Behind the SCOTUS attack on the Voting Rights Act

By Monica Moorehead
May 4, 2026

As the daughter of parents who were denied the right to vote while growing up in segregated Alabama, I both personally and politically deeply understand the significance of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) to address the long denied aspirations of Black people, especially in the Deep South. I was 13 years old when the VRA was signed into law on Aug. 6, 1965, by then President Lyndon B. Johnson with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. standing next to him in the Oval Office.

The Act did not come out of the goodness of the Johnson administration, but was forced by the decades-long struggle of the Civil Rights Movement led by oppressed Black masses.

The VRA was signed five months after “Bloody Sunday,” when on March 7, Civil Rights activists were brutally attacked by state troopers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, as they began a 55-mile march to Montgomery, the state capital, to demand the right to vote. This event — televised for the whole country to witness — was one among many campaigns that resulted in Black people and their white supporters being beaten, attacked by vicious police dogs, jailed and murdered in the struggle to win full equality.

The fact that an act like the VRA was necessary at all speaks to the long entrenched white supremacy upon which the U.S. Empire was built, coupled with the genocidal theft of Indigenous lands.

Almost 60 years after the passage of this historic bill on April 29, the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS), in a 6-3 vote, made a ruling that severely limits the consideration of race in drawing voting maps, an important component of the VRA. This legal attack underscores that any redistricting of these maps that bolsters electoral victories for Black, Latine or Indigenous candidates to gain greater political representation for marginalized communities on school boards, city councils or congressional delegations is now deemed “unconstitutional.”

This devastating decision was initiated by the case of Louisiana v. Callais that resulted in a second Black-majority congressional district in Louisiana being viewed as an unconstitutional racial gerrymandering (the changing of an electoral constituency’s boundaries so as to favor one candidate, party or class). The six most reactionary SCOTUS judges agreed that white voters, based on their race, were being discriminated against if they were outnumbered by people of color due to gerrymandering. Louisiana is the state with the second highest percentage of African American residents.

This decision gives the green light to MAGA-type Republicans to manipulate Black-majority districts so white majority districts can gain more congressional seats, starting with the midterm elections this fall. Some Republican governors are even attempting to postpone these elections if they legally cannot carry out their redistricting plans before voting takes place.

This latest SCOTUS ruling exposes a major weakness of the VRA with its vague use of the word “race.” It blatantly takes out of context the historical and political significance of the VRA, giving the false notion that all races or nationalities are equal in social status to begin with.

Historic struggle for democratic rights

The VRA is an extension of the 15th Amendment passed in 1870, five years after the U.S. Civil War that militarily brought an end to enslavement for four million people of African descent, which started in the early 1600s. The era of Black Reconstruction followed, where from 1865 until 1877 the newly freed Black population fought and won long-denied democratic rights that propertied white men already enjoyed, including the right to vote along with access to education, wealth and land.

During Reconstruction, due to the vote, for the first time state legislatures in the Deep South were either all or predominately Black men. Women in general were not granted the federal right to vote until 1920, and they were mainly white.

Louisiana was one of the states that greatly benefited from installing majority Black political representation.

Reconstruction was brought to an abrupt halt once the Compromise of 1877 was passed. This federal law, supported by Republicans and Democratic representatives, ushered in Republican candidate Rutherford B. Hayes as president. As part of the deal, Union troops, sent to the South to protect the political gains of Black people being threatened with terror by the remnants of the Confederate army, were withdrawn, leaving Black people defenseless and driving them back into semi-enslavement conditions.

With the decimation of political gains, Black people were left to the mercy of extra-legal fascism, including lynchings, burnings of schools and churches and repossession of lands carried out by the newly formed Ku Klux Klan.

Hundreds of thousands of Black people were forced into what was called the Great Migration to the North for a better life. Instead of facing extra-legal terrorism in the South with the KKK, Black people faced state terrorism in Northern cities in the form of police brutality.

SCOTUS founding rooted in enslavement

SCOTUS has always played a pivotal role in upholding white supremacy in the U.S.

The U.S. presidency, Congress and Supreme Court were established in 1789 within the framework of the U.S. Constitution. These three entities developed into the executive, legislative and judicial branches of the capitalist government. The Constitution was written by rich, white, male property owners, enslavers and proponents of the genocide of Indigenous nations. Under the guise of being “one nation with liberty and justice for all,” in reality the U.S. government upholds bourgeois class rule — to protect the private property of the billionaire class of corporate bosses and bankers.

Out of the three branches of the capitalist government, only SCOTUS is not elected. Once potential SCOTUS judges are nominated by the president, only the Senate, one house of the Congress, will determine who occupies each of their nine seats for lifetime terms — until death or retirement.

Six years before the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect in 1863, SCOTUS upheld the Dred Scott decision, which declared that Black people had no rights due to enslavement, including Scott’s attempt to sue his “owner” for his freedom.

Scott never had a chance of winning, considering that out of the nine justices, seven — including five from slaveholding families — were appointed by pro-slavery presidents from the South.

Chief Justice Roger B. Taney — a staunch supporter of slavery — wrote the ‘majority opinion’ for the court against Scott’s petition, stating that because Scott was Black, he was not a citizen and therefore had no right to sue. Therefore, Scott and his family remained enslaved. Under Reconstruction, Scott would have been granted the right to sue.

Almost 20 years after the demise of Reconstruction, SCOTUS made a ruling — Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) — that established segregation as the law of the entire U.S. Plessy, a person of mixed heritage, had been arrested, prompting him to challenge Louisiana’s “white only” Separate Car Act.

SCOTUS’s “separate but equal” edict declared that separate facilities along racial lines were constitutional if they were equal in quality — which in reality they never were. This white supremacist law was overturned by the Brown v. Board of Education ruling in 1954, which stated that separate is not equal in the areas of schools and other public facilities for people of color and white people.  In 1955, the year-long historic Montgomery bus boycott of Black people began to desegregate the buses which helped to ignite the Civil Rights Movement.

One SCOTUS judge from 1937 to 1971, Hugo Black, was a onetime card-carrying member of the KKK.

Undemocratic nature of SCOTUS

The late chairperson of Workers World Party, Sam Marcy, stated at a 1989 party conference: “Alongside this bourgeois democratization of the political process [expansion of the right to vote], there has been a simultaneous social and economic process which is superior in strength. That is the process of the concentration of power in undemocratic bodies.

“It comes from the concentration of the means of production in the hands of a ruling class which holds the power and distributes it in areas most conducive to them. So it’s not an accident that power should ultimately be exercised by the Supreme Court. That’s most reliable to them, most conservative, responsive only to those who have appointed them.

“So much talk goes on about democracy, about the rights of the people to vote and to elect, but when it gets down to the really critical issues, political power is concentrated in undemocratic bodies that are removed from the control of the masses.” (“Two contradictory trends in U.S. politics,” July 20, 1989)

Why revolutionaries must defend the right to vote

Until the 2008 election of Barack Obama, the first Black president, presidents were all white males, whether Democrats or Republicans. Despite having different social bases, leaders of both parties have been pro-war, pro-rich and pro-capitalist who uphold bourgeois rule, including Obama.

Without access to billions of dollars, it is virtually impossible for any progressive, independent candidate to get on the ballot much less to become president. Even Senator Bernie Sanders, a self-described democratic socialist — whose platform called for capitalist reforms — was defeated by his richer, more mainstream Democratic opponent, Senator Hillary Clinton, during the 2016 primaries.

Unless there are viable choices for workers and the oppressed to vote for in the current environment, it will understandably make it very difficult for revolutionaries to promote any candidates who support capitalist exploitation and imperialist war. One should not ignore that for the past 200 years, the workers have been propagandized to vote for the “lesser evil” candidate, especially for president. In their eyes, elections help to fill a temporary vacuum until real, pro-worker, radical change happens to fully meet their needs.

The VRA should be viewed by anti-capitalist revolutionaries as a legal form of affirmative action to help restore basic democratic rights that have been denied to Black people as a whole since the late 1870s. This denial is referred to as disenfranchisement that deepens white supremacy and aims to weaken and destroy the potential unity of the multinational, multigendered working class.

Despite the increase in deportations by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Border Patrol, the ruling class and its politician puppets, be they Republican or Democrat, feel threatened that the U.S. is becoming more Black and Brown. This is why the SCOTUS ruling on the VRA is another appeal to white supremacy.

No matter how corrupt, undemocratic and distasteful elections are, revolutionaries who seek to build class unity have a duty to defend the right to vote for every worker and oppressed person who has historically been denied that right. In the long term, unfulfilled rights will not be won by undemocratic elections or biased rulings by judges but by a socialist revolution with a united working class that will fully guarantee everyone the right to education, healthcare, housing, childcare and social equality.

In the meantime, any protests organized to reverse any attacks on the VRA by the working class must be understood and supported.

The writer was Workers World Party’s presidential candidate in 1996, 2000 and 2016.