Whites Only
The disaster the justices have unleashed has its roots in one of the darkest periods of our history.
Ari Berman and Pema Levy
On May 8, hundreds of civil rights protesters, carrying signs that said, “No Jim Crow Maps” and “Hands Off Our Vote,” descended on Baton Rouge to oppose a plan by Louisiana’s Republican-controlled legislature to dismantle one or both of the state’s majority-Black congressional districts. They packed a Senate hearing, occupied three overflow rooms, and spilled into the Capitol’s halls.
Just 10 days earlier, the Supreme Court had destroyed the Voting Rights Act in its Louisiana v. Callais decision, triggering a mad rush to eliminate majority-Black districts across Southern states. The next day, Republican Gov. Jeff Landry, despite 42,000 already-cast ballots, suspended Louisiana’s House primaries to give his party time to push through a new map reducing Black representation in Congress before the 2026 midterms.
Democratic Rep. Cleo Fields was on the front lines of this fight. It was his district, stretching 200 miles from Baton Rouge to Shreveport, that Callais had set the stage for invalidating, with Justice Samuel Alito calling it “an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.”
The Supreme Court’s decision decimating Section 2 of the VRA—which had required that racial minorities have an equal opportunity to meaningfully participate in elections—threatens to return the country to a pre-1965 America, when white supremacy was the law of the land and Congress contained no Black members from the South. “This has sent us back, in my view, over 60 years,” Fields says.
When he appeared before the state Senate that day to testify against the new redistricting plans, he was joined by three other veteran Black politicians. Although Fields, a 63-year-old lawyer, has a reputation as an even-keeled consensus builder, he grew emotional as he spoke.
“To me, it is personal,” he told the Senate committee. “Since Reconstruction, Louisiana has elected four African Americans to Congress. And you’re looking at all of them. Four.” Even though nearly a third of Louisiana’s population is Black.
“You said something very profound,” state Sen. Gary Carter Jr., an African American Democrat from New Orleans, told Fields. “From the 1870s all the way through [the] present, just you four gentlemen—that’s it. And now this body wants to reduce that. ‘We want to cut it. That’s too many.’ How do we not be outraged?”
Before these four men, Louisiana had elected just two Black members of Congress, both during the post-Civil War Reconstruction era, America’s fleeting 12-year experiment with multiracial democracy. One, Fields told the senators, was John Willis Menard, who became the first Black person ever elected to Congress in 1868. The other, Charles Edmund Nash, served just one term, beginning in 1875. A vicious white backlash to Reconstruction made it impossible for him to get reelected amid the disputed presidential contest in 1876, which culminated in federal troops withdrawing from the South and the official end of Reconstruction. After Nash, “Louisiana went 114 years without a single African American in Congress,” Fields later explains in an interview.
During Reconstruction, racial equality was written into the Constitution through the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments. As a result, from 1865 to 1877, roughly 2,000 Black officeholders were elected. That number dropped to virtually zero once Jim Crow’s racist legal regime took hold just a few years later, as the federal government—led by the Supreme Court—abandoned enforcement of the Reconstruction amendments.
Fields came to the state Capitol to warn that history was repeating itself. As his colleague Rep. Troy Carter—Gary Carter Jr.’s uncle—told the legislature: “The question before us is not merely about lines on a map. The question before us is whether we will honor the principle that every citizen deserves equal protection of the law.”
Their pleas fell on deaf ears. Three weeks later, GOP legislators approved a map designed to oust Fields, changing his district from a solidly Democratic seat whose population was 53 percent Black to an overwhelmingly white one, in which 65 percent of voters cast ballots for Donald Trump in 2024. Immediately after the new map passed, the self-described “non-African American” litigants who brought the Callais case launched a new lawsuit seeking to eliminate Louisiana’s last majority-Black district, represented by Troy Carter, thus leaving the state with no Black representation in Congress.
Amazingly, Fields has fought this battle before. He was first elected to Congress in 1992, but his district was dismantled in 1996 following the Supreme Court ruling in a racial gerrymandering lawsuit filed on behalf of a group of mostly white voters who charged they had been discriminated against. He returned to Congress nearly 30 years later, only to meet the same fate. His political career epitomizes the rise and fall of Black political power in America’s post-civil rights era—a story that darkly echoes the Supreme Court’s shameful elimination of equal rights for Black Americans in the 19th century.
Fields’ experience in Louisiana last spring was not an anomaly. Other Southern states, including Tennessee and Alabama, also rushed to eliminate majority-Black districts held by Democrats. Thanks to today’s Supreme Court, more than a dozen such seats across the region could be drawn away in time for the 2028 elections, triggering the largest drop in Black congressional representation since the end of Reconstruction.
That’s just the opening act. Up to 140 Black- and Hispanic-majority state legislative districts could also be erased—not to mention seats on city councils, school boards, and some county commissions. Generally, few white voters in the South will cast a ballot for a Black candidate, so losing these districts will effectively wipe out Black power at every level of politics. Black people there will still technically have the right to vote, but no real ability to elect candidates they support and who represent their communities.
Jim Crow lasted for nearly a century. It took the full force of the civil rights movement, from boycotts to marches and laws like the 1965 VRA, to create a Second Reconstruction, meant to redeem the squandered promise of the first. The VRA made America a truly multiracial democracy for the first time in its history. Today, there are more than 10,000 Black elected officials throughout the country, far surpassing the numbers following the Civil War. Yet by destroying the VRA and gutting the 14th and 15th amendments, the Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice John Roberts, has essentially ended the Second Reconstruction. Its logic for shredding the country’s most important civil rights law replicates the worst impulses of the Supreme Court in the 19th century. To truly understand the scope and origins of the disaster that the Roberts court has unleashed, you have to return to one of the darkest periods of our history.
Fields grew up with nine brothers and sisters in a rough South Baton Rouge neighborhood known as The Bottom. The family lived in a shotgun house so small that, as he told Baton Rouge’s Advocate, “if you threw a rock in the front door, you’d hit the back door.” Fields was 2 when the VRA passed, and his life is a testament to both how the law revolutionized American democracy and the 60-year conservative counter-revolution determined to roll back its gains.
Fields was 4 when his father, a dock worker, crashed his car after a double shift and died, leaving the family homeless. As soon as he was old enough, Fields worked every possible odd job to help the family survive and made it to Southern University, a local HBCU, where he became student government president. At 24, while still in law school, he passed out material from the trunk of his old Mercury Capri and enlisted his siblings as volunteers, becoming Louisiana’s youngest-ever state senator. He looked so boyish, with large round glasses and a wispy mustache, that another senator asked him to fetch coffee.
“I’m not a page, I’m your colleague,” Fields recalls responding, “but when you see a page, ask him to bring two cups.”
Despite his rapid ascent, the remnants of the past were never far away. During his first state Senate run, he asked his grandmother, who grew up during Jim Crow, to vote for him. She told him she’d been forced to take a literacy test and recite the preamble to the Constitution when she had tried to register to vote and was too scared to try again. His mother had similar fears and had never registered either, even though the VRA had been law for more than 20 years. Eventually, he convinced both to cast ballots for him.
In 1993, when he was 30, Fields became the US House of Representatives’ youngest member. He joined the largest incoming class of Black officeholders in history, elected after Congress strengthened the VRA in the 1980s, leading Southern states to create majority-Black districts.
“When you put a mirror in front of Congress, it should reflect America,” Fields told a group of DC students in 1996. “When that mirror does not reflect the nation, then that means the nation is not fully represented in the most powerful legislative body in the world. So that’s why I feel redistricting is so important. It’s important to give people not a guarantee, but give people the opportunity to elect the candidate of their choice.”
Yet his promising House career was abruptly cut short. In a federal lawsuit, a few of his constituents successfully claimed it was unconstitutional to consider race in redistricting. His district was redrawn at least three times before, in 1996, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority ultimately struck it down through a ruling limiting states’ ability to weigh race when complying with the VRA. It was an early signal of the court’s attack on the Second Reconstruction. “The court took the Voting Rights Act and spun it on its head,” Fields said, as he opted not to run in the reworked district.
Before leaving Congress, Fields attended a town hall held by the Congressional Black Caucus focused on combating threats to civil rights. “The issue is whether or not a person like me will have the opportunity to return to Congress and represent the people who have not been represented,” Fields said, “the damned, the doomed, the disenfranchised, and the have-nots.”
“If there’s any justice, I think he’ll be back, won’t he?” the late Harvard law professor Charles Ogletree asked the crowd.
Ogletree’s prediction took 28 years to come true, and only after civil rights groups successfully petitioned federal courts to create the state’s second majority-Black district in 2024. If Black people constituted one-third of Louisiana’s population, they argued, they should have the ability to elect their preferred candidate in one-third of the seats. “One-third of six is two” became their mantra.
In the meantime, Fields had served twice more in the Louisiana Senate, where, even though he was a Democrat in a legislature dominated by Republicans, he chaired the committee that created the new district under federal court order. Determined to “finish what I started,” in 2024, Fields won what was essentially his old seat.
Once again, his district was immediately challenged, this time by the “non-African American” voters led by Bert Callais, an election denier who attended the “Save America” rally that preceded the January 6 Capitol attack. Some of the insurrectionists carried Confederate flags that day—a striking symbol of their mission to overturn not just the 2020 election, but multiracial democracy writ large. Under Chief Justice Roberts, the high court used the Callais plaintiffs to accomplish this goal.
They claimed that the creation of a second majority-Black district was an affront to their “personal dignity”—an absurd argument, Fields says: “Literally, Louisiana elects more white members of Congress in one year than [Black members] we’ve elected in my whole lifetime.”
In a 6–3 decision, the court held that a majority-Black district that gave equal representation to Black people actually violated the rights of white voters under the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause. In a brazen legal sleight of hand, not only did the court turn the 14th Amendment against Black people, but it used it to nullify Congress’ authority to enforce voting rights protections under the 15th Amendment with laws like the VRA. Thus, the justices weaponized the 14th Amendment against its original purposes twice over, depriving minority voters of the protection of both amendments—and condemned Fields’ second stint in Congress to be even briefer than his first. Fittingly, Louisiana is at the forefront of the court’s crusade to end the Second Reconstruction. It is, after all, where the country’s long legal battle to upend equal citizenship for the formerly enslaved and their descendants began.
At the close of the Civil War, New Orleans was one of the only places with opportunity. The largest city in the former Confederacy, it had escaped the destruction of Richmond, Atlanta, and Charleston, drawing both freed people looking to build a new life and disgruntled rebels not yet ready to give up the fight.
One of the most prominent transplants was John Archibald Campbell of Alabama. A former Supreme Court justice who had voted to ban citizenship for Black people in the 1857 Dred Scott case, he resigned from the bench and became assistant secretary of war for the Confederacy. After Appomattox, he was imprisoned for about four months under suspicion that he had helped to plot President Abraham Lincoln’s assassination. Campbell arrived in Louisiana destitute, embittered, and determined to destroy Reconstruction through the courts. He was “one of the single most evil lawyers in the history of America,” says Rachel Shelden, a legal historian at Pennsylvania State University. “But he was very smart.”
New Orleans’ unique promise lay in its population of moderate Northern business people and a prosperous free Black Creole community. A young Republican governor, former Union officer Henry Clay Warmoth, pushed development and revitalization—repairing levees, rebuilding railroads, and opening factories. A booming economy, he hoped, would smooth the way to racial harmony. “Everyone’s eyes are on New Orleans,” explains University of Maryland historian Michael Ross. “There’s a moment where it looked like it could have turned out differently.”
After the Civil War, Congress enfranchised the formerly enslaved, leading to the registration of more than 80 percent of Black men in nearly all the Southern states, and an explosion of their political power. In 1868, John Willis Menard, a poet and newspaper publisher from New Orleans, won a special election to the US House. But Menard’s white opponent challenged his right to serve. Menard’s pleas to be seated made him the first Black person to address Congress. “Mr. Speaker, I appear here more to acknowledge this high privilege than to make an argument,” he began. “But as I have been sent here by the votes of nearly 9,000 electors, I would feel myself recreant to the duty imposed upon me if I did not defend their rights on this floor.”
By 130 votes to 57, the House decided to keep the seat open rather than fill it with a Black man. As Rep. James Garfield of Ohio, the future president, reportedly said, it was “too early to admit a Negro to the US Congress.”
Campbell vociferously agreed. “We have Africans in place all about us…They are jurors, post office clerks, custom house officers, and day by day they barter away their obligations and duties,” he wrote to his daughter. “Even insurrection,” he added, “would be better than the insensibility that seems to prevail.” Campbell dedicated himself to destroying Louisiana’s nascent biracial government by halting Warmoth’s economic revitalization plan with, as one contemporary said, “a degree of intensity which it is difficult to express.” Aided by sympathetic judges, he blocked essential taxes, thwarted railroad repairs, and fought improvements to canals and levees. As Ross, the historian, has chronicled, Campbell became a hero to the city’s Lost Cause reactionaries: “Leave it to God and Mr. Campbell,” his admirers said. For three critical years, Campbell stymied Warmoth, causing discontented white moderates to drift toward the politics of white supremacy.
But Campbell’s legal campaign did more than doom Louisiana’s Reconstruction government; it set in motion events that would lead to what became known as the Slaughterhouse Cases, which dealt devastating blows not just to Reconstruction, but to civil rights ever since.
For a decision of such magnitude, the background was provincial: Deprived of funds by Campbell’s crusade, in 1869, Warmoth’s government chartered a private company to build and run a slaughterhouse downriver of the city’s water supply so as to combat disease outbreaks. All butchers had to relocate there or shut down. Campbell seemed to care little about the white butchers who sued; he fought the slaughterhouse plans all the way to the Supreme Court because he could not abide a political system in which Black people had the power to help see it built. His legal strategy would hinge on perverting the newly enacted 13th and 14th amendments.
Before the Reconstruction amendments banning slavery, creating equal citizenship, and prohibiting voting discrimination, the “rights of the individual [were] at the mercy of the states,” as Sen. Carl Schurz (R-Mo.) stated not long before the case reached the high court. The new amendments, he insisted, “made the liberty and rights of every citizen in every state a matter of national concern.”
But Campbell saw an opportunity to exploit the federal government’s new involvement in securing every American’s rights. Although the goal of the amendments was equal citizenship, Campbell argued they must necessarily protect white people against what he deemed the corrupt and ignorant machinations of biracial legislatures—a claim of reverse discrimination a century before the idea had a name. Ordering butchers to use the slaughterhouse, he contended, violated the 13th Amendment because it amounted to involuntary servitude. He also argued that new “privileges or immunities” under the 14th Amendment included a broad right to labor as one wished. Most importantly, these rights were now protected by the national government. Campbell, The Daily Picayune commented at the time, was using the “tyrannical” new amendments in the same way “one poison would be swallowed as an antidote to another.”
Campbell’s previous stint on the high court guaranteed his admission to Washington’s elite legal clique. But Justice Samuel Freeman Miller, a Lincoln appointee, hated him. “He has made himself an active leader of the worst branch of the New Orleans democracy,” Miller later wrote. “No man that has survived the rebellion is more saturated today with its spirit.”
Miller may have let this antipathy for Campbell cloud his judgment. In April 1873, the Supreme Court delivered its notorious Slaughterhouse Cases decision. In trying to allow Louisiana to manage its butchers as it liked, Miller’s strong case for local control effectively withdrew the federal government’s oversight of how ex-Confederates used state power to subjugate Black people. “You don’t have a federal backstop anymore,” says Bertrall Ross, a constitutional law expert at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law.
Campbell recognized the victory he had secured in defeat: “It was probably best for the country that the case so turned out.” History disagrees: The preeminent constitutional scholar Charles Black Jr. called Slaughterhouse “probably the worst holding, in its effect on human rights, ever uttered by the Supreme Court.”
Campbell “is the first person to attempt to use the 13th and 14th amendments against the purposes for which they were designed,” historian Michael Ross explains. More than 150 years later, the Roberts court has embraced the same tactic. In Callais, the court perverted the 14th Amendment to eliminate Black political representation and liberate white people from multiracial government. “Somewhere,” Ross says, “Campbell is grinning his evil genius grin.”
The origins of the court’s next major attack on Reconstruction lie 200 miles northwest of New Orleans, in the town of Colfax. There, hours before the Slaughterhouse decision was announced, a racial battle over Louisiana’s 1872 elections ended in Reconstruction’s bloodiest single day. Black people had come to outnumber whites in the flood plains of the Red River, where cotton plantations ran on forced labor. Tied to the land by slavery, sharecropping, and enduring poverty, the region’s Black population has remained so remarkably stable that in 2024, when the Louisiana legislature drew Cleo Fields’ district, it followed the river’s path, where descendants of the plantations’ enslaved people still live.
After the Civil War, management of one of the valley’s largest plantations, where 14,000 acres had been worked by some 709 enslaved people, passed to a Republican, William Calhoun. White Democrats considered Calhoun, who led the freed men on his estate to the polls to back Republican Ulysses S. Grant for president in 1868, a traitor and turned to violence and fraud to suppress Black voters.
But Calhoun, just elected to the state House, bested his Democratic rivals by using his position to create a new majority-Black and Republican parish encompassing his land. As a final insult, Calhoun named it after Grant, and the parish seat after his vice president, Schuyler Colfax. The victory would prove short-lived.
Local ex-Confederates were outraged by the commingling of Black and white people in Grant Parish and determined to take control of its new government by any means necessary. After the 1872 elections, the outnumbered white Democrats fraudulently claimed victory. The Black Republicans hunkered down in Colfax’s courthouse, once the stable on Calhoun’s estate. About 140 white vigilantes, including former rebels and Ku Klux Klan members, gathered to attack. The shallow trenches the Black men of Grant Parish dug to defend the old stable would become their mass grave.
On April 13, 1873—Easter Sunday—the white mob struck. Unable to oust the men inside the courthouse, they set it ablaze. When the Black men laid down their guns and emerged waving handkerchiefs in surrender, the mob encircled them in a firing frenzy so chaotic that it killed two of their own. According to The Day Freedom Died, by journalist Charles Lane, the mob chased and shot as many fleeing men as possible in a scene of “racially tinged sadism.” Alexander Tillman, who led the resistance inside the courthouse, made it 100 yards before his pursuers riddled him with gunshots. Then, dismounting their horses, they slashed his throat and battered his lifeless face.
That night, as rain fell on the dozens of bodies scattered around Colfax, a former Confederate soldier named William Cruikshank lined up the Black prisoners, two by two. Then he made a game of trying to kill each pair with a single bullet. Three years later, a catastrophic Supreme Court decision bearing Cruikshank’s name not only would ensure no one was punished, but would liberate white supremacists to take back control of the South through a reign of terror.
The doomed prosecution fell to J.R. Beckwith, Louisiana’s US attorney, whose job was complicated by the still-fresh ink of the Slaughterhouse opinion; by entrusting the protection of civil rights to the states, it was unclear whether federal authorities could punish even such a heinous attack. Still, Beckwith hoped to wield the Enforcement Act of 1870, which authorized him to prosecute attacks on Black people’s right to vote and plots against their civil rights. The Colfax massacre was certainly that.
Unable to round up most suspects, Beckwith ultimately brought only nine, including Cruikshank, to trial and secured three convictions. Even they wouldn’t last. After a challenge to the guilty verdicts was upheld in June 1874, setting the men free, United States v. Cruikshank headed to the high court.
By the time the case was heard the following spring, other events had made the stakes crystal clear. Emboldened by the failed prosecution, white vigilantes murdered Black men throughout the Red River Valley, causing Republican officials to resign and flee. The state’s panicked governor warned the attorney general in Washington that unless federal troops intervened, the Civil War would have been futile. Black people, he wrote, “though free in name, will practically be remitted back to servitude.” In September, a white paramilitary, created with the help of lawyers for the Cruikshank defendants, ousted the Republican governor and legislature for three days until the US Army arrived.
The military’s intervention allowed the Civil War veteran and New Orleans bricklayer Charles Edmund Nash to become the second Black Louisianan elected to Congress. Nash, whom Cleo Fields would invoke 150 years later, was one of an unprecedented eight Black representatives seated in 1874. His election demonstrated that multiracial government would persist only if the court delivered a loss for the Colfax murderers and affirmed a federal role in combating vigilante violence.
It was not to be. Although a white mob had murdered Black men to hand political control to the party of white supremacy, the court’s March 1876 opinion asserted that there was “nothing to show…the conspiracy was formed on account of the race of the parties.” The court never recounted the horror of that Easter Sunday, but relied on the warped logic of the Slaughterhouse Cases to determine that states alone should safeguard citizen rights and punish lawbreakers; if they fail to do so, the federal government has no power to intervene. The court gutted the Enforcement Act and effectively ended Congress’ authority to punish vigilantism. A decade after the US adopted new amendments to protect Black people in the South, the Supreme Court severed the newly freed from their protection.
The contention that the 14th and 15th amendments shield Black people only against explicitly racist motives was immediately used to undercut voting rights. As the court announced Cruikshank, it handed down a separate case letting states disenfranchise Black people so long as they didn’t openly cite race, authorizing barriers like poll taxes and literacy tests. The lesson was clear: White supremacists were free to wrest control of the former Confederacy, either through violence or by regulating Black voters into irrelevancy.
By then, Democrats controlled the House, and they allowed Nash to deliver only one major speech. In the wake of the Cruikshank decision, he spoke late into the night on June 7, 1876, calling for strict enforcement of the Reconstruction amendments. “A government which cannot protect its humblest citizens from outrage and injury is unworthy of the name and ought not to command the support of a free people,” he warned a nearly empty chamber.
That November, as the white violence the court unleashed caused many Black voters not to cast votes or to have their votes thrown out, Nash lost reelection. His defeat was overshadowed by the disputed presidential election of 1876, when Republicans agreed to pull all remaining troops from the South as part of a deal to hand Republican Rutherford B. Hayes the White House. That so-called corrupt bargain, another concession by the federal government to segregationist whites, marked the end of Reconstruction. It would take Black voters in the South almost a century to regain the ability to freely exercise their political rights.
Today’s Supreme Court is unwinding that progress again. Just as with Cruikshank, the Callais decision strips Congress of the ability to halt discriminatory voting rules, making states the sole guardians of political rights. Under both cases, the only way to protect minority voting rights is to prove intentional racial discrimination. But just like the Cruikshank court, the Roberts court never admits the racism staring it in the face. In lieu of “no smoking-gun evidence of a race-based motive (an almost fanciful prospect),” Justice Elena Kagan explained in her blistering Callais dissent, the VRA is “all but a dead letter.” Today, “intent is a get-out-of-jail-free card,” says Bertrall Ross—just as it was for the Colfax killers.
Cruikshank and Slaughterhouse were a one-two punch to Black rights. White supremacists used violence to retake control of all former Confederate states and were free to deny Black people their fundamental rights. The Supreme Court repeatedly struck down further congressional attempts to protect Black people, while upholding state laws that subjugated them. In 1896, in another case out of Louisiana, the court officially sanctioned racial apartheid.
Six years earlier, the state had passed the Separate Car Act, requiring segregation on railways. The Comité des Citoyens, a New Orleans civil rights group, recruited Homer Plessy, a Black man from a Creole family, to ride in a whites-only car, just as Rosa Parks would do more than a half-century later on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama.
When Plessy’s case reached the Supreme Court, the group’s lawyer contended the law violated both the 14th Amendment’s mandate of equality and, by imposing what had been called the “badges and incidents of slavery” on Black people, the 13th Amendment. But the argument made no impression, as the court found that the Reconstruction amendments were too limited to protect Black people from segregation. Just as Louisiana was well within its powers to consolidate butchering for public health, likewise, it could mandate segregation to promote “comfort,” “peace,” and “good order.”
The decision, Plessy v. Ferguson, embraced Cruikshank’s refusal to see obvious discriminatory intent and went so far as to gaslight Black people for claiming segregation put one race above the other. “If this be so,” the court stated, it is “solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it.” By rendering the 14th Amendment’s promise of equal protection powerless to stop segregation, the justices relegated Black people to the margins of American society, wealth, and power. Now, in its unbridled attack on voting rights, Roberts’ Supreme Court has embarked on this project again.
As Fields told NPR after the Callais decision, “I now feel what Homer was going through on that railcar in New Orleans.”
John Roberts has always hated the Voting Rights Act. As a young lawyer in President Ronald Reagan’s Justice Department, he fought to limit it to cases in which a judge found intentional discrimination, much as the Supreme Court had done to rights violations in the 19th century. As chief justice, his Republican-appointed majority has dusted off arguments its predecessors once used to defend slavery and destroy Reconstruction to roll back the gains made during the civil rights era.
Roberts took his first hack out of the VRA in 2013 in Shelby County v. Holder, effectively blocking a portion of the law that had required states and localities with a history of excluding minorities from the polls to obtain federal approval before changing district lines or voting procedures. In doing so, he invoked the “equal sovereignty” of each state in its right to be treated the same as the others.
Roberts did not mention that “equal sovereignty” had been deployed in Dred Scott to declare that Black people were ineligible for citizenship. The 14th Amendment had overturned the ruling, but Roberts reanimated its logic to liberate white-dominated Southern legislatures from federal oversight, just as Chief Justice Roger Taney had done in the infamous 1857 case. New voter suppression laws spread across the South.
In 2019, Roberts gave states another powerful tool to disempower Black voters: partisan gerrymandering. Rucho v. Common Cause barred federal courts from throwing out maps drawn to advantage one party, even though they retaliate against voters based on their rights of speech and association.
And because race and party are tightly connected, particularly in the South, Rucho also provided a back door to lock minorities out of power. Legislators now have an easy alibi when drawing racist maps; they need only say party, not race, motivated the lines. The justices strengthened this alibi in 2024 by ordering lower courts to presume legislatures acted in good faith when accused of drawing racially discriminatory maps, allowing racist intent to hide behind this gentleman’s agreement.
Yet the VRA still required that racial minorities have an equal opportunity to elect representatives—a standard based on effect, not intent. That is until Callais, when the court put legislatures’ prerogative to draw partisan (and racially biased) maps above the VRA’s protections. Now, just by claiming partisan motivation, states can eliminate any district giving minorities a shot at political power. Like the Slaughterhouse and Cruikshank decisions before it, Callais renders the Reconstruction amendments unenforceable—except to serve white people. Once again, the court deployed a willful ignorance in order to camouflage obvious racism as normal politics.
The Roberts court may have cynically blinded itself to racist intent, but its own motives appear obvious. The court has used voting rights cases to boost Republicans, today’s party of white grievance. But this partisan gamesmanship is insufficient to explain the eagerness with which the Roberts court seeks to unwind the Constitution’s protections against white supremacy.
The Reconstruction amendments are a bulwark against discriminatory laws. Yet the court’s mandate that state lawmakers be afforded a “presumption of legislative good faith” essentially protects racist state laws; it’s the legal equivalent of the trope that accusations of racism are worse than actual racism. The court’s willingness to use the 14th Amendment to emancipate white people from Black elected officials—but not to help Black people elect officials—signals its fundamentally racist priorities. After all, this is the same institution that halted school integration programs and banned affirmative action in higher education.
The roots of the court’s logic can be found in Plessy, which captured the 19th-century justices’ antipathy to Reconstruction by railing against “enforced commingling” and claiming that “if the two races are to meet upon terms of social equality, it must be the result of natural affinities, a mutual appreciation of each other’s merits, and a voluntary consent.” Exactly 130 years later, the Roberts court has revived the idea that the law should play no role in bringing about racial equality. White people are the gatekeepers of political and economic power; they can open or close that gate to others as they desire. Neither law nor constitutional amendments can take away that birthright.
From this shared centuries-old mindset, similar rulings flow. Legal arguments, once stamped out, rise again. The country can make big changes, as it did after the Civil War and again 100 years later due to the civil rights movement. But in standing against that progress, the Supreme Court will take it away. It has done it before, it’s doing it now, and it will surely do it again.
In Callais, justice Alito offered a final justification for killing the nation’s greatest civil rights law: Racism is over. “Vast social change has occurred throughout the country and particularly in the South,” he wrote. But the past and present of Louisiana tell a very different story.
In 1995, after the courts first struck down his congressional district, Fields launched a bid to succeed the state’s Democratic governor. No Black Louisianan had won statewide office since Reconstruction, and his campaign, he said, would be “a very good test” of any progress. He lost by 27 points to a white Republican. During the campaign, a Baton Rouge mall sold T-shirts reading, “Run, Cleo, Run,” with a cartoon of a Black man being chased by robed figures carrying nail-studded clubs. “I wish I could say that there’s no more racism in Louisiana,” Fields told the New Orleans Times-Picayune at the time, “but I can’t.”
Thirty years later, a Black candidate still has not been elected statewide in Louisiana. In the most recent legislative session, Republicans not only dismantled Fields’ seat, but abolished the clerk of criminal court post in majority-Black Orleans Parish so that a Black man, once wrongly convicted of murder, who won the position could not be seated; eliminated two Black-held judgeships in the parish; and advanced a bill to redisplay Confederate monuments removed in the last two decades.
“I say to members of the Supreme Court, come to Louisiana as a Black man and run for Congress and see where that gets you,” Fields says. “We’ve never in the history of this state ever elected a Black person from a majority-white district. Many have tried. Have we overcome? You hope you have, but the proof is in the pudding.”
The loss of representation is just the beginning, as the erosion of Black political power is likely to revive blatant discrimination and forms of segregation. Trump, who has claimed that “white people were very badly treated” by civil rights laws, has signed a series of orders eliminating diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and disproportionately fired Black workers across the government, including high-ranking officials like the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “We just have some people in our country who feel that a person of a certain hue can’t do certain things,” Fields says. “I thought we were beyond that, but we’re not.”
Fields has been thinking about his Black predecessors whose brief Reconstruction-era careers were wiped out because of white supremacy. After he was sworn in to Congress a second time in 2025, he visited John Willis Menard’s DC grave and hung his portrait in his Capitol Hill office. “This story has been buried,” Fields says.
Now, like Menard, Fields is again being pushed out of the House by a reactionary white movement that is opposed to Black political power and has captured the highest levels of government. On July 21, he announced he was retiring from the House, this time for good.
“I’ve never served a single day in Congress,” he says, “without a federal lawsuit looming over my head.”
