On a humid May morning in Selma, Alabama, thousands of people filled the streets — an echo of 1965, driven by a new threat: a Supreme Court steadily dismantling the Voting Rights Act that marchers bled for over sixty years ago, under the banner “All Roads Lead to the South.” Yet again, the South is the arena we must fill and fight for our rights.  

In the 2020s, federal protections are weakened, inviting Southern states to reintroduce discriminatory maps, and activists return to the same bridges, churches, and capitals, where in the 1960s they exposed Southern voter suppression and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was born. But the Civil Rights Movement’s roots go much deeper into our past.

When Michelle’s great-grandmother, Ida B. Wells, came of age, a Black woman born in Mississippi during the Civil War was raised amid the fragile hope of Reconstruction. She watched her father vote under the 15th Amendment, and at 13, she celebrated the Civil Rights Act of 1875 as a promise of dignity, recognition, and equality in public life. Then, less than a decade later, the Supreme Court struck down that law. Overnight, the freedoms Wells had counted on vanished.

She witnessed the collapse of Reconstruction’s protections, the rise of oppressive “states rights” which rolled back opportunities and reinstituted American apartheid. Wells understood that the erosion was not random. It was legal. It was methodical. It started with court decisions and legislative neglect that made room for poll taxes, literacy tests, white primaries and terror.

Now, the current Supreme Court follows suit—steadily chipping away at one of the country’s most important civil rights laws: the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In 2013, Chief Justice John Roberts and the Court’s conservative majority gutted a rule that forced states with a history of racial discrimination to get federal approval before changing voting laws. That meant states could pass new voting restrictions without first proving they were fair. Then in 2021, Justice Samuel Alito wrote a ruling that made it harder to prove a voting law discriminates against minority voters. Together, the decisions weakened the federal government’s ability to protect voting rights.

In April’s Callais ruling, the same justices dealt the final blow to a law that is already a shadow of its original self, signaling to states that they may proceed with maps that fracture communities of color, laws that make voting harder for the poor and the young, and administrative decisions that quietly suppress turnout. It tells those who have long been disenfranchised that the federal government will no longer reliably defend their right to be heard.

In anticipation of the ruling, Texas, Missouri, Florida, and Tennessee all advanced maps that suppress communities of color. In the wake of Callais, Louisiana moves full steam ahead towards a new map, while Alabama and South Carolina’s unsuccessful—but revealing—redistricting attempts demonstrate the broader objective: exclusion by design.

So what must happen now? 

First, Congress can no longer treat voting rights as a partisan talking point rather than a constitutional guarantee. After years of judicial retrenchment culminating in the Callais decision, lawmakers must act immediately and decisively to restore and strengthen the Voting Rights Act. 

Second, civil-rights groups, local organizers, and state courts must remain relentless. Litigation, monitoring, and public pressure are now among the final guardrails against suppression dressed up as administrative policy that “accidentally” and “unintentionally” so happens to dilute racial minority representation.

Third, the public must recognize the Supreme Court’s role in this moment. Judicial neutrality is not the same as justice. When we have been on the cusp of becoming a multi-racial democracy where all have fair representation, the Court sides with those who seek to restrict participation, it is not interpreting the law; it is choosing who counts in America.

In 1883, rights slipped away under the guise of legal neutrality. In 1964, during Freedom Summer, thousands of volunteers traveled to Mississippi to register Black voters in the face of violence, intimidation, and a state apparatus determined to maintain white political control. They understood that democracy does not expand on its own. It expands because people insist on it—loudly, courageously, relentlessly.

Today’s threats may look different, but the intent is painfully familiar. And when the Court has retreated, the people must act. We, the American people, carry the moral weight of generations who fought and bled for the right to vote.

We are both Black women descended from enslaved people who were denied by law for centuries the opportunity to speak, vote, or lead. Today, one of us runs a national voting rights organization, and the other amplifies the stories of African Americans and women whose courage shaped this nation. Our very presence in these roles is proof of progress, and the setbacks Wells fought against reminds us that we can never take such progress for granted.

The Court has acted. But it will not be the end of this story. We are already seeing the beginnings of a new movement—a modern Freedom Summer shaped by the challenges of 2026. Will you join us? 

Rebekah Caruthers is President and CEO of the Fair Elections Center. Michelle Duster is a public historian and author of Ida B the Queen: The Extraordinary Life and Legacy of Ida B. Wells