10 Years After Supreme Court Gutted Voting Rights, We See the Impact on Black Americans

In response to the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, then-Alabama Gov. George Wallace said, “Never before in the history of this nation have so many human and property rights been destroyed by a single enactment of the Congress. It is an act of tyranny. It is the assassin's knife stuck in the back of liberty.”

The Civil Rights Act outlawed discriminatory voting practices established mostly in Southern states following the Civil War and — in Section 5 of the law — required 10 entire states and some individual counties to obtain federal government “preclearance” before changing election or voting laws or practices to ensure they were not discriminatory.

Unfortunately, dismissive and problematic views of the Voting Rights Act have persisted. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts also had a chilling response to voting rights 10 years ago today, on June 25, 2013, when the court issued its ruling in Shelby County v. Holder. Roberts, who wrote the opinion, said, “There is no denying, however, that the conditions that originally justified these measures no longer characterize voting in the covered jurisdictions.” The 2013 decision gutted the 1965 Voting Rights Act by declaring unconstitutional Section 5 and its requirement that jurisdictions with a history of suppressing Black voters get federal approval.

The plaintiff, in this case, was Shelby County, Ala. — the same state where Wallace fought to suppress civil rights for Black people. And it's the same state where, despite Roberts’ statement that Wallace-like conditions no longer characterize voting, legislators redrew electoral maps in 2021 in which Black people, who comprise one-quarter of the state’s population, were the majority in just one of seven districts. 

Earlier this month, a decade after the Shelby decision, Roberts wrote the unexpected 5-to-4 opinion in Allen v. Milligan that these new electoral maps — enabled by Shelby — stifled the voices of Black voters. Rather than hailing Roberts for saving the Voting Rights Act today, we should recognize his and the court’s role in allowing the discriminatory maps contested in Milligan to be drawn in the first place — he, and the other justices concurring in Shelby in 2013, seem to have willfully glossed over the South’s deep-rooted, virulent racism to declare that because some progress had been made since 1965, Southern states could now enact election measures at will without federal oversight regarding their impact on Black voters.

While described as a “landmark voting rights case,” Shelby is part of a long tradition of what amounts to Supreme Court hostility to Black people in this country dating back to upholding slavery laws and denying equal rights. From 1954 to 1964, there was a brief reprieve in the court’s decisions that resulted in the repression of Black people, bookended by Brown v. Board of Education, which invalidated school segregation, and Katzenback v. McClung, in which the court upheld the components of the 1964 Civil Rights Act prohibiting racial discrimination in public places such as hotels and restaurants.

Aside from that decade, the Supreme Court’s history is plagued with attacks on Black people. In 1857, the court ruled in Dred Scott v. Sanford that Black people “are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word 'citizens' in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States.” This case crushed the attempt of Dred Scott, an enslaved person in Missouri who had been taken to the free state of Illinois and then back to Missouri, to win his freedom and sent a signal to racist decision-makers that the Supreme Court could be used as a tool to oppress Black people. 

The Supreme Court also crushed the nascent rights given to Black people during Reconstruction following the Civil War. From 1865 to 1870, the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, as well as granted citizenship, equal rights and voting rights to formerly enslaved people. But in subsequent decades, the Supreme Court ruled that states did not have to enforce these rights and gave federal approval to racist Jim Crow laws, keeping Black people restricted from true freedom and equal access to American citizenship, which can be felt even to this day. 

The gerrymandered maps and voter suppression laws resulting from Shelby have peeled back the freedoms of Black voters, and they helped create right-wing majorities in state legislatures that do not represent the popular will but rather reflect a strategic power grab.

In its Milligan decision, the court ordered Alabama to redraw its electoral maps to result in one additional majority-Black district, the bare minimum. But just as the court did when it blithely declared in Shelby that the era of voter suppression was over, the justices are entrusting Alabama’s redistricting to the same legislature with a GOP supermajority that drew the discriminatory map that unconstitutionally blocked the will of the state’s Black voters. It’s entirely conceivable that a redrawn map could result in no Black representation in Congress from Alabama and that Milligan may be setting us up for even deeper disenfranchisement. 

Despite Shelby, voting rights advocates will continue to fight for each and every Black voter to have the full freedom to vote. With votes, we shape policy and distribution of resources. With votes, we create political power and can overcome racially discriminatory gerrymandering throughout the South and throughout the country. With votes, we hold state legislatures accountable to our communities’ demands on issues that impact our lives daily, including health care, education, environmental justice, criminal justice reform and more. So, on this anniversary of Shelby, now is the time for people of goodwill to lean into the battle for a restored and strengthened Voting Rights Act.

Cliff Albright is co-founder of the Black Voters Matter Fund and its Capacity Building Institute, which build community and organizational capacity related to Black voting power and work to empower Black communities.