Library of Congress
Protesters at the March on Washington in 1963.
Throughout U.S. history, purveyors of white supremacy have often limited Black people’s ability to participate in politics, even while speaking the language of inclusion.
This has been true since the time of enslavement, when the Three-Fifths Compromise of 1787 determined that every five Black (enslaved) people would count as three whole people in the calculation used to determine each state’s population and Congressional apportionment.
This dehumanizing view of Black individuals disproportionately bestowed power to the Southern slaveholding states, while also affirming the widely held view that Black bodies were nothing more than a math problem to be dealt with in service to white power. And though the Three-Fifths Compromise ended more than 150 years ago, the dehumanizing calculation of Black people’s value never went away.
During Reconstruction, the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments sought to rectify the imbalance of basic rights between Black and white people, with the promise of full citizenship and equal voting rights for formerly enslaved people. But the promise never fully materialized. Jim Crow systems, literacy tests, poll taxes, and violent intimidation replaced slavery’s chains, considerably diluting Black political power.
Over the course of the Civil Rights Movement and the decades that followed, the electorate slowly shifted to be more inclusive and diverse, and laws were put into place to try and address systemic racism at the ballot box. Then, in 2008, something unthinkable happened: The United States elected to the presidency Barack Obama—a Black man who offered the promise of change and a new direction for the country. People who had never been part of the voting system before finally saw and utilized their access to voting. The future seemed inclusive. Then, as most racial progress has gone in the United States, we regressed.
Before diving into where we went wrong, it is important to remember how the progress that eventually led to—the election of a Black President—was made possible. The Voting Rights Act of 1965, which outlawed discriminatory practices such as poll taxes and literacy tests that were weaponized to prevent Black people from accessing the ballot box, was passed after the nation watched, horrified, as peaceful marchers were brutalized by police on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, for demanding nothing more than the right to vote. The violence of what is infamously known as “Bloody Sunday” forced America to confront the hypocrisy of its democracy.
In response, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act, one of the most transformative civil rights laws in history. Its most powerful tool was “preclearance”—a requirement that states and counties with a history of racial discrimination needed to obtain federal approval before making any changes to voting laws or voting district maps. This safeguard acted as a shield against the weaponization of bureaucracy and policy to suppress Black votes. For decades, it stood to protect the promise of democracy against racist efforts to undermine it at the local or state level.
But that shield was shattered in 2013, when the U.S. Supreme Court issued its decision in Shelby County v. Holder. In one sweeping opinion, the Court struck down the provision determining which jurisdictions were subject to preclearance, effectively dismantling the Act’s most powerful enforcement mechanism. This decision effectively removed the requirement for anyone to seek approvals for possible racial discrimination in redistricting. The ruling rested on the notion that the nation had moved past the racial injustices that once justified such oversight, reflected in the opinion written by Chief Justice John Roberts—a claim history has proven tragically false.
States wasted no time erecting new barriers to the ballot box, such as closing polling places in Black communities, purging voter rolls, enacting restrictive ID laws, and redrawing districts to dilute Black political power. The Shelby County decision did not simply weaken the Voting Rights Act; it reopened the very gates of disenfranchisement that the movement in Selma had fought so fiercely to close.
Now, states that have been freed from the watchful eye of government oversight are now quickly aiming to undermine the ability of non-white people to vote, not just today but for the foreseeable future.
The hits came fast, as states redrew district voting maps and either wholly consolidated or drastically split up minority voters in Congressional districts. States like North Carolina, Texas, Mississippi, and Alabama were quick to adjust voting laws either by districts or new Voter ID restrictions.
Recently, the surge has been exacerbated by the partisan tricks and racism of the current administration. At the request of President Donald Trump, Texas vocally sought to change its voting districts in order to take away five seats in majority non-white districts from Democratic Congressmembers. Other states, including North Carolina, Missouri, and Louisiana, quickly followed suit, seeking to change their own maps to disenfranchise communities of color while appeasing the current President.
In addition to the rollbacks of the Voting Rights Act, these changes are being further couched in another legal argument stemming from a more recent voting rights case, Rucho v. Common Cause. In this 2019 opinion, the Supreme Court declared partisan gerrymandering (drawing electoral maps for political reasons) is a “political question” beyond the reach of the federal courts. The ruling gave legislatures freer reign to divvy up voting access, an approach that has, throughout U.S. history, yielded dubious results—including the Civil War. Now, the Court has affirmed the legislature’s right to be racist under the guise of partisanship, with chilling results: The Texas map, as constructed, could result in Black voting power amounting to one-fifth that of white voters.
The fight for a voice in representation now centers not only around overt disenfranchisement but also around the dilution of Black and brown votes through redistricting, state laws, and judicial decisions. In the state of Louisiana, this fight has reached a critical juncture in the case of Louisiana v. Callais, which is currently being heard before the Supreme Court. Out of Louisiana’s six Congressional districts, the legislature has drawn the maps in a way that only one is a majority-Black district, giving Black voters roughly one-sixth of the state’s representation despite their approximate one-third share of the population.
A court found that the maps had likely violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act by diluting Black voting power, and ordered the creation of a second Black-majority district. The state legislature responded by drawing such a district, but in January 2024, white voters in Western District of Louisiana sued the state, claiming the new map was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander against non-Black people.
Now, the Supreme Court has been asked to rule on whether the creation of a majority-minority district—a longstanding remedial tool authorized under the Voting Rights Act--itself violates the Fourteenth or Fifteenth Amendments.
North Carolina, egged on by Trump, recently passed its own version of a new redistricting map. After numerous back and forth battles in the courts, new maps were adopted in October that dilute the Black vote by moving Black voters into a heavily white district and likely removing the state’s only Black member of Congress. Similar redistricting efforts have also arisen in states such as Indiana, Kansas, Missouri, and Nebraska.
The echoes of the Three-Fifths Compromise are clear: When Black people are counted but not fully represented—when political maps and laws treat their votes as less potent—we are witnessing a structural subordination disguised as race-neutral administration. The genius of the Voting Rights Act was in recognizing that dilution—not just outright exclusion—undermines the Fifteenth Amendment’s promise. But if the Supreme Court permits states to draw maps that leave Black voters legally with less of a voice, then the promise of equal political power becomes hollowed out.
Political power depends on the ability to elect preferred representatives, to influence policy, and to secure resources. When a segment of the population is consistently parceled into insufficiently proportionate representation, the result is systemic inequality. And the judicial endorsement of that system creates a slippery slope: Remove enforceable protections, and the routine ways of marginalizing minority-voting power become normalized.
If Louisiana’s precedent holds, states drawing redistricting maps will know they can shrink the electoral power of Black and brown communities, without conspicuous barriers. The systematic dilution of votes will replace overt disenfranchisement as the new method of disempowerment.
In that way, the arc from the Three-Fifths Compromise to modern redistricting shows an enduring truth: If Black lives are to matter, then Black votes must matter too. And until every voter has equal power—not lesser or diluted power—the promise of democracy remains unfulfilled.