Louisiana v. Voting Rights, Then and Now

The Pelican State again finds itself at the center of a furor over the rights of Black voters. In October, 60 years after the passage of the VRA, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in Louisiana v. Callais, which focuses on congressional redistricting and Section 2 of the VRA, which prohibits diluting the voting power of minority groups. Louisiana, which is one-third Black and has six congressional districts, was recently compelled by a federal court to re-draw its maps to increase its majority-Black districts from one to two.

The Court will weigh whether race-conscious redistricting, enacted to protect Black voters, is unconstitutional. This case comes 12 years after the Court ended another key VRA protection in its decision in Shelby County v. Holder. In that 5–4 decision, the justices invalidated Sections 4 and 5 of the VRA, which had long required states with discriminatory histories to obtain “preclearance”—or permission—from the US attorney general before changing voting rules. Since Holder, many states have rolled out new voting restrictions—including voter roll purges, ID requirements, and limitations to early voting—that disproportionately impact communities of color. Voting rights advocates have increasingly fallen back on Section 2 of the VRA to counteract discriminatory practices.  

The selective enforcement of the law has long influenced the voting power of non-white Americans. The 15th Amendment, enacted in 1870 as a response to white violence against Black men organizing to vote in the Deep South, states that “the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” But after the federal government abandoned Reconstruction and its enforcement of civil rights in the region, Southern states found new ways to disenfranchise Black people.

Louisiana’s 1898 “Jim Crow” Constitution established poll taxes and literacy requirements for voter registration that would disproportionately impact Black voters. To ensure that white voters would not be burdened by these new restrictions, the state created a “grandfather clause” that exempted registrants so long as they, their father, or grandfather could vote on or before January 1, 1867—thus excluding Black voters, who could not legally vote at that time. As a result, the Black voting base in Louisiana fell from 130,344 in 1896 to 1,342 by 1904.

The grandfather clause was ruled unconstitutional in 1915, so Louisiana called a new constitutional convention in 1921 to replace it with an “understanding clause,” which granted unchecked power over the voting rolls to local officials. Registrars could, at their full discretion, ask any prospective voter to provide a “reasonable interpretation” of any section of the state’s constitution. The registrar had final authority to determine whether to deny somebody the right to vote on this basis. By 1940 the number of Black voters in the state bottomed out at 897.

If none of the above kept aspiring voters away, outright intimidation could be deployed. Ebony magazine reported that a year after his arrest, Rev. Carter returned to St. Francisville with a busload of 42 other prospective registrants—strength in numbers. CORE volunteers had been training them weekly on how to pass the registrar’s onerous test. The group was greeted at the courthouse by a mob of 100 white residents, who hurled epithets and death threats at them, while the registrar stalled for hours.

Carter was finally permitted to enter and take the test—and passed, becoming the first registered Black voter in the parish since 1902, and the only one that day. The rest were turned away, and several were visited at home by armed white men in trucks the next night. Two of Carter’s neighbors were threatened at gunpoint that evening, in front of their families, to leave town—and they did, fearing for their lives. Carter considered himself nonviolent but kept a rifle in his farmhouse, just in case. “I don’t want nobody to hurt me,” he said, “and I don’t want to hurt nobody.”

When President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law in August 1965, it gave the federal government the legal teeth it needed to enforce the 15th Amendment against overt and covert efforts to, as Section 2 states, “deny or abridge the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color.” By 1976, the number of registered Black voters in Louisiana approached 400,000.

In 1982, Congress and President Ronald Reagan extended the VRA’s protections to cover redistricting efforts that have a discriminatory effect on minority groups, regardless of intent. Those protections will be on the docket this fall in Louisiana v. Callais.

The wisdom of Louisiana’s civil rights heroes echo through oral history audio that anchors The Trail They Blazed. In one clip, CORE volunteer Katrena Ndang summarized the grassroots essence of a fight that continues today:

“It was like I teach you, and you teach some other people.”