Louisiana, Again: Callais, the Devil's Bargain, and the Ghost of Jim Crow at the Polls

There is a thread that runs from a courthouse in Grant Parish on Easter Sunday in 1873, to a streetcar on Royal Street in 1892, to the marble corridors of the United States Supreme Court on April 29, 2026, and it is the same thread, picked up by the same hand. Three times across one hundred and fifty years, the state of Louisiana has been the chosen instrument by which this nation's highest court has retreated from the multiracial democracy the Reconstruction Amendments promised. United States v. Cruikshank, 92 U.S. 542 (1876), born of the Colfax Massacre, gutted federal capacity to prosecute racial terror. Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896), born of the Comité des Citoyens of New Orleans, gave Jim Crow its constitutional architecture. And now Louisiana v. Callais, 608 U.S. ___ (2026), born of a Black-opportunity congressional district the state itself drew under federal court order, has — in the words of Justice Elena Kagan reading from the bench, dropping "respectfully" from her closing for the third time in this decade — "rendered Section 2 [of the Voting Rights Act] all but a dead letter."

Same state. Same constitutional grammar. Same betrayal. Three different generations.

On April 29, 2026, by a vote of 6 to 3, the Court held that Louisiana's SB 8 — the congressional map the legislature drew, after a federal court ordered it, to remedy a vote-dilution violation under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act — was itself an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the majority. He did not formally overrule Thornburg v. Gingles, 478 U.S. 30 (1986), the doctrinal architecture that has carried Section 2 enforcement for forty years. He did something subtler and more devastating. He rewrote it from the inside.

Under Callais, Section 2 plaintiffs challenging a discriminatory map must now make a showing sufficient that, in the majority's words, "the circumstances give rise to a strong inference that intentional discrimination occurred." Their illustrative remedial maps must satisfy not just neutral districting principles but the state's own "legitimate political objectives" — including its preferred partisan margins and incumbent protections. And the totality-of-circumstances analysis that has anchored Section 2 enforcement since 1982 must now treat historical and societal discrimination as "entitled to much less weight" than courts have long given them.

What Alito wrote confirms what Black folks have been saying since the gavel first dropped on us — justice in this country is not color-blind. It is blind, period. The statute looks the same on the page. The remedy has been hollowed out from the inside. Justice Clarence Thomas, joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch, wrote separately to say the quiet part out loud: Section 2 should not regulate redistricting at all. "No § 2 challenge to districting should ever succeed," Thomas wrote, calling four decades of vote-dilution doctrine a "disastrous misadventure." Justice Kagan, joined by Justices Sotomayor and Jackson, was clear about what just happened. "The majority claims only to be 'updat[ing]' our Section 2 law," she wrote. "But in fact, those 'updates' eviscerate the law" (Dissent Slip op. at 3).

This is what completion of a project looks like. Shelby County v. Holder, 570 U.S. 529 (2013), gutted Section 5 preclearance. Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, 594 U.S. 647 (2021), narrowed Section 2 vote-denial claims. Allen v. Milligan, 599 U.S. 1 (2023), preserved Section 2 vote-dilution doctrine for thirty-four months — long enough for it to look like a reprieve, short enough for it to be a head-fake. Callais is the last piece. Diane Vaughan (1996, 1999) called this kind of trajectory the normalization of deviance — catastrophe arriving not through a single act of misconduct but through the patient accumulation of small departures from the norm, each one declared technical, each one declared narrow, until the norm itself has been reconstituted as something else. Vaughan was writing about NASA and the Challenger. She might as well have been writing about the Roberts Court.

Here is what the ruling cost on the day it dropped, in the state where it was born. On April 30, 2026, Governor Jeff Landry declared a state of emergency and, by executive order, suspended Louisiana's May 16 U.S. House primary to give legislators time to draw a new map. Mail and overseas ballots for that election had already gone out. Early in-person voting was scheduled to begin within days. Voters who had already cast absentee ballots in the congressional races were told their votes for those races would not be counted, even as their votes in the same election for other offices would still be tallied. Within roughly thirty-six hours, lawsuits were on file — by the League of Women Voters of Louisiana, the Louisiana State Conference of the NAACP, and the Power Coalition for Equity and Justice in state court; by candidate Lindsay Garcia and voter Eugene Collins in federal court; by additional civic groups in a third action — alleging some combination of First, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendment violations and a separation-of-powers breach because election dates are a legislative function under Louisiana law (NAACP Legal Defense Fund, 2026; WBRZ, 2026). Senator Bill Cassidy, a Republican, called the suspension "disappointing."

The district that died was the Sixth — a 250-mile arc that Chief Justice Roberts at oral argument called a "snake" but which the people who live in it call home. It runs from Shreveport in the northwest corner of the state through Alexandria and Lafayette and into north Baton Rouge. Its Black voting-age population sits in the mid-50s percentage range. It contains Northwestern State University and Southern University. It elected Cleo Fields in November 2024 — Fields, who served Louisiana's 4th District from 1993 to 1997, the last era this state had two majority-Black congressional districts, before the Hays litigation cycle struck them down a generation ago. Fields told CBS News after the ruling: "You can't take the Voting Rights Act into consideration unless you take race into consideration. Black voters in this country should have some relief from the court. And this court basically said they do not." He scheduled a Redistricting Informational Town Hall Series — Galilee Baptist in Shreveport, Mt. Zion Baptist in Alexandria, the Clifton Chenier Center in Lafayette — beginning May 4, 2026. The work continues regardless.

This case is a Louisiana case. The damage is regional. National Public Radio's analysis (Wang, 2026) identifies at least fifteen majority-Black or near-majority-Black congressional districts from Louisiana through the Carolinas now at serious risk under the Callais logic — every one of them currently held by a Black member of Congress in a state where Republicans control redistricting. Fair Fight Action and Black Voters Matter Fund, working separately, put the figure as high as nineteen likely safe-Republican pickups, twenty-seven total seats trending safe-Republican, and one hundred ninety-one Democratic state legislative seats in jeopardy across the Black Belt South (Fair Fight Action & Black Voters Matter Fund, 2025).

Read the names of the districts on the line.

Louisiana 2 — Troy Carter, New Orleans. Alabama 2 — Shomari Figures, Mobile to Montgomery, the district Allen v. Milligan required Alabama to draw thirty-four months ago. Alabama 7 — Terri Sewell, Birmingham and the Black Belt and Selma. Georgia 2 — Sanford Bishop, Albany and Columbus. South Carolina 6 — James Clyburn, Columbia. North Carolina 1 — Don Davis, eastern Black Belt. North Carolina 12 — Alma Adams, Charlotte. Mississippi 2 — Bennie Thompson, the Delta and Jackson. Tennessee 9 — Steve Cohen representing a 63 percent Black Memphis district that Governor Bill Lee called a special legislative session to redraw on May 1, the day after the ruling. Virginia 3 and 4. Florida 10, 20, 24. Texas 9, 18, 30, 33 — already affected by the 2025 mid-decade redraw the Trump administration coordinated. Taken together, the projections suggest that up to roughly thirty percent of the Congressional Black Caucus could be drawn out of their districts or see their seats made newly vulnerable in a single redistricting cycle if the most aggressive scenarios materialize.

The post–Civil War record drop in Black House representation was four seats at the end of Reconstruction in 1877. Callais threatens to approach or exceed that in a single cycle.

This is what Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2007, 2022) means by organized abandonment — the deliberate, patterned withdrawal of state and federal protection from communities already subject to organized violence. The geography of the dismantled Sixth District traces the same Louisiana corridor as Cancer Alley, the same parishes whose maternal mortality rates are among the highest in the nation, the same parishes the carceral state has sieved most aggressively for Black bodies. Callais is not separate from those geographies. It is the political-representation cut of the same cloth. Take the political voice from the people the environmental violence is concentrated on, and you make sure no one in Washington has to hear about either.

Theory will not save us, but it will tell us where we are.

Albert Bandura (1999, 2016) gave us the framework of moral disengagement — the eight cognitive moves by which sincere people commit harm and remain at peace with themselves. The Callais majority reads as a near-complete inventory: moral justification (recoded as color-blind constitutionalism); euphemistic labeling (vote dilution recoded as "race-based redistricting"); advantageous comparison (Jim Crow as the only baseline that counts); displacement of responsibility (compelled by the Constitution itself); diffusion across a 6–3 majority; disregard of consequences (no engagement with the empirical record of Black representational loss); dehumanization of the very voters whose franchise is at stake; attribution of blame to the communities seeking remedy. Six justices author what Justice Kagan calls a gutting and call it constitutional fidelity. Bandura's framework explains how.

Derrick Bell (1980) called this interest convergence. White majoritarian power tolerates Black political advance only when its own interests run parallel. Allen v. Milligan in 2023 was the last moment when those interests still appeared to converge — when preserving Section 2 looked manageable to Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Kavanaugh. By 2026, with a coordinated mid-decade redistricting offensive underway in Texas, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, Utah, and Florida, with the Trump administration switching sides at oral argument, with the math suggesting robust Section 2 enforcement could cost the Republican Party as many as nineteen House seats, convergence had become divergence. The Court reversed because the calculation changed. The principle never moved. The arithmetic did.

And the bodies most exposed to the arithmetic are Black women's. Approximately ninety percent of Black women voted for Vice President Harris in 2024. Black women are simultaneously the most reliable Democratic voting bloc, the backbone of Southern Democratic competitiveness, and systematically underrepresented in Southern officeholding. Cleo Fields's now-extinguished District 6 was elected substantially by Black women voters; the Callais opinion treats the district's racial composition as the constitutional defect while refusing to see its gendered constituency at all. Kimberlé Crenshaw (1991) named this kind of erasure thirty-five years ago. The Court has not improved its eyesight.

W.E.B. Du Bois (1935/1998) wrote Black Reconstruction in America to explain how the first Reconstruction ended. He named the mechanism: federal judicial retreat, state-level disenfranchisement, racial violence, Northern white abandonment. Cruikshank in 1876, the Civil Rights Cases in 1883, Plessy in 1896 — that arc took roughly twenty years. Shelby in 2013, Brnovich in 2021, Callais in 2026 — that arc has taken thirteen. The first Reconstruction's window of meaningful Black political participation ran from roughly 1865 to the entrenchment of Jim Crow disfranchisement by the late 1890s. The Second Reconstruction's window — inaugurated by the Voting Rights Act of 1965 — has run from 1965 to Callais: sixty-one years. The math is almost identical. Du Bois could have written this morning's headlines.

There is a moment in Common's Letter to the Free (2016) — the closing track of Ava DuVernay's 13th — where the line between archive footage and present-tense reality dissolves entirely. The track names the Thirteenth Amendment's punishment-of-crime exception as the constitutional architecture of Black unfreedom. The same epistemological move applies here. Callais preserves Section 2 in name; it disables Section 2 in operation. The exception swallows the rule. Lauryn Hill, on MTV Unplugged in 2002, performed Mystery of Iniquity and called the courts what they are when they function as machinery of injustice rather than as arbiters of it. Lil Wayne in 2006, on Dedication 2, recorded the most directly political track New Orleans hip hop has produced — Georgia… Bush — and reframed Hurricane Katrina not as natural disaster but as engineered abandonment. He was saying then, in a mixtape, what Gilmore says now in academic prose. The culture has been calling the pattern for two decades. The credentialed institutions have been late to the citation.

Audre Lorde (1984) told us that silence will not protect us.

The ghost of Jim Crow walked back into the voting booth on April 29, 2026, wearing a robe, carrying a pen, citing precedent. The Court that ruled has, in this ruling, given us our work. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was the crown jewel of the civil rights movement. The crown jewel has been pried loose. The pattern is visible. The strategy must be plural — federal, where Congress can be moved when it can be moved; state, where Louisiana could pass its own Voting Rights Act tomorrow if its legislature found the will; municipal, where the work of building Black political power proceeds in city councils and parish school boards regardless of what nine justices say in Washington. The work continues regardless. The work has always continued regardless. Black folk in this country have been given empty promises since the peculiar institution of slavery, through sharecropping, through tenant farming, through every century when this state's economy ran on Black backs and this state's law ran around Black bodies. No one can ever understand what it means to walk in those shoes until they have walked in them. Including Alito.

The crown jewel has been pried loose. The pattern is visible. Silence will not protect us.

There is a moment in American memory the Callais majority will not look in the eye. The colonists called blind representation tyranny. Wrote a Declaration about it. Went to war over a tax on tea. Crispus Attucks fell first on Boston's cobblestones on the night of March 5, 1770 — a Black man, a sailor, a runaway from a Framingham slaveholder — dying for the right of his white neighbors to elect representatives who knew their interests. Two hundred fifty-six years later, Black Americans pay the same federal taxes, fight in the same wars, fill the same prisons disproportionately, build the same cities, bury our dead in the same soil. And in 2026 we are told that drawing one congressional district where Black voters can elect a representative who looks like us, sounds like us, knows what our grandmothers cooked, is racial gerrymandering. The remedy is recoded as the wrong. The cure is recoded as the disease.

If the American colonists refused to be governed without their consent and called it tyranny — if they believed themselves treated like slaves for the indignity of taxation without voice — what shall we call it now, when the descendants of actual slaves are told that asking for representation that reflects their geography is itself unconstitutional?

Have we not contributed to this country enough? Have we not shed our blood enough? Had our ancestors not slaved enough? What will it take for us to be seen, to be heard, to be respected?

Andrea Hagan, M.A., Ed.M.
​Founder, Pattern Hunters, LLC
Adjunct Instructor, Loyola University New Orleans
Email: andrea@patternhunters.com
patternhunters.com — Clarity. Advocacy. Power.

References

Allen v. Milligan, 599 U.S. 1 (2023).

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Du Bois, W. E. B. (1998). Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880. Free Press. (Original work published 1935)

Fair Fight Action & Black Voters Matter Fund. (2025, October). What happens in the South doesn't stay in the South: The national stakes of Louisiana v. Callais.

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Gilmore, R. W. (2022). Abolition geography: Essays towards liberation (B. Bhandar & A. Toscano, Eds.). Verso.

Hill, L. (2002). Mystery of iniquity [Song]. On MTV Unplugged No. 2.0. Columbia Records.

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NAACP Legal Defense Fund. (2026, April 30). Civil rights groups file emergency challenge to Louisiana governor's attempt to suspend election already underway [Press release]. https://www.naacpldf.org/press-release/civil-rights-groups-file-emergency-challenge-to-louisiana-governors-attempt-to-suspend-election-already-underway/

Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896).

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Wang, H. L. (2026, April 30). Supreme Court paves the way for largest-ever drop in Black representation in Congress. NPR. https://www.npr.org/2026/04/30/nx-s1-5805050/supreme-court-voting-rights-congressional-black-caucus

WBRZ. (2026, May 1). Multiple lawsuits filed against state leaders over suspension of May primary election. https://www.wbrz.com/news/multiple-lawsuits-filed-against-state-leaders-over-suspension-of-may-primary-election