On the morning of May 16, people knelt to pray on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma. It was already warm, the kind of Alabama heat that settles in by nine and does not lift. Faith leaders went first, their voices carrying over the rail and out over the brown water. Then everyone rose and crossed the bridge. Sixty years earlier, on that same span, a state trooper cracked John Lewis’s skull for the crime of asking to vote. That afternoon, fifty-four miles east, the crowd filled the steps of the Alabama Capitol in Montgomery, the city the 1965 marchers had been trying to reach when the troopers turned them back. In 2026 they came for the reason Lewis came the first time. The right had been gutted again, and they would not let it go quietly. The fight for voting rights 2026 continues, echoing the struggles of those who marched before.
Ten weeks later, on July 24, a three-judge federal panel looked at a congressional map that slices Black Memphis into three pieces and let it stand for the 2026 elections. The judges did not rule the map fair. They ruled that after Louisiana v. Callais, fair is no longer a question you are allowed to ask.
We did not lose Tennessee because our lawyers were outmatched. The ACLU filed. The NAACP filed. The Legal Defense Fund joined on behalf of the Memphis Urban League. Kathryn Sadasivan of the Legal Defense Fund named it exactly, targeting Black voters by severing their community into three districts to entrench white political power, both shameful and illegal. The court heard all of it and cleared the map for the primaries anyway. The tools that stopped this for sixty years no longer work, because in April the Supreme Court took the wrench out of our hands.
Callais came down 6 to 3 on April 29. Justice Samuel Alito wrote that compliance with Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act could not justify Louisiana drawing a second Black district, and that Black participation has equalized enough to make that district unnecessary. Justice Elena Kagan, joined by Sotomayor and Jackson, wrote that the decision leaves Section 2 “all but a dead letter.” She was not being dramatic. She was reading the room. Within weeks Tennessee cracked Memphis, South Carolina Republicans went after Jim Clyburn’s seat, and Louisiana was told to erase the district an 88-year-old named Press Robinson had spent years defending in court.
So here is the verdict, and I want it plain. If you are waiting for a judge to save these seats before November, stop waiting. The judge is not coming. Damon Hewitt of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law said Callais unleashed “a race to discriminate.” He is right, and the finish line is the 2026 midterm. The only thing standing between that map and the result it was drawn to produce is turnout. Ours.
We already have the proof, and it is not from a courtroom. In Georgia, Governor Brian Kemp called a special session in June to redraw the map the way Tennessee did. It ran from June 17 to June 23, and for those seven days thousands of voters filled the Capitol. They signed up to testify. They packed the hallways until there was nowhere to route the bill quietly. They made the political cost of the vote higher than the reward, and the session ended with no new map.
The Legal Defense Fund credited the win to increased turnout in Georgia’s primary and runoff elections and the overwhelming resistance from voters. Not a ruling. People, in a building, refusing to leave.
In South Carolina, the state Senate killed the push to erase Clyburn’s district on May 26, blocked by Republicans in their own chamber who did not want their names on it. Two maps went down this cycle, and voters took down both.
That is the whole argument. When we show up in numbers a legislature cannot ignore, the map does not get drawn. When we sit it out and trust the process, the map runs. Leon Russell, who chairs the national NAACP, gave the reason in one sentence: “They are redrawing the lines because they know what happens when we vote together.” They are not confused about our power. They are afraid of it. The cracking is a confession.
The people doing the work already understood this, and they did not wait for permission. Black Voters Matter ran a “We Got Us” tour across Alabama in mid-May, the same week as the Selma march, and put out plain-language reports breaking down exactly what Callais does to every district it touches. Cliff Albright and his organizers are not filing briefs and hoping. They are on the ground. In July, the “Good Trouble Lives On” weekend turned three days into voter registration aimed straight at the midterm. That is not nostalgia. That is a machine restarting.
Georgia had to rebuild while the fight was live. The New Georgia Project, which registered close to half a million voters over a decade, shut down this year under financial trouble and a state ethics fine. That would have gutted a weaker movement. Instead the Georgia Coalition for the Peoples’ Agenda under Helen Butler held registration on pace with a normal cycle, the Georgia NAACP under Gerald Griggs leaned on a hundred years of practice, and the national NAACP put one million dollars into Georgia turnout for 2026, double what it spent in 2024 and in 2020. One door closed. They walked through three more.
When we reach the polls, people are waiting to protect the vote itself. The Election Protection coalition relaunched on May 18 and runs the 866-OUR-VOTE hotline in English, Spanish, Arabic, and several Asian languages, with poll monitors and lawyers sent to the places most likely to turn a voter away. The Lawyers’ Committee, the National Bar Association, and the National Urban League staff it together. In Louisiana, groups the Southern Poverty Law Center funds through its Vote Your Voice program are expanding right now. Norris Henderson’s organization, Voice of the Experienced, is registering people with felony convictions who thought their vote was gone for good. Women With a Vision doubled its canvassers from thirty to sixty. Nobody is standing down.
The record is being kept for the long fight too. The Southern Coalition for Social Justice, whose voting-rights chief counsel Jeff Loperfido has worked these Louisiana maps for years, filed historical briefs in Callais arguing the second Black district was a real community with a real past, not a line drawn only by race. In May the group joined other Southern organizations behind a plain declaration, Southern Communities Unite Against Attempts to Undermine Black and Brown Political Power. That fight will outlast this election. This election will not wait for it.
I spent 23 years in the Air Force. I deployed to Desert Storm, to Bosnia, to Kosovo, to Haiti. I took an oath to a Constitution, not to a party and not to a man, and part of what that Constitution promises is that my vote and my neighbor’s vote count the same. I watched the Court tell Black Louisiana this spring that the promise comes with an expiration date. I am not going to pretend that did not land hard. But I know the difference between a setback and a defeat. A setback is when they take a tool. A defeat is when you put down the work. We have not put it down.
November 3 is the test. Every cracked district still has voters inside it, and a cracked map counts the same ballots as a clean one when enough of those ballots show up. Memphis is still there. Clyburn’s district is still standing. Georgia held the line in a hallway. The courts have told us plainly they will not carry us across this one. Fine. We have carried ourselves before, from that bridge in Selma to a governor’s session in Atlanta this summer, and we will do it again. Register the people around you. Check your own registration twice, because they are counting on you to assume it is fine. Save the number, 866-OUR-VOTE. Then vote like the map is rigged, because it is, and like your turnout is the one thing they could not draw around. Because it is.
Sources
- Louisiana v. Callais, U.S. Supreme Court
- LDF joins the Memphis Urban League challenge to the Tennessee map
- Federal panel clears the Tennessee map for the 2026 primaries
- Georgia special session ends with no new map
- South Carolina Senate rejects the push to redraw Clyburn’s seat
- Southern voting-rights mobilization after Callais (Selma day of action)
- Black Voters Matter on Louisiana v. Callais
- New Georgia Project closes; organizing continues (NAACP $1M in Georgia)
- Election Protection launches its 2026 campaign
- SPLC Vote Your Voice: Louisiana groups prepare post-Callais
- Southern Coalition for Social Justice on Louisiana v. Callais
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