{"id":3362,"date":"2026-05-05T21:25:22","date_gmt":"2026-05-06T01:25:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vr-news.net\/?p=3362"},"modified":"2026-05-05T21:25:22","modified_gmt":"2026-05-06T01:25:22","slug":"telling-it-like-it-is","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vr-news.net\/?p=3362","title":{"rendered":"Telling It Like It Is"},"content":{"rendered":"
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In a devastating blow to what John Lewis called \u201cthe most powerful non-violent tool we have in a democracy,\u201d a right-wing, illegitimate SCOTUS finally gutted the Voting Rights Act they\u2019ve long been chipping away at, ensuring communities of color will increasingly be denied \u201ca voice in their own destiny.\u201d By striking down a new Louisiana voting map as a bogus \u201cracial gerrymander,\u201d the court\u2019s extremist hacks betrayed generations who fought and bled, said Fannie Lou Hamer, \u201cto live as decent human beings.\u201d<\/p>\n

The court\u2019s 6-3 decision in Louisiana v. Callais<\/em><\/a> kneecapped \u201cour nation\u2019s most important federal civil rights law,” effectively voiding the last remaining provision of the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act\u2019s Section 2 <\/a>that allowed voters of color to legally challenge racially discriminatory electoral maps. Specifically, they rejected Louisiana’s redrawn 2024 Congressional map that created a second majority-Black district – in a one-third Black state – aimed at righting the GOP\u2019s racist wrongs <\/a> of the past, defying precedent, context and common sense to argue the move, already upheld by two courts, was \u201dan unconstitutional racial gerrymander.\u201c<\/p>\n

In another outlandish opinion, Samuel Alito<\/a>, the hackiest of a cabal of hacks, didn\u2019t directly strike down Section 2, which prohibits voting practices that discriminate on the basis of race; writing for the majority<\/a>, he argued he was simply \u201cproperly\u201d re-interpreting it to require proof<\/em> of intentional discrimination – which Congress didn\u2019t write <\/a>into the law, which defies past rulings that redistricting must only result <\/em>in discrimination, intended or no, and which is almost impossible to prove. Thus, wielding \u201csleight of hand and legal gibberish,\u201d did Alito give license for corrupt politicians to further rig the system by silencing entire communities of color.<\/p>\n

The potential death knoll for a vital law that’s curtailed racial gerrymandering<\/a> and discrimination for 60 years comes, of course, after years of whittling <\/a>away by Roberts Court zealots, using tactics from voter ID laws to limiting registration. One advocate<\/a>: “This ruling isn\u2019t about the law, it\u2019s about power, and giving Republicans<\/a> more seats they (could) win at the ballot box.” One “pernicious” result, writes <\/a>Rick Hasen: To “bleach the halls” of Congress, state legislatures and city councils, the life’s work of judges who see their constituency as aggrieved white men hostile to the rights of minorities – a stance that puts them “at odds with democracy itself.”<\/p>\n

In a fiery dissent,<\/a> Justice Elena Kagan charged the majority \u201cstraight-facedly holds the Voting Rights Act must be brought low to make the world safe for partisan gerrymanders.” The law they \u201ceviscerate”, she wrote, “is – or, now more accurately, was – one of the most consequential, efficacious, and amply justified exercises of federal legislative power in our Nation\u2019s history. It was born of the literal blood of Union soldiers and civil rights marchers, and repeatedly, and overwhelmingly, reauthorized by the people\u2019s representatives in Congress. Only they have the right to say it is no longer needed – not the Members of this Court.\u201d<\/p>\n

Above all, critics decry the hubris and perfidy of those heedless Court members blithely stripping from millions of Americans the elemental rights so many of their descendants struggled, suffered and died for. The Rev. William Barber eviscerated <\/a>a court, ignorant of the painful history <\/a>of “the rights that cost our people so much,” that has “decided their job is to enable extremism and systemic racism by arguing that race has no place in the American Democratic process. Race has always had a place in the process. And claiming that partisan decisions are not racist is a form of racism.” “Some of us,” John Lewis humbly noted of his lifetime of good trouble, “gave a little blood for (that) right.”<\/p>\n

John Lewis called the fight for voting rights \"the struggle of a lifetime, or maybe even many lifetimes.\" John Lewis called the fight for voting rights “the struggle of a lifetime, or maybe even many lifetimes.”<\/small>Photo from Getty Archives<\/small><\/p>\n

So did Fannie Lou Hamer, who fought against a Jim Crow South she’d grown up in because, “I was sick and tired of being sick and tired.” The granddaughter of slaves and youngest of 20 children of sharecroppers, she was 45 in 1962 when she went to a SNCC meeting at a church in Sunflower County, Mississippi and learned Black people could register to vote. The next day, she took a bus with 17 others to the county seat in Indianola. Police only let her and another person take the literacy test; she failed, but kept going back until she passed: “If I’d had any sense, I\u2019d a been scared. But the only thing (whites) could do was kill me, and it seemed they\u2019d been trying to do that a little bit at a time since I could remember.”<\/p>\n

On the way back, police stopped them and brought them back to Indianola, where the bus driver was fined for “driving a bus the wrong color.” Back at the plantation, her children said the owner was angry she’d gone to vote; he told her to leave that night “because we are not ready for that in Mississippi.” “I didn\u2019t try to register for you,” she said.<\/a>.<\/a> “I tried to register for myself.” Then she left: “They set me free. It\u2019s the best thing that could happen. Now I could work for my people.” For the rest of her life, she did. She joined the voter registration campaign, helped organize Freedom Summer, became SNCC’s oldest field secretary, ran for Congress.<\/p>\n

Left with a limp after surviving childhood polio, she embraced her identity as a Black working-poor woman with a disability and little formal education, upending preconceptions of both Black colleagues and white foes. When Rep. Adam Clayton Powell Jr. once challenged her expertise, she retorted, “How many bales of cotton have you picked?\u201d In 1963, she became more disabled after she was arrested with other activists in Winona MS, taken to jail and brutally beaten <\/a>by cops and, on their order, other black prisoners, suffering permanent damage to her eyes, legs and kidneys. She was still in jail when Medger Evers was murdered. <\/p>\n

In August 1964, she recounted that ordeal at the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, days after the funerals of murdered Freedom Riders Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman. Testifying to the Credentials Committee, she challenged the seating of Mississippi’s all-white delegation – from still-all-white primaries – demanding<\/a> the party seat Black members of an integrated Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party she’d helped found. In the end, MFDP delegates were not seated – party leaders offered a compromise of 2 seats, which she declined – but she had confronted them on a national stage about their own discrimination, famously asking, “Is this America?”<\/p>\n