SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
voting rights act
Nine Justices in Black Who Rule White
The Supreme Court has been a bastion of white supremacy for generations. If it guts what remains of the Voting Rights Act, get ready to raise hell.
Nov 20, 2025
Fifty-seven years ago, I authored an article in the New York Times Magazine provocatively titled: “Nine Men in Black Who Think White.” It argued that the Supreme Court had long been one of the major roadblocks to progress on racial justice in this country.
Today, the nine black-robed Supreme Court justices include two Black justices, one Latina, and four women. Yet, all the evidence suggests that given the balance of forces on the court, they continue to “rule white,” undermining the dreams of a more racially just nation. Yes, three of the justices care deeply about racial justice, but they are only three of nine.
Next year, this Court is poised to further gut the signature piece of racial justice legislation of the last century, the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Movements across the nation need to make it clear to the world that this is unacceptable.
Those of us who share dream that our Declaration of Independence and Constitution would help create a country and legal system dedicated to liberty and equality have, for most of the nation's history, been sorely disappointed.
The Supreme Court and Segregation
Yes, the Supreme Court briefly awakened to the “Equal Justice Under Law” motto engraved into its entrance with its famous 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education. In this decision, the court signaled the death knell of legalized racial segregation by rendering such segregation in public schools unconstitutional. Three cheers. But then it returned to its old habits right up to this current dangerous moment in history.
First a little background.
Rarely has the United States Supreme Court paid much attention to this country's Declaration of Independence and its stirring statement that all men are created equal. Instead, our forefathers built slavery into our legal system, adding a clause allowing for the nation's slaves to be counted as three-fifths of a person for purposes of representation in Congress.
After our bloody Civil War, with Northerners in control of Congress, the United States passed strong equal rights constitutional amendments during the period known as Reconstruction. But that era proved short-lived.
It will come as little surprise that the Supreme Court has spent much of the ensuing six decades after the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts weakening key parts of both.
In 1874, the Supreme Court struck down key sections of these laws, leaving Southern states in control of race relations as soon as Congress ended Reconstruction two years later. This opened the doors for Southern politicians and a resurgent Ku Klux Klan to terrorize the freed slaves and Southern politicians to retake control of Southern states and local governments and their local law enforcement apparatus and return property and plantations to former white owners.
Then, in its 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson ruling, the Supreme Court fully codified Jim Crow, establishing the so-called “separate but equal” doctrine (in this case, segregated railway cars were ruled legal so long as they were “equal”).
As bad as that was, it turned out even worse as Southern states largely ignored the “equal" part, giving the nation what amounted to a judicial seal of approval on Southern segregation.
Turning Back the Clock
Many believe that this era ended in 1954 with the historic Brown v. Board of Education ruling, in which the Supreme Court declared that “separate but equal” was unconstitutional in public schools. At that time, schools across the entire South, from Maryland and Delaware to Texas, were segregated.
Yet in my 1968 “Nine Men in Black” piece, I argued that the 1954 decision was a lone beacon of legal hope surrounded by decades of racist rulings, both before and after that decision. Just one year after the Brown decision, in 1955, the court ruled that Southern public schools needed time to figure out how to integrate.
Today, in both North and South, many schools are still largely segregated, and the Supreme Court and most lower courts have given up seeking workable court orders. Put simply, “more time” turned into endless time, and Black students have continued to suffer the results.
Starting in the early 1930s, the legendary legal genius Thurgood Marshall joined the NAACP’s legal team as the organization built its early Southern school desegregation work. The team executed its case-by-case strategy, leading up to the Brown ruling in 1954. These cases led to many successful outcomes, which changed the reach of the separate but equal doctrine. Marshall then led the team that won the Brown case.
Yet, when Marshall was appointed to the Supreme Court himself 13 years after the Brown decision, his crusade to end racial injustices hit roadblock after roadblock. The court greeted Marshall's appointment with two devastating 5-4 opinions. The first involved the NAACP's attempt to address whites who had fled across state lines to avoid integrating schools in their original state or in their new state. The second case involved Texas, where the legislature established school districts that placed low-income students, mostly Black students, in poorly performing schools.
Two Interwoven Histories
As Howard Zinn reminds us in his powerful People’s History of the United States, our nation has always had two forces that shape history, inextricably interwoven.
One consists of the powerful, but the second consists of those who have opposed the powerful. Most history is written uncritically about the former, the people and corporations and government institutions that have oppressed people in this country and around the world. But equally important has been the second strand, the social movements that have risen in opposition to fight for people and justice and the environment.
Few movements have been as powerful as the civil rights movement, which Marshall and Ella Baker and A. Philip Randolph and others helped get off the ground in the 1930s. The movement gained momentum after the 1954 Brown decision, even in the face of the murders of leaders like Martin Luther King Jr., Medgar Evers, and the Kennedy brothers, as well as volunteers, by killers that included police and sheriffs.
Fight like hell to write and pass replacement statutes even better than what the current administration and its followers have destroyed.
Yet the movement’s marches and protests and the countless jail terms of its leaders culminated in two landmark pieces of legislation: the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. This period is often referred to as the Second Reconstruction.
The Civil Rights Act outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin in public places, employment, and federally funded programs. The Voting Rights Act the following year prohibited racial discrimination in voting, massively increasing voter turnout and voter registrations, particularly among Black people.
I got a deep sense of the power of the civil rights movement and the obstacles it faced in 1963. After graduating from law school, I volunteered to work on the overworked, minuscule legal staff of the NAACP, under the renowned Robert L. Carter, participant with Thurgood Marshall in the Brown case.
Testing me, he immediately sent me to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where I slept for safety on the floor between beds in a Black motel. In New York, Carter assigned me to a difficult Northern public school class action case, where the judge implied the reason why Black students assigned to a virtually all-Black school did not do well was due to their intelligence level. Litigating before these judges was quite an eye opener. But the power of the civil rights movement, with Northerners working with Southerners, Blacks with whites, was imprinted on my soul.
Prepare to Raise Hell
It will come as little surprise that the Supreme Court has spent much of the ensuing six decades after the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts weakening key parts of both.
The one that today stands dangerously close to emasculation is the Voting Rights Act of 1965. It was already seriously eroded by the Supreme Court decisions in 2013 and 2021.
Then, this fall, the Supreme Court heard a case, Louisiana v. Callais, that threatens to erase much of Section 2 of the act, one of the few tools we still have to prevent racial gerrymandering and voter suppression. The reports from the oral arguments before the Supreme Court in October suggested the court is likely to rule in 2026 to weaken Section 2.
With such a ruling, as former Georgia state representative Stacey Abrams put it in The Atlantic: “We will not have free and fair elections in this country going forward” because “for the vast majority of people of color in this country, you will not be permitted to have access to a truly representative democracy.”
As we fight back, we should all be inspired by Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall’s words in 1992, after he had dissented on hundreds of Supreme Court rulings between 1967 and 1991:
We must dissent from the indifference. We must dissent from the apathy. We must dissent from the fear, the hatred, the mistrust. We must dissent from a nation that has buried its head in the sand, waiting in vain for the needs of its poor, its elderly, and its sick to disappear and just blow away.
We should listen to Bishop William Barber, who has mobilized tens of thousands of people through the Poor People’s Campaign and Repairers of the Breach. Bishop Barber has kept his attention solidly focused on building movements that link the South with the North. He has called for a Third Reconstruction, which has been encapsulated in a Congressional Resolution to end systemic racism and poverty, as well as militarism and environmental destruction.
For those of you who worked hard to pass the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, for those of you who have just joined the fight for racial justice, I say this. Forget your sadness and your despair. Fight like hell to write and pass replacement statutes even better than what the current administration and its followers have destroyed.
Raise hell if the Supreme Court further guts the Voting Rights Act. Dare to dream of and build a world without discrimination.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Stop Trump and His Supreme Court From Tightening the Circle of Personhood
The right-wing Supreme Court, in rulings on Trump administration policies, has done its best to murder what's left of civil rights in the United States.
Sep 26, 2025
Warning: dangers in the mirror are often closer than they may appear. In other words, the next few paragraphs may seem to be hyperbole but are, in fact, expressions of reality (animated by a cold fury).
On September 8, 2025, the Supreme Court did its best to murder what’s left of civil rights in this country. As Charlie Savage of the New York Times reported, in an unsigned 6-3 ruling, it overturned a lower court’s order forbidding Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Border Patrol in Los Angeles from stopping, interrogating, and detaining people based on any of four factors: “apparent race or ethnicity; the fact that they speak English with an accent or speak Spanish; their presence at particular locations like farms or pickup sites for day laborers; and the type of work they do.”
Those six conservative justices might as well have stood in front of the court and set fire to the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which outlawed segregation and discrimination based on race, religion, sex, or national origin in a wide variety of venues and actions, including public accommodations, education, the provision of government services, housing, transportation, and voting. The Civil Rights Act outlawed exactly the kind of racial profiling now being practiced—and permitted by our highest court—in the Trump administration’s war on immigrants.
While they were at it, those six robed arsonists might as well have burnt the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment, which outlaws unreasonable searches and seizures and requires a court-issued warrant for arrests. They could have added the 14th Amendment to their bonfire, which was one of three passed and ratified during the Reconstruction period following the Civil War. Those three amendments established full citizenship rights for emancipated Blacks and future generations of US denizens, regardless of race. The 13th Amendment, of course, outlawed slavery, and the 15th secured voting rights for all (male) citizens regardless of race, color, or previous conditions of servitude. The 14th Amendment, while establishing birthright citizenship, also guarantees “all persons” (regardless of citizenship status) due process under the law—including those suspected of being in the country illegally.
Centuries of Struggle Undone
No one gave us those rights. Successive generations of Americans fought for them, starting in the late 1780s and in the 1791 passage of the Bill of Rights, the first 10 amendments to our Constitution. That’s when the Fourth Amendment established the rights that centuries later would be invoked to prevent people from being stopped for “driving while Black” or seeking work while looking Latino. (It’s also when, thanks to the First Amendment, we secured freedom of speech and the press, which gives me the right to state publicly, even in the wake of his despicable assassination, that the founder of Turning Point USA, Charlie Kirk, built his organization on explicit contempt for women, especially women of color, and LGBTQ people.)
It took a civil war and the deaths of almost 700,000 soldiers on both sides to end legal slavery in this country and give us those three Reconstruction amendments, passed between 1865 and 1870.
As we’ve seen repeatedly, the hard-won legal remedies for racism are now being turned against both the historic and present-day targets of racism.
And it took decades of mostly nonviolent struggle and sacrifice (and more deaths) to win passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Those two laws essentially reiterated the same rights that had been secured back in the 1860s but had been denied in practice in the Southern states of the former Confederacy. “Denial” is a weak word for the life-destroying discrimination and segregation that was then systematically enforced by state-sponsored terrorism (all too often in the form of lynching) against those accused of violating the Jim Crow regime of that era.
The Supreme Court had already torn the guts out of the Voting Rights Act in 2013, deciding in Shelby County v. Holder that states with a history of race-based voter suppression would no longer have to seek “preclearance” from the Department of Justice for changes to their voting procedures. The court’s argument was essentially that voting discrimination no longer exists in the states named in the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg dissented, observing that ending preclearance was like “throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.”
The fact that a storm of suppression was indeed still raging became clear almost immediately, as affected states began passing laws making it more difficult for people of color to vote. Ironically, US President Donald Trump’s crew hasn’t yet completely purged the Department of Justice’s website of support for voting rights. You can, for instance, still find there a 2023 blog post by Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke lamenting the depredations of Shelby and praising the Biden administration’s support for the—never passed—John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act as a remedy.
Now, in a one-paragraph decision, the six right-wing justices, appointed by a series of Republican presidents including Trump, have made another contribution to his administration’s all-out attack on race and gender equality. Justice Brett Kavanaugh found it necessary to amplify the court’s decision in a lengthy concurrence. In words untethered from the real world, he wrote:
The Government sometimes makes brief investigative stops to check the immigration status of those who gather in locations where people are hired for day jobs; who work or appear to work in jobs such as construction, landscaping, agriculture, or car washes that often do not require paperwork and are therefore attractive to illegal immigrants; and who do not speak much if any English. If the officers learn that the individual they stopped is a US citizen or otherwise lawfully in the United States, they promptly let the individual go.”
Let me repeat that: “If the officers learn that the individual they stopped is a US citizen or otherwise lawfully in the United States, they promptly let the individual go.” Tell that to Kilmar Abrego García.
Oh, California
In the last few decades, some very bad ideas have come out of my own state, California. This may surprise readers who think of Californians as living in a great blue expanse on the country’s “Left Coast.” They may think our governor, Gavin Newsom, is an avatar of liberalism. (Despite my criticisms of the man, I will admit that his recent trolling of Donald Trump’s ALL-CAPS MEDIA STYLE is pretty funny.)
Nevertheless, some seriously bad ideas have triumphed as ballot propositions here. In 1978, there was Proposition 13, which made it all but impossible to raise taxes in the state—especially property taxes, which provide almost half the funding for our public schools. That “taxpayer revolt” (as it came to be known) spread rapidly to other states. Then, in 1994, Republican Gov. Pete Wilson transformed his flagging reelection campaign by inflaming white anxiety about immigration in California. He launched a series of TV ads with the tag line “they keep coming,” a reference to people crossing the Mexican border looking for work in my state. Weaponizing white anxiety was something Donald Trump would borrow when he ran for president in 2016, 2020, and 2024.
To ramp up his 1994 gubernatorial campaign, Wilson endorsed the anti-immigrant Proposition 187, or “Save Our State” initiative. And Californians then indeed did reelect him, while passing the proposition, which outlawed the provision of any government services—including healthcare and education—to any undocumented immigrant. Government employees at any level were required to report anyone (including schoolchildren) they suspected of being in the country illegally. In language forebodingly similar to the rhetoric of both of Trump’s presidential campaigns and his two administrations, Proposition 187 began:
The People of California find and declare as follows:
That they have suffered and are suffering economic hardship caused by the presence of illegal aliens in this state. That they have suffered and are suffering personal injury and damage caused by the criminal conduct of illegal aliens in this state. That they have a right to the protection of their government from any person or persons entering this country unlawfully.
What happens in California doesn’t always stay in California. As the Washington Post reported 25 years later, “Since 1994, 65 initiatives and referendums to change state immigration laws were attempted via direct democracy mechanisms.”
Almost immediately, federal courts prevented the implementation of most parts of Proposition 187. Three decades later, however, the Supreme Court has effectively validated Proposition 187’s premise, permitting the use of racial profiling to identify possible “illegal aliens.”
The right wing wasn’t done with legislating racism in my state. In 1996, Proposition 209, also known by the (completely unironic) ironic title its proponents gave it, the “California Civil Rights Initiative,” outlawed affirmative action at any level of government in the state, including access to public colleges and universities.
Though it faced legal challenges, Proposition 209 remains in force today. There’s no doubt that earlier Supreme Court decisions, including the 1978 finding in University of California v. Bakke, had indeed laid the groundwork for it. In it, a 30-year-old white man had challenged his rejection by the medical school at the University of California, Davis. He sued and was eventually admitted. In his case, the court upheld the principle of affirmative action to address racial or other discrimination against protected classes of persons, but outlawed specific numerical quotas.
By 2023, however, an ever more right-leaning Supreme Court had ruled in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard that affirmative action violates the equal protections guaranteed by the 14th Amendment. As we’ve seen repeatedly, the hard-won legal remedies for racism are now being turned against both the historic and present-day targets of racism.
Then, in 1998, another ballot initiative outlawed most bilingual education in California public schools (though it was finally repealed at the ballot box in 2016).
Disparate Impact
By 2003, however, in part because of changes to the demographic makeup of the electorate, California voters had had enough of legally weaponizing white anxiety. They roundly rejected Proposition 54, known as the “Racial Privacy Initiative,” which, as the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California put it, “would have banned most agencies from collecting data on race, ethnicity, and national origin, with disastrous consequences for health, education, public safety, and civil rights.”
But in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, the right-wing strategists for a second Trump presidency made it very clear that their plans included implementing a national version of the Racial Privacy Initiative. The author of the section on labor advocated prohibiting the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, or EEOC, from collecting employment data based on race. The mere existence of such data, he wrote, “can then be used to support a charge of discrimination under a disparate impact theory. This could lead to racial quotas to remedy alleged race discrimination.” In other words, if you can’t demonstrate racial discrimination in employment (because you’re enjoined from collecting data on the subject), then there’s no racial discrimination to remedy. Case closed, right?
I used to suggest to my philosophy students that you could view the last 2,000 years of “Western” history as a gradual widening of the circle of beings who count as full persons.
It seems that Donald Trump agrees. In April 2025, he issued an executive order entitled “Restoring Equality of Opportunity and Meritocracy.” In it, he noted that “disparate-impact liability all but requires individuals and businesses to consider race and engage in racial balancing to avoid potentially crippling legal liability.” Trump and his handlers don’t see taking systemic racism and contemporary bias into consideration as a solution to a problem. Such consideration is the problem. “It not only undermines our national values,” says the order, “but also runs contrary to equal protection under the law and, therefore, violates our Constitution.”
Whatever Trump may decree, current employment law (as implied in the 1964 Civil Rights Act, affirmed in 1970 by the Supreme Court in Griggs v. Duke Power Co., and codified in the 1991 Civil Rights Act passed under the presidency of George H.W. Bush) supports the use of disparate impact. As of now, plaintiffs can still seek to prove discrimination by demonstrating the disparate impact of a company’s “facially neutral” hiring, firing, or promotion policies. How long will it be, however, before this Supreme Court reverses decades of progress in equal employment?
We’ve already seen the “disparate impact” of Trump and his Department of Government Efficiency’s destruction of the federal workforce, which has disproportionately affected Blacks, and especially Black women. It’s a major factor explaining why 300,000 Black women have lost jobs since Trump took office.
If you have any doubt whether race (and sex) bias continues to exist at the highest levels in this administration, consider the words of a man Trump thought of as “sort of like a son,” the recently assassinated right-wing firebrand Charlie Kirk:
If I see a Black pilot, I’m going to be like, boy, I hope he’s qualified.
If I’m dealing with somebody in customer service who’s a moronic Black woman, I wonder is she there because of her excellence, or is she there because of affirmative action?
And about a list of prominent Black women, including Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, Kirk said: “You do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. You had to go steal a white person’s slot to go be taken somewhat seriously.”
Circling Backwards?
I used to suggest to my philosophy students that you could view the last 2,000 years of “Western” history as a gradual widening of the circle of beings who count as full persons. At first, that circle contained only high-born men. Centuries of struggle saw the inclusion of men without noble birth, and later without property. Racial concepts, themselves a human invention, long excluded men who were not deemed white. Eventually, fitfully, they, too, were admitted to the circle of personhood. Most recently, women seem to have become persons, and with that addition, people of a variety of genders and sexual orientations have also joined the circle.
But right now, six people on the Supreme Court, along with the Trump administration, are doing all they can to tighten that previously ever-widening circle of personhood and Donald Trump is on board in a big-time way. Let us hope that we can stop them from turning that circle into a noose.
Keep ReadingShow Less
How Will John Roberts Be Remembered? As a Democracy Destroyer
It is unlikely that any Chief Justice in history played more of a role in destroying more of our nation’s democracy rules than this man.
Sep 15, 2025
Chief Justice John Roberts is smart and skilled. He will be remembered, however, as a historic failure.
This is not a claim to make lightly, but his record compels it, because Roberts’ legacy will be defined by two catastrophic roles he played.
First, Roberts has played the lead role in destroying indispensable rules of our democracy.
Second, Roberts has played the lead judicial role in serving as the handmaiden to President Trump’s efforts to turn our democracy into an autocracy. (This historic failure will be detailed next week in Part II).
Roberts’ role in destroying essential rules of our democracy
Chief Justice Roberts has taken the lead in writing a series of opinions that have destroyed essential rules governing our democracy. They deal with:
- The sacred right of every eligible citizen to vote.
- The integrity and honesty of the political system.
- The right of citizens to have an unrigged opportunity to choose their representatives.
- The idea that public officials should not be allowed to sell influence with their office.
- The foundational principle that no person is above the law.
The following opinions, written by Roberts and joined in all but one case only by the Republican-appointed majority on the Court, have done unprecedented harm to our democracy.
Roberts wrote the majority opinion for a 5–4 decision in Shelby County v. Holder (2013). It declared key sections of the landmarkVoting Rights Act of 1965, the most consequential voting rights law ever enacted, to be unconstitutional. The Act was reenacted periodically over decades until the Shelby County decision.
The Roberts opinion unleashed a wave of regressive and discriminatory voting changes by states and local jurisdictions that disadvantaged minority voters and impeded their voting rights and their ability to fully participate in the democratic process.
McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission
Roberts wrote the majority opinion for a 5–4 decision in McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission (2014) which struck down the aggregate limit on all contributions by a donor in an election cycle, a provision previously held constitutional by the Supreme Court in Buckley v. Valeo in 1976.
In Buckley, the Supreme Court had found that unlimited contributions given to support candidates were inherently corrupt. The McCutcheon decision, however, eviscerated the limits on individual contributions to candidates by unleashing billionaires, millionaires, and other big money donors to give unlimited, often huge, contributions to Super PACs to benefit specific candidates.
Roberts wrote the majority opinion for a 5–4 Court decision in Rucho v. Common Cause (2019), in which the Court decided that it could not act on challenges to partisan redistricting plans. The decision claimed that the Court is incapable of establishing standards for determining when partisan maps become unconstitutional, no matter how extreme.
The Rucho decision means that there are no constitutional restrictions on partisan gerrymandering, no matter how rigged the plans are. The result is that politicians get to choose their voters rather than voters choosing their representatives.
Roberts wrote the unanimous opinion in McDonnell v. United States, (2016), which vacated the conviction of former Virginia Governor Robert McDonnell for honest services fraud and extortion. In his opinion, Roberts said that McDonnell’s actions did not constitute “official acts” under the applicable laws, including the bribery law.
In its decision, the Court adopted a narrow, unrealistic construction of the term “official act” to exclude various acts of an officeholder that should be covered, even when those acts are done in direct exchange for gifts or other benefits. For all practical purposes, the Court has left the country without effective bribery laws to prevent public officials from selling their office for financial benefits.
Roberts wrote the opinion for a 6–3 majority in Trump v. United States (2024), which gave Trump presidential criminal immunity. The decision violated a guiding principle of our Founders that no person is above the law. The Roberts opinion placing Trump above the law and also giving him personal control of the Justice Department and FBI can be seen in such outrageous Trump pronouncements as the statement that he has “The right to do anything I want to. I’m the president of the United States,” and “I run the country and the world.”
It is unlikely that any Chief Justice in history played more of a role in destroying more of our nation’s democracy rules than Roberts. And that is how he will be remembered.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular