WASHINGTON, D.C. — The U.S. Supreme Court issued a decision in Louisiana v. Callais that removed a Voting Rights Act provision that prevented racial discrimination in voting practices and had enabled minority voters to elect candidates of their choice. Eight days after the decision, the Republican-led Tennessee legislature passed new redistricting maps eliminating the state's one Democratic, Black-majority congressional district.

The Voting Rights Act, passed in 1965, outlawed literacy tests and poll taxes and enabled increased Black political participation across the country. Its passage came five months after the assault on peaceful protesters on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, known as "Bloody Sunday," was broadcast nationally and contributed to public pressure for the law.

When the country was founded, voting was limited to white male landowners. After the American Civil War, Black American men were granted the right to vote under the 15th Amendment, and in the years that followed they voted in large numbers and elected Black senators and representatives to Congress. White southern Democrats then used violence, fraud, poll taxes and literacy tests to suppress Black political power and eliminate Black congressional representation for generations.

Black Americans continued organizing through strategic litigation, mass organizing and protests to fight for voting rights. Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King Jr and Vernon Dahmer were assassinated for their civil rights efforts, and Fannie Lou Hamer, Amelia Boynton and John Lewis were assaulted. Activists in the southern United States were murdered, kidnapped, beaten, had their homes firebombed and their families harassed.

On 7 March 1965, hundreds of activists marching on the Edmund Pettus Bridge to demand equal voting rights were brutalized by state troopers wearing teargas masks, mounted on horses and accompanied by dogs wielding billy clubs. When leaders John Lewis and Hosea Williams refused to turn the march around, troopers deployed tear gas and charged horses and dogs against the marchers.

Sheyann Webb-Christburg, then eight years old and living next door to Brown Chapel Church in Selma, was the youngest participant in the Bloody Sunday march. Williams picked her up and carried her back to the George Washington Carver projects. Her parents had told her to stay away from the church because they feared the Ku Klux Klan and losing their jobs, but she repeatedly sneaked out to attend civil rights meetings and marches. King invited Webb-Christburg and other children into a prayer meeting at the church after instructing others to "Let them stand," he said.

"When we look at the Supreme Court's action against the Voting Rights Act, it's really a kneecap – a way to discriminate, to silence voters who fought so hard for this right," said Webb-Christburg, a civil rights activist. "I think this is not only illegal and unconstitutional, but I think it's an assault on the struggle of the civil rights movement."

"This Supreme Court decision should be a wake-up call for us to become more cognizant – more woke – on the reality of what is happening," she said. "We have not come this far to go back."