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How to Win the New War for Black Voting Rights

It’s not enough to draw “neutral” districts. We need to overhaul the entire voting system.

Activists gather in front of the Supreme Court of the United States during the re-argument of Louisiana v. Callais on October 15, 2025, in Washington, DC.

In the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s Callais ruling decimating what was left of the Voting Rights Act—a decision likely to join Plessy v. Ferguson in the court’s Jim Crow Hall of Fame—people have suggested many paths forward, including strengthening the proposed John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, pursuing state-level voting rights acts, and introducing proportional representation in our electoral system.

These strategies all have merit. But there are also wildly misguided tactics being proposed to deal with our new voting rights landscape. And perhaps none is as inadequate and outright dangerous as the recent suggestion by Nate Cohn and Eve Washington in The New York Times that pursuing so-called “neutral” maps could produce results for Black communities similar to VRA protections.

When Black Voters Matter, the organization I help lead, and Fair Fight released our study on the potential impact of the Callais ruling, we found that Republican‑controlled legislatures could redraw maps to eliminate 191 Democratic‑held state legislative seats and 19 US House seats, most of which are currently represented by Black lawmakers. We were called hyperbolic. But maps that erase Black districts passed in Tennessee, Alabama, and Louisiana, and attempts elsewhere demonstrate that our warning was an understatement.

Yet in their analysis Cohn and Washington argue that utilizing “a race-neutral, nonpartisan redistricting process”—as opposed to consciously working to draw Black-majority districts— could result in 23 congressional seats across eight Southern states for Democrats, compared to the 24 seats Democrats won in 2024. It’s an alluring proposition—but the analysis has several flaws, including inconsistent references to Black “opportunity districts” (e.g., districts with a majority of Black voters), voters of color, and Democratic voters at various points in the analysis. Those concepts are referenced almost interchangeably in the article; however, they are not at all equal, particularly in the South.

One needs only to look at the likely state maps to identify the glaringly unacceptable consequences. Using this framework, there would not be a single Black “opportunity district” anywhere in the state of Mississippi, a state in which the Black population is roughly 38 percent. In essence, this returns Mississippi to a Jim Crow–era level of representation, or lack thereof.

What, pray tell, is “neutral” about that?

Moreover, in the two states that have been the focus of recent Supreme Court cases, Alabama and Louisiana, so-called neutral maps would result in each state having only one Black opportunity........

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