Two hundred and fifty years. That is the figure being celebrated this year, the round number the country wants to put on its cake. I work at Embrace, which means I have spent the last several years sitting inside the names and the work of the people who tried, against the country’s strongest instincts, to make it keep its word. Coretta Scott King and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. first among them.
Around them, in widening rings, the marchers at Edmund Pettus, the SNCC organizers in Mississippi, the church mothers in Alabama who walked into county clerks’ offices and waited to be told they had failed a literacy test no white person was ever asked to take. And here in Boston, on the 1965 Freedom Plaza, we carry some of the names of the northern Freedom Fighters. They believed, and over time, they made me believe that the vote was never the country’s gift to give. It was something the country had been holding onto and owed us back.
That is the frame I sit down with on the eve of this anniversary. And then, on the 29th of April, in a case called Louisiana v. Callais, six justices of the Supreme Court took most of what was left.
The vote was six to three. Justice Alito wrote the opinion, joined by Chief Justice Roberts and by Justices Thomas, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett. Thomas wrote a concurrence to argue the Court had not gone far enough, and Gorsuch signed onto that. The majority struck down a Louisiana map that drew a second majority-Black congressional district and, in the process, gutted what was left of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the part of the 1965 statute that allowed Black voters to challenge maps drawn to dilute their votes. It is the part that had survived the cuts in Shelby County and Brnovich. After Callais, in Justice Kagan’s phrase, Section 2 is “all but a dead letter.”
Kagan dissented. Sotomayor and Jackson joined her. She read parts of the dissent aloud from the bench, which is what justices do when an opinion has shaken them. And when she finished, she did not say “respectfully.”
This is what the Court has often done when our freedom got out ahead of the country’s appetite for it. It reaches back. It calls our undoing a vindication of principle. The calm tone that delivered Dred Scott in 1857 was the same tone that blessed Plessy in 1896, that gutted Reconstruction in the Slaughter-House Cases and the Civil Rights Cases of the 1880s, that gutted Shelby County in 2013, that weakened the Voting Rights Act again in Brnovich in 2021, and that finished the work this week in Callais. The robes are pressed. The opinions cite each other in a polite, lettered handwriting. And another piece of what was won in Selma, Birmingham, and Memphis has been undone in a marble room in Washington by six people, none of whom ever stood in a county clerk’s office and waited to be turned away.
I am not writing this in despair. I do not have the room for it, and the people whose work I am in service to keep alive did not have the room for it either. I work in the shadow of a sculpture on the Boston Common, twenty feet of bronze in the shape of two arms leaning into each other, Coretta’s and Martin’s. The piece is called The Embrace. I read it as an instruction. It is not a monument to a finished thing. It is the gesture of an argument that has not been won. So today, on the eve of the anniversary year, I am preparing. Our ancestors are watching, the unborn are listening, and the ballot, for now, is still in our hands. We must organize the vote here in Boston and across the nation.