossible to prove that racially-discriminatory congressional maps violate Section 2 of the VRA, a decision that will disproportionately hurt voters of color, according to legal experts. 

In 2024, a group of congressional map that included two majority-Black districts, claiming that the two districts were drawn to unfairly favor Black voters. 

But disputes over Louisiana’s congressional map actually began back in 2022, when the state adopted a map that only included one majority-Black district out of the six total districts allotted to the state.  voting population, while only a sixth of congressional maps were majority-Black in the 2022 map. A group of Black voters challenged the 2022 map in federal court, citing racial discrimination and a violation of Section 2 of the VRA.  

A federal judge , agreeing that the map diluted their voting power by splitting, or “,” them into different districts. The  upheld that ruling and ordered Louisiana to draw a new map — one that included a second majority-Black district.

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Jemal Countess // Getty Images for Legal Defense Fund

 
Louisiana’s new 2024 map — the map in question in the Callais decision — included a second majority-Black district that elected Representative Cleo Fields, a Democrat from Baton Rouge who served another majority-Black district in the 1990s. 

But in April of this year, the Supreme Court struck down Louisiana’s 2024 map. In his  opinion, Justice Samuel Alito stated that a violation of Section 2 of the VRA only occurs when “intentional discrimination occurred.” But proving intentional discrimination is difficult, even if an electoral policy or map discriminates in effect. Before the Callais decision, Congress explicitly stated that proving discriminatory intent was not necessary, and that discriminatory effects were sufficient evidence of a Section 2 violation.

“You didn’t need to show that there was a discriminatory purpose,” said Cusick, assistant counsel at LDF. “It’s very, very difficult to prove an intent case.”

Concern over violating Section 2 might have previously kept an all-white legislature from drawing a racially-discriminatory map, but that’s not the case anymore, according to Cusick.

Under the Supreme Court’s new interpretation of Section 2, “a State can, without legal consequence, systematically dilute minority citizens’ voting power,” wrote Justice Elena Kagan in her , which was joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor and Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. New updates to Section 2 of the VRA “eviscerate the law,” according to Kagan.

The Voting Rights Act Today

In response to the Callais decision, many states are rushing to redistrict ahead of the 2026 midterms, while others are calling special legislative sessions to consider a redistricting push for the 2028 presidential election. 

The day after the Supreme Court decided Callais,  asked the court to allow them to use an old congressional map that lower courts previously determined to be racially discriminatory.  with the Alabama lawmakers, allowing the state to use the congressional map that erases one of its two majority-Black districts. Meanwhile, Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry  House primaries to give the state time to redraw a map that  the majority-Black district at the heart of the Callais decision. 

“Unfortunately, Black voters are going to be harmed regardless, and it’s going to show up in different ways,” said Cusick. And the gutting of Section 2 will affect state and local elections in addition to federal ones, according to Cusick. 

In February of 2025, the  in Fayette County, Tennessee, asserting that a county commissioner map discriminated against Black voters. Fayette County is a suburb of Memphis, where more than 75% of the population lives in a rural area according to the Census definition. More than a  of Fayette County residents are Black, but all of the county’s commissioners were white at the time LDF filed its case. 

“In response to that lawsuit, the county commission passed a new map that was fair and reduced those harms. But there are chances throughout this country that you’re going to see revisiting or redistricting at every level,” Cusick said.  

Voters need to be involved at every level of government — attending meetings and following updates — in order to hold leaders accountable, said Cusick, who referred to recent electoral legislation as part of a multi-decade project to dismantle key civil rights protections. The VRA had such an important role in “increasing Black voter participation, turnout, Black candidates running for and winning office,” said Cusick.

Sutton from Foot Soldiers Park echoed Cusick’s advice to voters, emphasizing the importance of participating in democracy. “If something wasn’t important, there wouldn’t be so many people trying to weaken your power or take it away from you,” Sutton said. “So it must be really, really important.”

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