Six supreme court justices handed down a ruling built, ostensibly, on the belief that the US has changed so much as to render the protections of the Voting Rights Act unnecessary. No one should be that gullible.

In 1901, the same year my great-grandfather was born, George H White rose to address the 56th United States Congress for the last time. He was a Republican congressman from North Carolina – the only Black member of the entire body. He was leaving because the state he represented had passed legislation making his re-election impossible. Reconstruction had already been undone. The powers that be had narrowed, then deferred, then erased the promise of multiracial democracy, written in the blood of Union soldiers and freed people alike.

White’s farewell was not defeat. It was prophecy. “This, Mr Chairman, is perhaps the Negro’s temporary farewell to the American Congress,” he said, “but let me say, phoenix-like, he will rise up some day and come again.” He was right. It took 64 years, a march across a bridge in Selma, and a president signing the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

White’s phoenix did not rise, though, because those in power could be trusted. It rose because our forebears forced America to act against its own instincts. The Voting Rights Act was not a gift or a concession. It was a constraint – imposed on a country that had proven, over a century, that it would not protect Black citizens’ right to vote without one.

On Wednesday, the supreme court removed that constraint.

The ruling in Louisiana v Callais did not formally strike down section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. The statute remains. What it can do does not. But strip away the procedural language and the ruling rests on a single premise: that America has changed enough that these protections are no longer........

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