We Are the Architects Now

On Louisiana v. Callais and what this moment requires of us.

(Photo by Envato)

What Just Happened?

On April 29, 2026, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its decision in Louisiana v. Callais, 6-3, with Justice Alito writing for the majority. The court held that drawing a second majority-Black congressional district in Louisiana (a district required to remedy a violation of the Voting Rights Act) is itself unconstitutional.

With those words, the court did not just strike down a map. It eviscerated the most consequential civil rights legislation this country has ever produced.

I want to be precise. Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act has not been formally erased. The court did not have to. Janai Nelson, president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, who argued this case before the Supreme Court, named exactly what happened: The ruling has “rendered key voting protections that have served this country for more than 60 years null and void.” Justice Elena Kagan, in dissent, said the majority had “eviscerated” the VRA. The statute survives on paper. Its power does not.

In 2013, the court gutted the preclearance provision in Shelby County v. Holder. On Wednesday, it gutted what was left. Read those rulings together, and you are looking at the cause of death on a single document. The Voting Rights Act is dead. We cannot organize around an instrument that no longer exists. We have to know where we are.

What It Means

This is a reshaping of the political landscape of this country. It will marginalize Black political representation not just in the South, but throughout the nation. The analysis we have produced at Black Voters Matter, in partnership with Fair Fight Action, projects this ruling could flip as many as 19 majority-minority congressional seats and 191 state legislative seats across the South. NPR projects white candidates could win 15 House seats currently held by Black members of Congress. We are looking at a level of racial revanchism not seen since the end of Reconstruction.

We are not being dramatic. We are being historically literate. In 1877, the Compromise that ended Reconstruction handed the South back to those who had lost the Civil War. By 1901, every Black member of Congress from the South had been driven out of office. It took until 1972 for a Black person to be elected to Congress from the Deep South again. Seventy-one years. That is what happens when the architecture of representation is dismantled. That is the playbook being run on us right now, and the people running it know exactly what they are doing.

Read the ruling. I mean that. Go read it for yourself. The majority could not even agree on a coherent legal argument. The reasoning shifts. The standards multiply. The opinion bends and twists to reach a result that the court had already decided to reach. When you strip away the legal language, what is left is unmistakable. This ruling is about race. It is about re-entrenching white dominance and control. It is about eliminating Black representation. The Legal Defense Fund’s case was strong. It was clear. It was, in my opinion, flawless. The discrimination was proven. The remedy was lawful. The map was constitutional. The court ruled against it anyway, because the goal was never legal coherence. The goal was the result.

This ruling is not just about us. The reasoning is portable. The majority framed any race-conscious remedy as a constitutional violation in itself. That is the same logic the court used to dismantle affirmative action. That is the logic now coming for every protected class in this country. Latino voters. Asian-American voters. Native American voters. Disabled communities. Religious minorities. The blueprint is on a shelf, ready to be pulled down for whatever group comes next. This is not a Black problem. This is an American crisis dressed up in colorblind language.

And it is not just about Congress. This is the part that has not gotten enough attention yet. More than half of all Section 2 cases brought since the 1982 amendments to the Voting Rights Act have challenged the use of at-large elections by cities, school districts, counties and other local government bodies. Section 2 is what allowed Black communities across the South to elect Black school board members, Black city council representatives, Black county commissioners, Black judges. It is the legal tool that built modern Black local political power in places where state and federal protections were never going to come. That tool has now been broken, which means the same legal door that just closed on Black congressional representation is also closing on the school board that decides whether your child’s school gets fully funded, the city council that decides whether your neighborhood gets sidewalks and the county commission that decides where the new development goes and where the landfill goes. The implications of Callais will reach every level of government where Black communities have organized themselves into representation. That is the real scale of what just happened.

How Fast They Are Moving

Before the ink could dry on the paper, they were already moving.

Within hours of the Callais ruling, the Florida legislature passed a new congressional map designed to flip up to four Democratic seats to Republicans. Gov. Ron DeSantis is now arguing that Callais nullifies Florida’s voter-approved Fair Districts Amendments, the anti-gerrymandering provisions Floridians put into their state constitution.

The next day, Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry issued an executive order suspending the state’s House primary elections. Let that sink in. Early voting was set to begin Saturday. Absentee ballots had already been mailed. The primary was scheduled for May 16. The governor of Louisiana literally suspended an election that was already underway to give the legislature time to redraw the maps.

Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves had prescheduled a special legislative session to convene 21 days after the Callais decision came down, so they could redraw their state Supreme Court districts. Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee has told President Donald Trump he will work hard to put a new congressional map in place in his state, which currently has one Black-represented district based in Memphis. Alabama called a special session to start on Monday and Georgia and Texas are expected to follow.

This is what coordinated political dismantling looks like. They were not surprised by this ruling. They were ready for it. They had bills drafted, sessions scheduled, maps already sketched. Florida passed a gerrymander bill an hour after the court ruled. The Voting Rights Act died on a Wednesday, and by Thursday the perpetrators of disenfranchisement were already redrawing the political map of the South in real time.

We do not have weeks to think about this. We do not have months to convene panels. The other side has been preparing for years, and they began executing within hours. We have to match their tempo while building something deeper than they are capable of imagining.

Honoring the Work That Brought Us Here

Before I say what comes next, I want to say this clearly. We did not fail.

For more than 60 years, civil rights and voting rights organizations in this country have done extraordinary work. The Legal Defense Fund. The ACLU. The Lawyers’ Committee. The Brennan Center. The Leadership Conference. The NAACP. Advancement Project. The Transformative Justice Coalition. Fair Fight. The National Coalition on Black Civic Participation. The voting rights groups in every Southern state that have spent decades filing lawsuits, knocking doors, and protecting the franchise one precinct at a time.

I want to lift up Janai Nelson and the entire LDF team in particular. Janai stood before the Supreme Court and argued our case with extraordinary precision and moral clarity. She proved the point. She left no question. The fact that they lost is not a verdict on their advocacy. It is a verdict on a court that had decided what it wanted to do before it ever heard the argument. We owe them an enormous debt of gratitude for the work they continue to do under impossible conditions.

We have poured our hearts, our souls and our imaginations into this work. We have given our lives to it. And what this moment is telling us is that it was not enough. Not because we did not fight hard enough. Because the framework itself was always vulnerable. The Voting Rights Act, as magnificent as it was, was always a federal statute that could be hollowed out by a single court at a single moment. We have just lived through that moment.

As co-founders of Black Voters Matter, my partners Cliff Albright, April England-Albright and I have issued our official statement on the Callais ruling. What I am writing here is not a substitute for that organizational response. It is a personal call, from one organizer to another, about what I believe this moment requires of us beyond the immediate fight.

We are not powerless. We are not finished. We are at a turning point.

The Short Term: Power, Not Pacifism. Power, Not Party.

There is a short-term strategy and there is a long-term strategy, and we have to do both at the same time. The short-term strategy is about consequences. The long-term strategy is about architecture.

In the short term, every Black person in this country should be enraged. Not annoyed. Not disappointed. Enraged. We have just been told, by the highest court in the land, that the protections our grandparents bled for can be revoked at the convenience of six unelected lawyers. That should sit in your chest like fire. And that fire (organized, disciplined, channeled into strategy) is the most powerful force in American political history.

Over the next few weeks, you will see Black Voters Matter, the Legal Defense Fund, Advancement Project, the Transformative Justice Coalition, Fair Fight, the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation, the NAACP and our movement partners come together to align on a coordinated response. The midterms are in front of us, and we have to send an overwhelming mandate that reflects both our outrage and our power.

This cannot be about pacifism. This cannot be about party loyalty. This has to be about power. Black collective power. If our vote is going to be marginalized to a leverage vote, then we have to leverage the hell out of it.

Here is what that looks like.

A response that meets the magnitude of the harm. This is not a moment for one tactic. This is a moment for a full mobilization in the region most impacted. We have to organize the people the court just told they do not count.

That means massive voter registration drives in every Southern state, beginning now, not in October. It means organizing in the communities most impacted, block by block, county by county, parish by parish. It means creating economic pressure campaigns targeted at the major corporations headquartered in the South who have stayed silent while our representation was being dismantled. Their silence is complicity. Their boardrooms need to feel the cost of that silence in their quarterly numbers. It means massive communication campaigns to inform people about what just happened, what it means for them, and what they can do about it. Most people in this country still do not understand what was taken from them on April 29. That is on us to fix.

It also means strategic political consequences for the perpetrators of this disenfranchisement. The specific people who engineered this moment: the legislators who drew the maps, the attorneys general who defended them, the members of Congress who voted for the laws that made today’s ruling possible. Some sit in safe seats. We primary them. Some sit in competitive seats. We defeat them in the general. Open seats in the South where Republicans are retiring. Senate races in Georgia, North Carolina, Louisiana and Texas where Black voter turnout is decisive. State legislative races where the maps were drawn. We concentrate and not spread ourslevs thin. Where the calendar has already closed primary windows, we mount serious write-in campaigns. The goal is clear, public, repeated consequences for the perpetrators of our disenfranchisement, until the political class on both sides understands that complicity has a cost. The only language power respects is power.

Black representation has to be used at full weight. If you hold office in our name, you govern in our interest. Procurement. Contracts. Budgets. Hiring. Land use. Police accountability. Education funding. We have Black elected officials who have given their careers to public service, and we love them, and we need them to step into the full weight of this moment with us. Anything less than full-weight representation will be the difference between a community that survives this era and a community that does not.

An economic strategy with teeth. “We Ain’t Buying It!” proved we can move markets. Now we launch the next phase. Companies headquartered in the South or dependent on Southern Black consumers do not get to stay silent while our representation is dismantled. We name them. We target their brand. We disrupt their bottom line. We smoke them out and force them to take a public position. Reclaim. Redirect. Resist. (More on the next phase soon.)

A communications strategy built for the long war. We cannot build power if we cannot tell our own story. Mainstream media is not going to carry our message. We have to build, own and resource our own infrastructure. Black-owned podcasts, newsletters, video platforms. Black-led narrative organizing that does not need permission from a New York editor to tell our truth.

Coalition or nothing. The midterms have to be the largest turnout we have ever produced. Black. Brown. White working class. Indigenous. Faith. Labor. Disabled organizers. Not because voting alone will save us, but because in this election cycle, an unanswered affront becomes a permanent loss.

The Long Term: Architects Before Founders

We have always called the men who wrote the Constitution the founders. But before they founded anything, they were architects. Someone had to draw the plans, decide what would hold the weight, decide what was non-negotiable. The founding came at the end of that work, not the beginning.

That is where we are. We will be the founders of a new nation. I believe that in my bones. But before we found anything, we have to do the architects’ work. And I do not want anyone intimidated by it. That work happens in study groups and Sunday school classes and barbershops. It happens in city council meetings. It happens when we read about how other peoples have built democracies that protect their most vulnerable, and we let ourselves wonder what we could build. You do not need a law degree to be an architect of a new democracy. You need to be willing to dream out loud and then organize toward what you dreamed.

We are not the first people to face this question. Ireland adopted proportional representation when its electoral system was crushing minority voices. New Zealand created reserved parliamentary seats for the Māori in 1867 and still has them today. Post-apartheid South Africa built a Bill of Rights enforced by an independent constitutional court. India reserved seats all the way down to the village council for historically excluded communities. The state of Maine gives reserved seats to three Indigenous tribes in its state legislature. These are tools democracies use when they take exclusion seriously.

Lani Guinier (rest her soul) tried to start this conversation 30 years ago. They destroyed her nomination for it. They called her a quota queen. What they were really afraid of was that she was right.

Imagining What Does Not Yet Exist

The architects’ work begins with imagination. Some of these tools exist elsewhere. Some have been piloted in American cities. Some have been theorized but never built. Some have not been imagined yet because we have not been the ones doing the imagining.

Here is a starter agenda. These are not all the answers. They are the beginning of a serious conversation.

• Proportional representation with multimember districts and ranked choice voting, so that Black voters at 30% of a state’s population reliably elect 30% of its representatives. No districts to gerrymander. No maps for the Court to strike down.

• Ranked choice voting in every federal, state, and local election, so that no vote is wasted and no community is forced into the lesser-evil trap.

• Elimination of the Electoral College. A national popular vote for president. One person, one vote, finally.

• Universal voting. Make voting a civic duty, not a privilege you have to fight for. Australia and Belgium do this. Turnout exceeds 90 percent.

• Same-day registration in every state, with automatic voter registration tied to government services.

• A Department of Democracy at cabinet level. We have a Department of Defense to protect against external threats, but no permanent institution whose purpose is the protection of democratic participation itself. (I have been developing this proposal through my fellowship at the Ash Center at Harvard Kennedy School. More on it soon.)

• Supreme Court reform. The court has been expanded seven times in American history. There is nothing sacred about nine justices. Expansion. Term limits. Binding ethics rules. Jurisdictional limits. All of it on the table.

• Reparations. This moment creates an opening, and we need to seize it. Political disenfranchisement has always been designed to protect economic dispossession, and power that is not grounded in economic security is power that can be reversed. H.R. 40 has been introduced in every Congress since 1989 and treated as symbolic. That ends now. We build a sustained, organized, strategic campaign around reparations—federal, state, and institutional—and we use the moral clarity of this moment to drive the kind of momentum the movement has never had before. Pass H.R. 40. Fund the commission. Begin the work. The window is open. We walk through it.

Some of these require constitutional amendments. Most do not. Proportional representation, ranked choice voting, House expansion, Court reform, same-day registration, automatic registration and a Department of Democracy can all be done through ordinary legislation. The barrier is not constitutional. The barrier is political will. And political will is exactly what the architects’ work is designed to build.

The Unapologetic Tradition

We have always advanced when we have refused to be polite about our humanity. Frederick Douglass refusing to celebrate the Fourth of July in 1852. Ida B. Wells refusing to soften her ledger of lynchings. A. Philip Randolph forcing Roosevelt’s hand with the threat of a march on Washington. Fannie Lou Hamer telling the credentials committee in 1964 that she was sick and tired of being sick and tired. Shirley Chisholm in 1972, unbought and unbossed. That is the lineage. That is the tradition we are stewards of. And this is one of those moments.

I am asking us to stop being incrementalists. Incrementalism assumes a system that operates in good faith. We do not have one. I am asking us to stop being pacifists in our political posture. Power respects power. I am asking us to stop letting party loyalty think for us. Both major parties have benefited from our votes. Our loyalty must be to Black collective power and to the multiracial coalition we will build alongside it.

I am asking us to be the architects. The people who understand that we are building for a hundred years, not for one election or news cycle.

The court took something from us today. Let it. We are not in the business of preserving their version of America. We are in the business of building ours.

This is a new frontier. The old tools have been broken. We do not lay them down because we are tired. We lay them down because they no longer fit the work in front of us. New frontier. New tools. New thinking. New solutions. New people stepping into power who have been waiting their whole lives for this call.

We are the architects now. Pick up the tools so that we become the founders of what is next to come.