To the Six Justices Who Formed the Majority in Louisiana v. Callais:
There’s a photograph that keeps pushing at the edges of my consciousness.
March 7, 1965. John Lewis and Hosea Williams are leading 600 people across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. They’re dressed for church. They’re carrying nothing that could be called a weapon. They’re walking toward Montgomery because a state trooper had shot Jimmie Lee Jackson in the stomach for trying to protect his mother during a voting rights march. Jackson died on February 26. He was 26 years old, an army veteran.
Jimmie Lee Jackson Memorial. (Richard apple, CC BY-SA 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons)
His crime?
He wanted to vote.
What happened after Jackson’s death is part of the American record. Sheriff Jim Clark, his deputies, and state troopers met the marchers at the foot of the bridge. The marchers were told to turn back. When they knelt to pray, the troopers descended on them with clubs, bullwhips, tear gas, horses, and, according to some accounts, cattle prods.
John Lewis’s skull was fractured. Amelia Boynton Robinson was beaten unconscious and left in the road. Seventeen people were hospitalized. With an irony that couldn’t have been more perfectly scripted, the violent images of Alabama’s version of stormtroopers beating Black bodies went out over the television networks that night, interrupting a broadcast of Judgment at Nuremberg. Americans watched what their country was doing to its own citizens for wanting a voice in their own governance.
Eight days later, Lyndon Johnson stood before Congress and said, “We shall overcome.”
The Voting Rights Act was signed on August 6, 1965. Less than five months after the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
I’m rehearsing this particular history because this morning you struck down Louisiana’s map creating a second majority-Black congressional district, and declared that, on these facts, compliance with the Voting Rights Act could not justify the state’s race-conscious remedy. You ruled that the fix for racial discrimination in voting was itself the problem. The remedy, you concluded, is the crime.
And you did it using the 14th Amendment.
Think about that for a minute.
The 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868, written in the aftermath of a war that cost hundreds of thousands of lives, to guarantee equal citizenship to the people this country had enslaved for 250 years. The 15th Amendment followed two years later, promising that the right to vote couldn’t be denied on account of race. Both amendments gave Congress explicit power to enforce those guarantees.
For a brief, extraordinary moment, they did. During Reconstruction, Black men voted, held office, built communities, and shaped the direction of this country. Then in 1877, a political compromise ended federal enforcement, and the promise was betrayed.
What followed were nine decades of terror, disenfranchisement, poll taxes, literacy tests, fraud, intimidation, and violence inflicted on anyone who tried to make those amendments real.
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was an attempt to finish the sentence that the 14th and 15th Amendments had started.
Section 2 is the part of that law that has allowed voters to challenge maps that dilute minority voting strength, even when discrimination is accomplished not by a locked courthouse door, but by district lines carefully drawn to make some people’s votes matter less.
I’m writing to remind you of just who paid for that law. It was purchased with very dear currency.
With Jimmie Lee Jackson’s life.
With John Lewis’s fractured skull.
The Rev. James Reeb (Abernathy Family, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)
With James Reeb, a Unitarian minister who answered the call to Selma and was beaten to death four days after Bloody Sunday.
With Viola Liuzzo, a Detroit mother who drove marchers home through the dark and was murdered by the Klan for it.
With 99 years of promises deferred, rights denied, bodies broken, names forgotten, and prayers forced to wait at the edge of a bridge.
And in 1965, the debt was finally collected.
Knowing what it cost, today you used the 14th Amendment, the one written to protect those people’s descendants, to declare that giving their communities actual political power constitutes an impermissible act of racial sorting.
I don’t know what else to call that but an unconscionable betrayal.
Not of a political position.
But of actual human beings.
Of the specific people who paid the specific price for the specific law you’ve just gutted.
I’m not writing because I think this letter will change anything. Your ruling stands. As much as I hate it, I know that. No, I’m writing because some things deserve to be said out loud, directly, to the people responsible for them.
I’m not writing to a general audience, or for the comfort of those who already agree.
I’m writing to you.
You’ve wrapped this decision in the language of colorblindness, as though the act of claiming not to see race magically produces equality. But the tradition I come from insists on seeing clearly. It insists on looking at who’s being pushed out of the gate and naming it, not abstractly, but in the presence of those doing the pushing.
Amos didn’t address the structural forces of his day in general terms. He looked at the people benefiting from injustice and told them exactly what they were doing, and exactly what it would cost.
I’m not Amos.
But I understand the assignment.
Do you have any idea what was sacrificed for what you’ve taken?
Memorial to Viola Liuzzo. (Carol M. Highsmith, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)
Jimmie Lee Jackson wanted to vote. He was killed for that wanting.
Viola Liuzzo drove marchers home in the dark and never got to see her home again.
James Reeb answered a call to stand with his neighbors, and it cost him his life.
They all gave their lives for something you’ve now handed back, using the vocabulary of the very amendment that was supposed to protect them. I mean, you get that, right?
Originalism, indeed.
I grieve that, and I’m absolutely going to call it out.
And I refuse to let the elegance of your legal rationalizing be the last word on what this day actually means.
History will have its say. But so will the bridge. So will the blood on the pavement. So will the people who were told to wait, then beaten for praying, then buried for believing the Constitution meant what it said.
And so, on this day, do I.
You’ll wear this shame for the rest of your lives.
Tony Dixon
The Rev. Derek Penwell
The Rev. Derek Penwell is Senior Minister at Douglass Blvd Christian Churchin Louisville, Kentucky. This is a free post from his Substack blog, Heretic Adjacent. Click here to read the rest of his Substack .