Equal Justice Initiative
Nkyinkyim, by Ghanaian artist Kwame Akoto-Bamfo, at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama.
One of the most harrowing phrases in the English language is “what if.” And it’s while touring the Legacy Sites in Montgomery, Alabama, that the “what if” of America really takes hold.
The Legacy Sites, created by the Equal Justice Initiative, are a collection of historically accurate installations that dive deep into America’s racist history, traveling through enslavement and racial terror to the problems we still face today. The Legacy Museum takes an immersive approach that engages visitors upon entry and tells the true story of American anti-Black cruelty. Nearby, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice walks visitors through the realities of racial terror in America and tells the story of lynching across our nation.
In viewing these sites, one glaring reality is hard to ignore. It could very well be our greatest “what if.”
The question is: What if this country had not set out to achieve the systematic destruction, displacement, and erasure of Black life? Where would we be?
Long before voter ID laws, gerrymandering, or intimidation at the polls, the most enduring form of voter suppression in this country was demographic—the tens of millions of people, disproportionately Black, who were never allowed to exist. Their absence continues to shape who governs this country today.
Start with the Middle Passage, the treacherous months-long course where enslavers trafficked stolen Africans across the ocean to the Americas. Historians estimate that approximately 12.5 million Africans were forcibly transported across the Atlantic, and roughly 1.8 to two million died during the journey. Those individuals never entered the population of what would become the United States. They never had children. They never built communities. They ultimately never voted.
Then consider slavery itself. Enslaved people in the United States were subjected to brutal conditions that produced elevated mortality rates, family separation, and suppressed economic growth. The same historical estimates suggest that across the full span of U.S. slavery, millions died prematurely under conditions of enslavement, shaped by a sustained system that reduced life spans and limited generational growth.
After emancipation, the terror did not end, it simply evolved. Between 1877 and 1950, more than 4,000 documented lynchings occurred in the United States, overwhelmingly targeting Black Americans. These killings were not random acts of violence. They were tools of political control, intentionally designed to suppress Black civic participation and enforce racial hierarchy. In fact, some were murdered simply for telling other Black Americans about their eligibility to vote.
This is where the “what if” comes back into play. Looking at these numbers—4,000 lynchings, two million deaths in the Middle Passage—only scratches the surface. What they obscure is the generational impact: the families that never formed, the children never born, the communities that never grew.
In estimating the sheer impact of these deaths and other racial challenges, using a counterfactual population modeling method I developed based on U.S. Census Bureau data and the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, it is possible to posit a conservative estimate to begin to examine the “what if” analysis. Based on birth rates, death rates, and migration trends, creating a picture of what was stolen from our past helps determine a grounded estimate of a power never allowed to come to fruition.
The two million deaths during the Middle Passage, two- to four-million deaths during slavery, and 200,000 to 500,000 lives lost to lynching and suppressed births brings us to around five to six and a half million people.
When extended across generations based on population trends, a modest estimate concludes forty to seventy million Black people were never able to exist in this country. That is not just a moral tragedy. It is a political one.
Representation in the United States is tied to population. Today, one seat in the House of Representatives represents roughly 760,000 people. That means the absence of forty to seventy million people equates to approximately fifty to ninety seats in Congress, which is also fifty to ninety votes in the electoral college. Those numbers alone are more than enough to reshape national policy and dictate the outcome of presidential elections. Especially in the South.
Yet, it does not stop there. Forced displacement also dilutes power. Between 1910 and 1970, approximately six million Black people fled the South during the Great Migration. People left not by choice, but under the pressures of escaping racial violence, economic exclusion, and systemic disenfranchisement.
Those six million people, and their descendants, now numbering perhaps twenty to twenty-five million using Census growth rates, shifted political power out of the South and into other regions. Congressional seats moved. Electoral votes moved. Representation moved. In total, the South did not just lose population, it lost political power that had been systematically suppressed, extracted, and redistributed.
Taken together, these forces—death and suppressed life under slavery, racial terror, and forced migration—produced a profound distortion in American democratic existence. They determined where power resides. They determined which communities would have a voice, and which would not.
And yet, when we debate voting rights today, we rarely acknowledge this history. We argue over access to the ballot, but we ignore the millions who were denied the chance to ever hold one in their hands.
What does an America with forty to seventy million more descendants of Black people look like? What would the South look like if it had developed with a large, protected Black electorate instead of one diminished by violence and displacement?
What would our elections look like if the descendants of those lost millions were voting today?
While these are questions that cannot explicitly be answered, they should garner deep thought and reflection. One answer that is certain, however, is the system in which we operate in the United States is not and never has been neutral. It is the byproduct of deliberate policies and sustained violence—choices about who would be allowed to live, to stay, and to belong.
When we talk about voter suppression, we should be clear. It did not begin with modern laws or recent court decisions. It is embedded in the foundation of this country.
The most enduring form of voter suppression in American history is not just about restricting access to the ballot. It is about ensuring that millions would never exist to cast one.
As this country continues to seemingly move backward, it is worth thinking about where we would be if so many of us had been allowed to live. The biggest “what if.”