Activists paid for the Voting Rights Act in blood. The supreme court has undermined it | Sophia Lin Lakin

The supreme court on Wednesday paved the way for racial discrimination in voting, 60 years after Martin Luther King Jr and thousands of other movement leaders bled, marched and mobilized for Congress to outlaw it. This is a break-glass outcome for what was already a severely weakened Voting Rights Act (VRA), and it will reshape the future of political representation at all levels of government, in Louisiana and beyond.

Section 2 of the VRA has served as the country’s primary shield against racial vote dilution – prohibiting voting practices that leave minority voters with less opportunity than others to elect candidates of their choice, such as racially gerrymandered district maps. The court’s decision has torn it away.

Some will celebrate this as a victory for a “colorblind” constitution. But ignoring racial discrimination does not make it go away; you cannot cure a disease by refusing to diagnose it. Without section 2 or the ability to respond to patterns of discrimination, there is little to stop future maps from returning to what they looked like during Jim Crow. For decades, the VRA gave civil rights advocates and the federal government powerful tools to stop racial discrimination in voting. In today’s decision, the supreme court treats the law’s very success as the reason why it is no longer necessary. But as justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg described it in her dissent in Shelby County v Holder, dismantling effective voter protections is like “throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet”.

When Dr Press Robinson first tried to register to vote, he was a young man in the Jim Crow south. In the 1950s, a registrar handed him the US constitution and told him to read and interpret it. This was a “literacy” test designed to block Black citizens from the ballot box. Years later, after the VRA was enacted – through immense personal sacrifices and the historic activism of the civil rights movement – and tests like these were banned, Robinson became the first Black member elected to the East Baton Rouge parish school board. He is a true testament to what happens when America’s promise of a racially-inclusive democracy is made real.

Robinson’s story is not of another era. It is the basis of the very section 2 claims we brought all the way to the supreme court in Callais. For more than a generation, a majority of Black voters in Louisiana – who make up roughly one-third of the state’s population – were confined to a single congressional district out of six, while white voters commanded a majority in the rest. Lower courts found that this diluted Black voting strength in violation of section 2 of the VRA, and a remedial map finally produced two majority-Black districts for the 2024 elections. But that progress – hard-fought and hard-won – has just been swept away by the supreme court.

This decision will jeopardize maps for congressional seats, state legislatures, city councils, school boards – every level at which communities of color have fought for true representation. Without section 2 as a meaningful protection, legislatures across the country will face far fewer legal constraints on drawing maps that dilute minority voting strength. Fair districts that took decades of litigation – not to mention blood and sweat – to achieve are now at risk. And representation isn’t just symbolic. It is a vote on whether your child’s school gets funded, whether your neighborhood gets flood relief, and whether your community’s healthcare survives the next budget. Erase the district, and erase the power to determine any of it.

Robinson spent his life proving that democracy could be made to work and he lived to see the district his testimony helped create. Today, the court has erased it. Make no mistake: today’s decision represents a serious setback for America’s promise of a racially-inclusive democracy. But the lesson of his generation is that this ruling does not mean the end of the struggle for fair representation. It means that struggle will now be steeper, longer, and more uncertain. The court cannot take away the memory of what it took to secure these rights in the first place – and the resolve of those who have fought for them across generations. All people of conscience should come together in defense of voting rights this year, such as joining your local ACLU affiliate’s Democracy Defenders program, to organize in defense of election safeguarding.

• Sophia Lin Lakin is the director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project, and a premier voting rights attorney who has dedicated her career to protecting and expanding voting rights across the United States