The Court has Gutted the Voting Rights Act. Selma Must March Again.

Statement from Kimberly Smitherman, Foot Soldiers Park Founding Partner and CEO

The Voting Rights Act was earned by those who marched on the streets of Selma in 1965. The Supreme Court voting rights ruling diminished their sacrifice. And now, millions’ ability to freely exercise their right to vote in the future is in jeopardy.

President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law weeks after law enforcement chased and beat civil rights protesters, like our late co-founder Jo Ann Bland. She and 600 other  brave foot soldiers marched on the Edmund Pettus Bridge – daring to demand their fundamental right to vote. They risked their lives so that all Americans would have a meaningful voice in our democracy.

In the court’s decision, the justices gutted the law. They didn’t strike it down outright. They did something more insidious: rewrote it to require proof of intentional racial discrimination. But, that’s a lot like asking someone to count how many bubbles are in a bar of soap – the same kind of impossible test they used to block Black voters at the registration office during Jim Crow.  It creates a standard designed to fail and be deliberately out of reach. Some tactics don’t change, they just learn to hide behind new language.

Today, discrimination doesn’t always declare its motives. Discrimination is good at operating in the shadows. It appears in voting bills and precinct closures. Relocates polling places. It manipulates district lines. And now, unless you can prove they harbored racial hatred in their hearts, the law leaves communities like ours with virtually no protection.

But we have been here before. When courts turned their backs in the past, ordinary people stepped forward. They organized, marched, and voted until the law had no choice but to catch up. In the face of the Supreme Court voting rights ruling which weakens a cornerstone of the Voting Rights Act, our answer must be the same. We fight back together. We refuse to be drawn out of power. And we make it undeniable—at the courthouse and the ballot box—that we will not surrender our voice in this democracy.