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civil rights movement
The Redistricting Wars Prove History Doesn't Move in Just One Direction
Abandoning the solemn commitment America made to guarantee equal representation regardless of race is a grave threat to our system of governance. And the fact that the Supreme Court has done it to enable partisan gamesmanship offends that legacy.
May 13, 2026
The late 19th century was a dismal time in American politics. Corruption ran rampant. Congress was governed by staunch partisan loyalties and nail-biting majorities. And redistricting, instead of being confined to after the census every 10 years, was a tool of manipulation and partisan hardball. “From 1872 to 1896,” a political scientist reports, “at least one state redrew its congressional districts each year.”
Of course, that era was marred by another phenomenon—one too familiar to us today. It saw a swift rollback in voting rights and representation for the newly freed Black population of the South. In 1875, after the Civil War and the adoption of the 15th Amendment, seven Black men served in the House, and one sat as a senator. Terrorism, political cowardice, and racial backlash ended Reconstruction. By 1902, Congress was once again all white.
That status quo largely held until the civil rights movement of the mid-20th century, culminating in the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The law ushered in the multiracial democracy we have taken for granted.
Nearly two weeks ago, the Supreme Court supermajority finished its project of demolishing the law. The ruling in Louisiana v. Callais convulsed American politics. Since then, we have seen an ugly frenzy in Southern states, a brutal redrawing of district lines that could, as scholar Rick Hasen put it, “bleach the halls of Congress, state legislatures, and local bodies like city councils.”
Congress must act. It can ban partisan gerrymandering nationwide, in red states and blue states alike.
Since the ruling, Louisiana has gone back to the drawing board to erase one of its majority-Black districts, even though early voting had already begun in the primary election that was set for May 16. Preparations are underway in Alabama and Mississippi for redrawing their maps. Just last week, Florida passed a new map, which had been in motion in anticipation of a favorable Supreme Court ruling. In some states, as in Tennessee, Black voters could be left without any effective congressional representation.
Blue states, too, are scrambling to redraw maps to help their party, though their success remains to be seen. In a surprise ruling last week, a closely divided Virginia Supreme Court struck down the just-passed constitutional amendment that gave the legislature the power to redraw the state’s congressional map, which would have likely handed several seats to Democrats.
While gerrymandering remains unpopular among voters at large, among the activists whose votes tend to control primaries, party loyalty rules. In Indiana, for instance, several legislative challengers backed by President Donald Trump defeated most of the incumbents who refused to get on board with the Republican redistricting agenda.
Pundits who tally up the wins for each party may be missing the bigger point: Soon, state congressional delegations will begin to resemble the Electoral College—all red or all blue. Recall that Trump won 1 in every 3 votes cast in Massachusetts, while Kamala Harris won a similar share of the votes cast in Tennessee, yet both states will have monolithic party delegations.
What can be done?
The raw power grabs on display may be just the kind of thing to rouse voters to anger. Yes, midterm elections in November will turn on issues such as affordability and the war in Iran. But when people feel something being wrested away from them, they can fight back.
And Congress must act. It can ban partisan gerrymandering nationwide, in red states and blue states alike.
It should enact legislation to make clear that American citizens can sue to protect their right to vote when it is infringed. Legislation should give voters of color a meaningful opportunity to prove intentional discrimination, and it should make sure that judges apply strict scrutiny to laws that impinge on the franchise.
And Congress should recognize the danger of an unelected Supreme Court—highly ideological, appointed for life—taking a hammer to laws that uphold political equality. This past month reinforces the need for court reform, including an 18-year term limit for justices.
Want more proof of the political role the court has assumed? Alabama took, as Brennan Center senior fellow Joyce Vance put it, a “nanosecond” to rush to the justices for permission to gain the “benefit” of Callais, even though primary voting starts in a week. The justices quickly agreed, even though the state’s map had already been found intentionally racially discriminatory by a lower court, allowing the state to eliminate one of the two districts represented by Black lawmakers. This contravenes years of the high court’s assurances that rules should not change too close to an election. Calling balls and strikes? The fix seems to be in.
Alabama, of course, is where Selma is located. Its history is more complex than you might imagine. Here’s what I wrote in my book The Fight to Vote:
Alabama previously had one of the most democratically robust systems in the country, including universal male suffrage and a bar against gerrymandering. But its new Jim Crow constitution gave county registrars great discretion in barring African American voters. White men could vote without anyone attesting to their good character, but Black men required the recommendation of a white voter. As a result Black voting rates fell from 180,000 to fewer than 3,000 between 1900 and 1903.
History emphatically does not move only in one direction.
Abandoning the solemn commitment America made to guarantee equal representation regardless of race is a grave threat to our system of governance. And the fact that the Supreme Court has done it to enable partisan gamesmanship offends that legacy.
The Brennan Center was named after Justice William J. Brennan Jr., a leading force in the brief but celebrated period when the court actually moved to ensure equality in our election system. He authored the opinion in Baker v. Carr, which established the willingness of the court to enforce what would become the “one person, one vote” rule. He also wrote Thornburg v. Gingles, which set national standards so that voters of color could go to court and seek remedies when officials unfairly limited their opportunity to elect candidates to Congress. That American achievement is what the Supreme Court has so casually tossed away. It may be a long time before the court will once again play a positive role in our democracy.
The stakes are high. Brennan put it well: “The Constitution will endure as a vital charter of human liberty as long as there are those with the courage to defend it, the vision to interpret it, and the fidelity to live by it.”
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No Kings, One Planet
Trump has made himself the perfect target for what may well be a growing movement to rebuild humanity itself.
Apr 02, 2026
The glow of the recent No Kings rally still pulsates in my heart. Some 8 million people across the planet took part in over 3,000 separate events—people carrying signs that said things like “Power of Love, not Love of Power,” and “Jesus was a refugee,” and, well... “Super Callous Fragile Racist Sexist Nazi POTUS” and “Grab ’em by the midterms.”
Credit to President Donald Trump. He wages his wars and struts through life with so much arrogant swagger—so much indifference to politically correct propaganda—that he has made himself the perfect target for what may well be a growing movement to rebuild humanity itself. Oh God, I hope this is the case! Trump is the fool, the bellicose idiot of the moment—in partnership, of course, with Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu—but they’re only the current faces of the trek to hell and nonexistence we’ve been on for a while.
No Kings is bigger than “no kings.” It’s more than just a movement to reclaim the democracy we used to have (back in the days of George W. Bush, for instance). Yes, it’s a movement in opposition to actions of the Trump administration: the pointless war in Iran and the global economic chaos it has created; the war on immigrants; the invasion, especially of blue cities, by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Gestapo; and, no doubt, people’s ongoing shock and outrage over the Epstein files and the sexual abuse of young girls.
“But voicing opposition is one thing,” as a recent piece in The Christian Science Monitor put it. “Turning it into action is another. The long history of American protests, dating back to the original Boston Tea Party in 1773, shows that not all mass movements produce tangible or lasting results.”
So on Saturday I knew that we marched with open souls. We felt the wrong that’s underway, perpetrated by our country, and turned that wrong, as best we could, into hope. Into love.
And tangible, lasting results are definitely what the participants want: what we want. And it’s crucial we don’t let this movement go, this movement emerging from “a broad progressive coalition,” according to the article, “with supporters across the country. No Kings organizers include labor unions, such as the American Federation of Teachers and the Service Employees International Union; veterans organizations, such as Common Defense; environmental groups, such as the League of Conservation Voters; and civil rights groups, such as the American Civil Liberties Union.”
As I pushed my wheeled walker through the streets of Appleton last Saturday, feeling an urgent connection with the thousands of people present, I wanted to swaddle the moment in my arms. I knew it was bigger than Donald Trump. I felt like we were crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge—stepping into, and beyond, humanity’s hatred of itself. We were marching not simply for No Kings but for One Planet.
Could this be the civil rights movement rebirthing itself? This movement, of the ’50s and ’60s, wasn’t just about the nation’s great wrongs—the racism, the segregation, the enormous lie that some people are less than human. It pushed against the hatred that had been structured into law and turned into national certainty. The civil rights movement pushed us toward a connected world. It opened the nation’s eyes... and soul.
So on Saturday I knew that we marched with open souls. We felt the wrong that’s underway, perpetrated by our country, and turned that wrong, as best we could, into hope. Into love. Love for the children our bombs have murdered. Love for the families ICE has torn apart. Love for the lost refugees whisked to concentration camps.
This is One Planet! We know it on the streets. We will not stop marching until it is known in the halls of Congress. Until it is known in the White House.
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North Carolina Students Walk Over a Mile to Vote After GOP Shut Down Campus Polling Places
"Aggies do what is necessary for our rights, for our survival, and for our people,” said one student organizer at North Carolina A&T State University, the largest historically Black college in the nation.
Feb 14, 2026
As early voting began for the state primaries, North Carolina college students found themselves walking more than a mile to cast their ballots after the Republican-controlled State Board of Elections closed polling places on their campuses.
The board, which shifted to a 3-2 GOP majority, voted last month to close a polling site at Western Carolina University and to reject the creation of polling sites at two other colleges—the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNC Greensboro), and the North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University (NC A&T), the largest historically Black college in the nation. Each of these schools had polling places available on campus during the 2024 election.
The decision, which came just weeks before early voting was scheduled to begin, left many of the 40,000 students who attend these schools more than a mile away from the nearest polling place.
It was the latest of many efforts by North Carolina Republicans to restrict voting ahead of the 2026 midterms: They also cut polling place hours in dozens of counties and eliminated early voting on Sundays in some, which dealt a blow to "Souls to the Polls" efforts led by Black churches.
A lawsuit filed late last month by a group of students at the three schools said, “as a result, students who do not have access to private transportation must now walk that distance—which includes walking along a highway that lacks any pedestrian infrastructure—to exercise their right to vote.
The students argued that this violates their access to the ballot and to same-day registration, which is only available during the early voting period.
Last week, a federal judge rejected their demand to open the three polling centers. Jay Pavey, a Republican member of the Jackson County elections board, who voted to close the WCU polling site, dismissed fears that it would limit voting.
“If you really want to vote, you'll find a way to go one mile,” Pavey said.
Despite the hurdles, hundreds of students in the critical battleground state remained determined to cast a ballot as early voting opened.
On Friday, a video posted by the Smoky Mountain News showed dozens of students marching in a line from WCU "to their new polling place," at the Jackson County Recreation Center, "1.7 miles down a busy highway with no sidewalks."
The university and on-campus groups also organized shuttles to and from the polling place.
A similar scene was documented at NC A&T, where about 60 students marched to their nearest polling place at a courthouse more than 1.3 miles away.
The students described their march as a protest against the state's decision, which they viewed as an attempt to limit their power at the ballot box.
The campus is no stranger to standing up against injustice. February 1 marked the 66th anniversary of when four Black NC A&T students launched one of the most pivotal protests of the civil rights movement, sitting down at a segregated Woolworth's lunch counter in downtown Greensboro—an act that sparked a wave of nonviolent civil disobedience across the South.
"Aggies do what is necessary for our rights, for our survival, and for our people,” Jae'lah Monet, one of the student organizers of the march, told Spectrum News 1.
Monet said she and other students will do what is necessary to get students to the polls safely and to demonstrate to the state board the importance of having a polling place on campus. She said several similar events will take place throughout the early voting period.
"We will be there all day, and we will all get a chance to vote," Monet said.
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