They Killed the Voting Rights Act. Now We Mobilize

On April 29, 2026, the Supreme Court of the United States handed down its decision in Louisiana v. Callais. Six to three. With those words, the Court did not just strike down a map. It eviscerated the most consequential civil rights legislation this country has ever produced.

In 2013, the Court gutted preclearance in Shelby v. Holder. This month, the Court gutted what was left. Read those two rulings together and you are looking at the cause of death on a single document. The Voting Rights Act is dead. We do not have to like it. But we cannot organize around an instrument that no longer exists.

We have to know where we are. And we have to decide, right now, what we do about it.

The Stakes Are Plain

This will marginalize Black political representation throughout the nation. Analysis from Fair Fight Action and Black Voters Matter projects this ruling could flip as many as 19 majority-minority congressional seats in the U.S. House. NPR projects white candidates could win 15 House seats currently represented by Black members of Congress. We are talking about racial revanchism not seen since the end of Reconstruction.

And the reasoning is portable. Latino voters. Asian American voters. Native voters. Disabled communities. Religious minorities. The blueprint that gutted Section 2 is sitting on a shelf, ready to be pulled down for whoever comes next. This is not a Black problem. It is an American crisis dressed up in colorblind language.

So What Do We Do?

We get enraged. Not annoyed. Not disappointed. Enraged. And we channel that fire into strategy. Here is what that looks like, starting now.

1. Power, not pacifism. Power, not party. Every Republican incumbent in the South should face a serious, well-funded challenge. They drew districts so safe they got complacent. Let us go find that complacency. Make every safe seat unsafe. The only language power respects is power.

2. Black representation at full weight. If you hold office in our name, you govern in our interest. Procurement. Contracts. Budgets. Hiring. Land use. Police accountability. Education funding. Anything less than full-weight representation will be the difference between a community that survives this era and one that does not.

3. Economic strategy as backbone. We Ain’t Buying It! proved this works. Forty million digital views. Sixteen hundred media stories. Forty thousand pledges. Make it permanent. Reclaim. Redirect. Resist.

4. Build our own narrative infrastructure. Mainstream media is not going to carry our message. We build, own, and resource our own. Black-owned podcasts, newsletters, video platforms. Black-led narrative organizing that does not have to ask permission from a New York editor to tell our truth.

5. Coalition or nothing. The midterms have to be the largest turnout we have ever produced. Black. Brown. White working class. Indigenous. Faith. Labor. Disabled organizers. In this cycle, an unanswered affront becomes a permanent loss.

Rapid Response: What To Do Now

That is the strategy. Here is the assignment for this week. Three things, in order of urgency.

1. Support the frontline groups leading this work. The organizations on the ground are moving in real time. Follow them. Share their posts. Amplify their calls. Donate when you can. This is how you stay informed and stay useful. Start by following Black Voters Matter for daily updates and where to plug in. The Legal Defense Fund, Advancement Project, the Transformative Justice Coalition, the NAACP, and the state-based voting rights groups across the South are all in motion. Find them. Follow them. Move with them.

2. Show up in person. Direct actions across the South are happening. Pick the closest one to you and bring people with you.

Bring a friend. Bring a sign. Bring your whole self. The work is on the ground, in the streets, and at the doors. We need every body we can get.

3. Vote in your state and local elections. Vote in the midterms. They weakened the federal protection. They did not take the ballot. State and local elections decide who draws maps, who funds schools, who runs prosecutions, who certifies results. Voting now reduces the harm. Voting now slows the bleed. It is not the whole answer. It is the answer we can use this season, and we have to use it at full strength.

Tuesday, May 19th is a really important day. It is the primaries for several states in this nation. Alabama, Georgia, Idaho, Kentucky, Oregon, and Pennsylvania – this is your voting day. We need you to go to the polls and vote in record numbers. 

We Are the Architects Now

That is the short term. The long term is bigger. We have always called the men who wrote the Constitution the Founders. But before they founded anything, they were architects. Someone had to draw the plans. Someone had to decide what would hold the weight.

We will be the founders of a new nation. I believe that in my bones. But before we found anything, we have to do the architects’ work. And the architects’ work begins with imagination, with the radical act of asking what we actually want this country to look like, instead of asking what we are willing to settle for.

We are not the first people in history to face this question. Ireland adopted proportional representation. New Zealand created reserved parliamentary seats for the Māori in 1867. Post-apartheid South Africa built a constitutional court with teeth. India reserved seats from parliament down to the village council. Norway has reserved seats for the Sámi. Maine has reserved seats for two Indigenous tribes. These are not radical ideas. These are tools democracies use when they take exclusion seriously.

Lani Guinier (rest her soul) tried to start this conversation thirty years ago. They called her a quota queen. What they were really afraid of was that she was right. We need to revisit her work. Now.

Pick Up the Tools

I am asking us to stop being incrementalists. Incrementalism assumes a system that operates in good faith. We do not have one.

I am asking us to stop letting party loyalty think for us. Both parties have benefited from our votes. Neither has built us a system that can withstand a single Court term. Our loyalty is to Black collective power and to the multiracial coalition we will build alongside it.

The Court took something from us this week. Let it. We are not in the business of preserving their version of America. We are in the business of building ours.

This is a new frontier. The old fight is over. The old tools have been broken. We do not lay them down because we are tired. We lay them down because they no longer fit the work in front of us. New frontier. New tools. New thinking. New people stepping into power who have been waiting their whole lives for this call.

We are the architects now. Pick up the tools.

Read the full essay.

This is the short version. The long-form essay (with the full breakdown of the ruling, the international models we should be studying, the Department of Democracy concept I have been developing at Harvard, and what comes after the midterms) is on my Substack, Spirit, Song & Soul: Elevated Strategies for Building the America We Desire and Deserve. Find it there. Bring a friend. We have work to do.

LaTosha Brown is the co-founder of Black Voters Matter Fund and the founder of the Southern Black Girls and Women’s Consortium. She is a Senior Practice Fellow at the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard Kennedy School.