The Voting Rights Act Changed America. Now, It Can Change.

Before me as I write this is a photo album open to the one surviving image of my great-grandfather John Hamilton McWhorter II, a rural Black South Carolinian born in the late 19th century. He died — decades after the 15th Amendment guaranteed Black people’s right to vote, and decades before the Voting Rights Act of 1965 put the power of the federal government behind that guarantee — without, almost certainly, ever being allowed to vote.

Yet I’m not so alarmed that last week the Supreme Court took its latest gutting swipe at that 60-year-old law, which enfranchised millions of Black people, and helped lead to the election of hundreds of Black officials.

In Louisiana v. Callais, the Supreme Court........

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