May 7 — What we are witnessing in Louisiana right now is not just a legal dispute. It’s a coordinated attack on the fundamental right to vote, and it’s being led from the highest court in the land. The Supreme Court didn’t just issue a ruling on April 29; on May 4, it took the extraordinary step of rushing its judgment to give racist Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry the cover he needed to cancel an ongoing election.
Its action on May 4: allowing racists to throw out congressional votes for Black candidates. A new map was rushed through before voters could organize a response.
Each step comes dressed as law. Together, they are a ruling-class attack on Black voting rights.
Let’s be clear about the sequence of these events. The Court struck down a map that finally gave Black voters a fairer shot at representation. The very next day, the governor suspended the congressional primary. Absentee ballots were already in the mail. Over 42,000 votes were denied. And now, those legally cast ballots are being thrown out by not allowing the usual 32 days before the Court’s orders were to be implemented.
As the ACLU of Louisiana said, a court has allowed Landry “to suspend part of an election already in progress and disenfranchise voters who have already cast their ballots.”
This is what a modern coup by law looks like. No troops at the polls, just a court ruling and an emergency order. They are using procedure to achieve what Jim Crow once did with terror and literacy tests: diluting Black voting power. They are telling us that even if you vote, even if your ballot is already in, the ruling class can simply refuse to count it if they don’t like the potential outcome.
Louisiana is the test run. They want to see if they can get away with this so they can export this model across the South. That is already happening in Tennessee, where lawmakers are moving to break Memphis — the largest Black-majority city in the United States — into three congressional districts and erase the state’s only majority-Black district. Black struggle was at the heart of winning the Voting Rights Act in Selma and Montgomery, and Black representation is the special target now because it’s a central part of every struggle of our working class. The Supreme Court’s robe may give it an air of neutrality, but its record from Dred Scott in 1857 to Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896 to today’s actions screams the truth: it is intervening to win a political fight for the ruling class and put a rubber stamp on white supremacy and slavery by other means.
The Dred Scott decision, enabling slavery by the Court, was based primarily on the denial of “citizenship” toward people of African descent in the U.S. — our immigrant, migrant and Indigenous families’ struggle against the weaponization of citizenship has roots in the Black struggle. Also, these rulings expose a Court that is not elected but chosen by a ruling class that relies on the division of our working class.
Courtroom appeals are necessary, but they are not enough. Real change will only come from organized resistance. We will not let Louisiana be the test case for furthering disenfranchisement of Black people. I stand with the voters whose ballots are being silenced, and I call on every union, church, progressive organization and community member to say clearly: our votes will not be erased, and we will fight by any means necessary.
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