One made national news when she protested the Covid-19 vaccine at her local City Council. Another is a member of the Trumpettes, a group of women united in their ardent support for the president. A third is a retired grocery salesman who said he didn’t remember signing up to be involved in a lawsuit.
The three are among the 12 Louisiana voters at the center of a case set to be heard by the Supreme Court on Wednesday that could gut what remains of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the landmark civil-rights-era legislation.
In January 2024, the group filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of Louisiana’s congressional district map, arguing state lawmakers had discriminated against them as white voters by impermissibly taking race into account when they drafted the map after the 2020 census.
Since then, they’ve been referred to in court filings merely as the “non-African-American” voters.
Plaintiffs in such weighty Supreme Court cases often become the public faces of major issues in American life, their names forever tied to the historic legal challenges: Fred Korematsu became a civil rights icon for resisting an executive order that forced Japanese Americans into internment camps during World War II. Mildred and Richard Loving successfully challenged Virginia’s ban on interracial marriage in a landmark case.
Not so in the Louisiana case. The landmark case, on whether the Constitution permits race to be used as a factor in carving congressional districts, has had no public face.
None of the plaintiffs testified at a three-day trial in federal court, according to transcripts. The legal briefs list their names but say nothing about their lives or the reasons each chose to participate in the case, aside from assertions that each “suffered unlawful, intentional discrimination based on race.”
“I genuinely don’t know who these people are,” said Stuart C. Naifeh, manager of the Redistricting Project at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which has been involved in the litigation and will be defending the map at the Supreme Court.
Plaintiffs in a lawsuit must be able to show that they were directly harmed by the party they are suing and that there is a possibility that a court could remedy the harm. By the time a case gets to the Supreme Court, the justices are dealing with the law, not factual disputes. Although some plaintiffs attend Supreme Court proceedings, they do not testify or participate in the argument.
The New York Times used public records, social media and court filings to locate and reach out to several of the voters at the heart of the case. They hail from big cities like Baton Rouge, Shreveport and Lafayette and tiny ones like Gonzales, population 13,000, known as the Jambalaya Capital of the World. One man is 38. Two plaintiffs, a man and a woman, are 81 years old.
Exactly how they came together remains unclear, but they are represented by a local Louisiana lawyer who has for decades challenged the use of race in the drawing of voting maps.
Their relative anonymity demonstrates a reality of how modern landmark Supreme Court cases often come together. Some of the most consequential cases are crafted from the start by lawyers and advocacy groups hoping to achieve a particular legal result rather than arising organically from plaintiffs who claim they will be most affected by the outcome.
That strategy, of course, isn’t new. Cases challenging segregated schools, anti-sodomy laws and the right to abortion have relied heavily on lawyers’ ability to find the right plaintiffs. But the human stories at the heart of those cases often took center stage.
The Voting Rights Act case will be known by the court and in history as Callais, the last name of the lead plaintiff, Phillip Callais, 60.
Reached by phone, Mr. Callais, who goes by Bert, referred questions to lawyers in the case, as did several other plaintiffs. Those lawyers declined to comment.
A veteran who lives near Baton Rouge, Mr. Callais testified before a committee of Louisiana lawmakers tasked with creating the new voting map in January 2024.
At the time, the legislators were working on a compressed schedule to come up with a map that they could all agree on. They had already tried once, adopting a map in 2022 that contained only one majority-Black district, even though the 2020 census showed that Black people made up an increased share of the state’s eligible voters. A group of Black voters sued, and after a weeklong hearing in June 2022, a federal judge determined those plaintiffs were likely to succeed in proving that the state’s map violated the Voting Rights Act.
Under the act, courts have said states are prohibited from drawing voting maps that unlawfully dilute minorities’ voting power.
If they failed to agree to a new version, state lawmakers faced the possibility a judge would draw the map for them.
Wearing a blue-and-white dress shirt and glasses, Mr. Callais sat at a wooden table at the Louisiana House committee meeting, video shows. He told the legislators that he had been a member of a board of election supervisors.
He acknowledged the state’s troubled history of racial segregation, telling lawmakers that he had “supported desegregation when my grandparents and my parents didn’t exactly do so, given the time of the ’60s, early ’70s.”
But he raised concerns about whether lawmakers would have the courage “to stand up to a federal judge” in the voting-map case. He said he saw the state’s attempt to draw two majority-Black districts as another type of segregation based on race.
When Mr. Callais finished talking, a man in a dark gray suit and tie took his place. He introduced himself as Paul Hurd, a lawyer who had led challenges related to voting maps for 30 years around the country.
“I have never represented anyone but voters,” Mr. Hurd said. “I believe in compact contiguous districts for white, Black, Asian voters that live together, work together, go to school together.”
He called the map under consideration — including a second majority-Black district that snaked diagonally across the state from the southeast to the northwest — “a racial gerrymander,” urging them to “stand up for the Constitution” and reject it.
Instead, lawmakers adopted the new map the next day and sent it to Jeff Landry, the state’s Republican governor. He had repeatedly pressed the State Legislature to pass it, rather than to allow “some heavy-handed federal judge” to do it for them.
The lawmaker who filed the legislation, Glen Womack, a Republican state representative, asserted that “politics drove this map,” as opposed to race. Republican lawmakers argued they had crafted it to protect three valuable Republican incumbents: House Speaker Mike Johnson; Steve Scalise, the majority leader; and Representative Julia Letlow.
Within two weeks, Mr. Hurd filed the suit, listing Mr. Callais and 11 other Louisianans, each described in the document as a voter who had been discriminated against by the new map. Mr. Hurd declined to speak about his plaintiffs.
One of them, Albert “Skip” Caissie Jr., 78, said in a phone interview that he wasn’t aware that he was involved in a Supreme Court case.
Mr. Caissie, who is retired from grocery sales and the Coast Guard Reserve, speculated that perhaps he had received “a direct mail piece” about challenging the voting map. He said he supported the suit’s aims and hoped the need to have majority-minority districts was “something in the past.”
“We’re supposed to respect everyone for who they are, no matter their color,” he said, pointing to President Trump’s growing support among Black voters as a sign that race did not determine political leanings.
The husband of another plaintiff said in a phone call that he didn’t know about the case and didn’t think his wife was involved. The plaintiff and her husband did not respond to subsequent messages.
One plaintiff, Candy Carroll Peavy, of Shreveport, said at a City Council meeting in 2021 that the Biden administration was going door to door to “document unvaccinated Americans,” a popular conspiracy theory at the time. Ms. Peavy, 75, who has also received local recognition for founding a chimpanzee sanctuary, did not return phone messages seeking comment.
Another Shreveport resident, Elizabeth Ersoff, 60, was a Louisiana delegate to the Republican National Convention in 2024 and described herself on the website for the Trumpettes as “a hard-core Trumplican.” A man who identified himself as her husband told a reporter that she had been told not to talk about the case.
Another plaintiff, also listed as residing in Shreveport, has a familiar name: Mike Johnson. Mr. Johnson, the plaintiff, could not be located. A spokeswoman for Mike Johnson, the House speaker, said it was not him.
The case came to the Supreme Court in June 2024, after a divided panel of three federal judges struck down the new map as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.
The justices paused the lower court’s ruling, allowing the map to stay in place for the 2024 election, when voters from the newly created district elected Cleo Fields, a longtime Democratic figure from Baton Rouge.
The Supreme Court heard arguments in the case in March on whether Louisiana had focused too much on race when drawing the map. The justices declined to issue an opinion and, in a rare move, set the case for reargument.
The justices have said they wish to explore an expansive question: Did Louisiana’s creation of the new majority-minority district violate the 14th and 15th Amendments? That has set up the case as a critical test for the future of the Voting Rights Act.
In an email, Mr. Hurd said the current case was his fifth challenge in front of the Supreme Court to what he termed “unconstitutional racial gerrymanders.” Among them were two cases in Louisiana, one in Virginia and one in Texas.
Mr. Hurd worked on the Texas case, Bush v. Vera, in the 1990s with Edward Blum, a former stockbroker turned legal activist who has become known for his work to remove the consideration of race from parts of American life and law.
In an interview, Mr. Blum said that case had helped launch his own legal fight. In 2023, Mr. Blum won his challenge to race-conscious admissions at Harvard and at the University of North Carolina.
Mr. Blum, who is not involved in the Callais case, said he did not know the back story of the plaintiffs in the Wednesday case.
He described Mr. Hurd as “a one-man band.”
Julie Tate contributed reporting.
Abbie VanSickle covers the United States Supreme Court for The Times. She is a lawyer and has an extensive background in investigative reporting.
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