The future of the Voting Rights Act hangs in the balance. As the Supreme Court deliberates in Louisiana v. Callais, Times Opinion convened a conversation between the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s son and Norm Ornstein, a leading scholar of voting rights, to talk about the stakes of this case — and look back on what’s been accomplished since 1965.
Times Opinion: Can you tell us what this Supreme Court case is all about?
Norman Ornstein: In 2024, Louisiana created a new congressional map to remedy racial bias, and the new map created a second majority-Black district. A group of white voters challenged the move as a racial gerrymander, turning the Voting Rights Act on its head. Now, in Louisiana v. Callais, the Supreme Court will decide not just the fate of that district, but whether the part of the Voting Rights Act that forced the redistricting, Section 2, is constitutional.
If the oral arguments are any guide, the court is poised either to eliminate Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act or render it impotent. If that happens, there will be next to no protections left for minority voters. In effect, Section 2 is the remaining core piece of the act that remedies voting discrimination on the basis of race. And it won’t just affect Louisiana. We will be back in the era before Dr. King’s achievement — the dark days of Jim Crow.
Times Opinion: What does Section 2 say?
Ornstein: That if a government limits someone’s voting rights on the basis of their race or minority status, they can sue.
Martin Luther King III: Section 2 is one of the last backstops protecting the right of Black, brown and minority communities to challenge discriminatory election laws and to elect candidates of their choice.
Times Opinion: Mr. King, do you remember your father talking about voting rights when you were growing up?
King: My father was often traveling during the voting rights campaign. But my mother took the time to explain to my siblings and me what each of the Civil Rights movement campaigns was trying to accomplish. “The right to vote is a central goal of our freedom movement,” she’d say. “Without it, we will continue to be oppressed. But with it, we can help change our society and make America better for everyone.”
The vote is the most powerful nonviolent tool that the citizens have at their disposal. As we see an unacceptable increase in political violence, voter intimidation and other barriers that make voting harder, we need to remind all Americans that our political differences must be decided at the ballot box and elections need to be free and fair.
As my dad said, “A voteless people is a powerless people.”
Times Opinion: Tell us a little bit about the Voting Rights Act’s passage.
King: After the Civil Rights Act passed in 1964, Lyndon Johnson told my father that, to pass the Voting Rights Act, he and his movement needed to dramatize the need for the law.
Bloody Sunday in Selma, Ala. showed the nation a brutal and violent reaction to a peaceful group of protesters marching for their right to vote. At that time, Black residents accounted for more than half of the population of Selma, but only 2 percent of its registered voters.
Weeks later, at the conclusion of the voting rights march from Selma to Montgomery, my dad said, “In focusing the attention of the nation and the world today on the flagrant denial of the right to vote, we are exposing the very origin, the root cause, of racial segregation in the Southland.”
Ornstein: Up until that march, because of the Senate filibuster, a minority led by white Southern Democrats had blocked every effort to erase discriminatory measures that demeaned and disempowered Black voters. It was because of the pressure applied by Dr. King and his allies that President Johnson, who feared that he would not have the votes, mobilized. In a historic address to Congress urging the law’s passage, Johnson paid tribute to the voting rights movement and its martyrs, saying, “We shall overcome!” With bipartisan support, including key Republican leaders like Everett Dirksen, they did overcome.
King: Several Black and white volunteers in the struggle were murdered. Many others were beaten, threatened and jailed — including my father. Both my parents received death threats, and because of her lifelong work for voting rights, my mother continued to receive such threats for the rest of her life.
As a child, my parents did their best to protect us from all of this, but I understood very clearly that voting was empowering and that the most important step you can take is that short step to the ballot box.
That said, Dad understood that voting rights were never just about ballots; they were about belonging — about whether Black and brown people are full participants in the promise of America, or whether we’re conditional guests whose access can be narrowed, delayed or denied. Protecting those rights is the measure of whether our democracy lives up to its ideals.
Times Opinion: Was the act popular when it was passed in 1965?
Ornstein: Yes, a poll that year found that 95 percent of Americans approved of it. And over time, it’s continued to be embraced broadly. It was reformed and amended five times, each time to ensure that its key protections would continue. That last revision in 2006 passed the House by 390-33 and passed the Senate unanimously, demonstrating the degree to which a deeply divisive issue had turned into a national consensus.
But its widespread popularity doesn’t seem to extend to Chief Justice John Roberts and a majority of the Supreme Court. After Congress had revised the Voting Rights Act to extend its protections by 25 years, Mr. Roberts and his majority eviscerated a key part of the act in the 2013 case Shelby County v. Holder.
Times Opinion: What exactly was the court’s ruling in Shelby County v. Holder?
Ornstein: The decision removed any way to enforce Section 5, a provision that required governments with a history of voter discrimination to get a federal clearance before changing their voting laws. The clearance process had been an effective deterrent to voter suppression efforts.
In his majority opinion, Mr. Roberts said that pre-clearance was no longer necessary — that the Voting Rights Act had been so successful that discrimination had virtually disappeared. The day of the decision, Texas lawmakers moved to reinstate some of the roadblocks to voting that had been stymied by the Voting Rights Act.
King: In the decade since Section 5 was effectively gutted, we have seen a stark rise in partisan and racially motivated redistricting efforts, the enactment of over 100 restrictive voting laws and state level initiatives across the country that disproportionately disenfranchise voters in the Black, brown, and other minority communities.
To go further now and gut Section 2 would not be merely a legal setback; it would be a moral failure. It reveals, once again, the nation’s recurring temptation to retreat from its highest ideals when justice demands endurance. The court would be stripping away the Voting Rights Act’s last essential safeguards.
Times Opinion: If the court decides to roll back the Voting Rights Act again in Louisiana v. Callais, what could happen?
Ornstein: A report by the Black Voters Matter Fund indicates a ruling could lead to as much as a 30 percent reduction in the size of the Congressional Black Caucus, including the erasure of majority-minority seats in Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, South Carolina and Louisiana. It would also eliminate majority-Hispanic districts in Texas and other states.
King: The consequences would be devastating. The Voting Rights Act is the instrument that gives the marginalized a voice.
I urge Chief Justice Roberts and his colleagues to recognize both their moral obligation and the clear reality that many voters continue to be denied fair representation because of partisan gerrymandering and other methods of voter suppression. My mother said it well: “Freedom and justice cannot be parceled out in pieces to suit political convenience. I don’t believe you can stand for freedom for one group of people and deny it to others.”
Martin Luther King Jr. Day stands as a powerful testament to my father’s achievements. A day for all Americans to show their support. The Supreme Court has a choice to make: weaken voter protections, further silencing the voices of Black and brown voters, or honor and preserve my father’s legacy and make real the promise of our democracy. This is a test of whether we will accept the slow erosion of democracy, or rise up — as generations before us did — to redeem it.
Martin Luther King III is the chair of the Drum Major Institute, a nonprofit, progressive think tank that was created by his father. Norman J. Ornstein is a political scientist and a member of the Drum Major Institute’s board.
Source photograph by Stephen F. Somerstein, via Getty Images.
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