I usually highlight quotes i find interesting and then type that out into my notes for future research. I wanted to ask, of the quotes i've listed below which do you find most important and why? I definitely recommend purchasing the book. Lots of great information.

"President Ulysses Grant wrote with uncommon candor about the true objectives of southern whites in the aftermath of slavery. Southern whites, by force and terror intended to... deprive colored citizens of the right to... a free ballot; to suppress schools in which colored children were taught, and to reduce the colored people to a condition closely akin to that of slavery." p2

"Despite the government's failure to live up to its promise, African American farmers persevered. By 1910, they had acquired approximately 16 million acres of farmland. By 1920 there were 925,000 African American farms in the United States. Today, there are fewer than 18,000 African American farms in the United States, and African American farmers now own less than 3 million acres of land." p7

"Congress apologized to Japanese Americans for their removal and internment during World War II and made its apology believable by legislating a host of reparations, including $20,000 for each victim. These movements are less about money and more about atonement-apology plus reparations." p12

"One of the largest life insurance companies in the United States, AETNA, based in Hartford CT, which traces its roots to 1853 and once wrote life insurance policies on slaves, naming slave owners as beneficiaries, made two significant moves toward slave redress in 2000. First, it issued a formal apology to Black Americans for its participation in sustaining the institution of slavery. Second, it voluntarily created a minority internship program and established a diversity scholarship fund as forms of reparation for its financial support of slavery." p15

"Another CT company made a positive contribution to the slave redress movement in 2000. Connecticut's largest daily newspaper, the Hartford Courant, issued a front-page apology for running advertisements for slave auctions and for committing other acts in support of slavery." p15

"The Vatican has also supported slave redress. In August 2001, it issued a statement that reads in part: The evil which has been done must be acknowledged and, as far as possible, corrected. This statement was perhaps timed to coincide with an important international human rights conference scheduled for that month." p16

"As an example of what he called The Solidarity of self-interest, the black black author and newsweek columnist Ellis Cose, who attended the Durban Conference, cited a disturbing development involving black africans and black americans. Although both came to the conference advocating for reparations for slavery and colonialism, self-interest eventually drove them apart. African nations were interested in debt relief, foreign aid, and investments (called the new africa initiative) and abandoned the call for reparations to close the deal. During intense backstage negotiations over world conference documents, African governments found it relatively easy to drop demands for reparations in return for assurances of support for their own initiatives, Cose notes. The Africans willingness to negotiate away the issue prompted one Afro-Latino delegate to quietly suggest that the Africans were abandoning their brothers in the new world. They sold us once, and now they're doing it again, she quipped." p18

"Political coalitions with other victim groups are likely to founder on the shoals of self-interest. It was not just the Africans who were prepared to sell out their friends for selfish reasons; it was other groups as well. As the Wall Street Journal pointed out, "The Indians were willing to support the U.S.'s attempts to remove the language about zionism, provided that India's skeleton in the closet, the caste system, wasn't mentioned." p18

"Where legislative enactments dared not tread, informal practice-newly established, but anointed with the force of custom- served the same proscriptive function. By general consent, white employers barred free blacks from trades they had practiced openly as slaves, driving them deep into poverty. Unable to gain employment except as...day laborers and domestics, black people then found themselves ridiculed for their lack of ambition and irregular work habits. " p33

"One visitor, a British solicitor, summed up the views of many of his fellow visitors when he observed that, With close, though perhaps unconscious, copy of the policy of ancient Egypt towards the children of Israel, America denies to free men of colour every liberal motive and every generous style, solace and recompense of industry; and then insults them with the calumnious reproach, Ye are idle, ye are idle." p34

"Some 30 years after the  cheating stopped with the passage of the civil rights legislation, the racialized distribution of the poker chips- power, wealth and privilege- continues to limit opportunities for black Americans. These assets, often invisible, are passed down intergenerationally. Indeed, some economists estimate that up to 80 percent of lifetime wealth accumulation results from gifts from earlier generations, ranging from the down payment on a home to a bequest by a parent. Thus, power, wealth and privilege are  more than just comforts or indulgences. They create the starting point for the next generation. When power, wealth and privilege are racialized, the starting point for each succeeding generation is necessarily racialized." p36

"In some states a Negro was defined as a person with one eigth  part or more of Negro blood, while in other states she was defined as a person with one African ancestor in the previous two generations. But some states, like South Carolina, treated as white, a person of mixed race who appeared to be white, and was socially accepted as white." p52

"Similarly, Patricia Williams argues, If a thief steals so that his children may live in luxury and the law returns his ill-gotten gains to its rightful owner, the children cannot complain that they have been deprived of what they did not own" p102

"After the Tulsa race riot of 1921 The City of Tulsa denied restitution claims made by every black resident of Greenwood, but allowed restitution claims made by whites." p131

"A scholarship program for African Americans as a form of redress for slavery is a reparation. But a scholarship program for, minority and women students, even when presented as a form of redress for slavery is no more a reparation than are Holocaust payments to American gentiles, including blacks." p155

"In my view, compensatory reparations are inappropriate for slave redress. Rehabilitative reparations are far more appropriate, for two reasons. First, they are structurally designed to reach a greater number of victims. As such, they are likely to be both more effective than compensatory reparations in solidifying the apology for slavery and Jim Crow and more helpful in fostering racial reconciliation." p157

"The two rehabilitative  reparations I favor most are a museum of slavery and an atonement trust fund. The former would be a memorial to the slaves, and the latter would be a governmental response to some of the capital deficiencies today's blacks have inherited from their ancestors." p157

"Slavery museums modeled on the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC and the Simon Wiesenthal Center Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles should be built in Washington D.C., and every state capital to commemorate the contributions slaves made to our country and educate Americans about them, as well as about the lingering effects slavery has on blacks today. These objectives can be realized through high-tech, interactive experiences. Visitors will be led back in time to witness the horrors of racial slavery, from capture in Africa, to the middle passage, and finally to the peculiar institution." p157

"Visitors will also be able to listen to recordings of slave narratives spoken by the slaves themselves." p157

"Reenactments of the debates on slavery at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 and in Congress  on the eve of southern succession can be presented in a, Point of view Diner, that serves a menu of slave-related topics on video jukeboxes." p158

"Visitors will listen to the debates on these and similar topics, and then input their opinions as to which side of the debate won. After instant tabulation of the results, the visitors might be surprised to learn how little our opinions may have changed over time." p158

"The museum of slavery will pull a racially divided nation together through a mixture of awareness, understanding and in some cases empathy."p158

"The museum of slavery, in short, will be a national symbol that gives voice to the millions of nameless slaves who made possible the aspirations of others." p159

"If it was worth constructing memorials to mourn the dealth of the some 3,000 innocent people who perished in the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and on the field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, at the hands of terrorists, then it is surely worth constructing a tribute to the millions of slaves who died in forced service to this country." p159

"The purpose of the trust fund is to provide a core group of blacks with one of the most important resources slavery and Jim Crow have denied them- financial capital, family resources, or an estate, handed down from generation to generation." p159

"unlike Asians and Latinos, blacks did not volunteer for this tour of duty. Blacks were kidnapped from their homeland and brought into this country by brutal force, the likes of which we have not seen before or since in American history." p161

"As Patricia Rodriguez has observed, White means mostly privilege and black means overcoming obstacles, a history of civil rights. As a Latina, I cant try to claim one of these. Black Americans carry the weight of the atrocities- slavery and jim crow- for which atonement is being sought. But again, all racial minorities, including Blacks, should continue to receive the protection of symmetrical social measures, including the civil rights laws." p161

"Money accumulated in the atonement fund would only be spent  for education or to start or invest in a business. Good primary and secondary education, graduation from a prestigious college or university, and small businesses are important ingredients in building family resources and sustaining their accumulation from one generation to the next." p162

"Finally wealthy black families would be excluded from this program. Because wealth is relative- $100,000 in Tupelo, Mississippi, is not the same as $100,000 in New York City- The income level would be set regionally by the board of commissioners." p162

"In this unprecedented legislation, congress, on behalf of the federal government, apologized and provided atonement money of $20,000 each to citizens and permanent resident aliens of Japanese ancestry who were forcibly relocated and placed in internment camps during World War II. The act also apologized and provided reparations awards of $12,000 each to the Aleuts who were forcibly relocated from their homelands in Alaska during the war. The Civil Liberties act is asymmetrical; no other groups are entitled to compensation under the act. A German American who was detained with his German father during the war challenged this feature of the act on grounds that it denied him equal protection of the law. Finding that there was ample evidence in the legislative history of the act demonstrating that Japanese American and Aleutian internees were the victims of racial prejudice at the hands of the federal government, while German American internees were not (e.g. no mass exclusion or detention of German or Italian Americans was ordered, and those detained, including the plaintiff and his father, were first given due process hearings to establish their threat to national security), the court ruled that the act passed constitutional muster under both the intermediate scrutiny test, which, based on Metro Broadcasting, was the controlling standard of the review at the time the case was decided, and the strict scrutiny test. Congress had clear and sufficient reason to compensate interns of Japanese but not German descent; and the compensation is substantially related, as well as narrowly tailored, to congress's compelling interest in redressing and shameful example of national discrimination." p177

"A similar discriminatory predicate can certainly be established for the atonement trust fund. As chapters 2 and 3 indicate, slavery and Jim Crow were more than mere acts of everyday societal discrimination. They were mandated and sanctioned by the U.S. government, undeniably shameful examples of discrimination, to use the language of Jacobs. Congress can certainly find ample evidence of this in the historical record should it decide to enact legislation creating the atonement fund. Passing H.R. 40, which, as discussed in Chapter 1, would establish a national commission to study slavery and its lingering effects, would help greatly in developing this historical record." p177

"Must the beneficiaries of the atonement fund, like those of the Civil Liberties Act, be direct victims of the federal discrimination in question? Certainly, there are current victims of slavery and Jim Crow, as discussed in Chapter 3. But privy (a close and direct relationship) between beneficiary and perpetrator may not be legally required for at least two reasons. First, as we have seen, the Supreme Court's constitutional regime governing affirmative action upholds race-conscious remedies designed to redress the perpetrator's past discrimination. Because such discrimination can occur, and often occurs, years, even decades, prior to the crafting of the race-conscious remedy, the beneficiary and victim are not necessarily one and the same person. Thus the absence of privity between the beneficiary and victim seems to be built into the controlling constitutional law." p177

"If white southerners wish to be emancipated from the legacy of slavery, they must reject that legacy. They must burn the Confederate flag, that brazen symbol of white hegemony. Thus, in the context of slave redress, white southerners carry additional responsibility. They must, as one southern historian has said, stop venerating a heritage that was centered on slavery and a flag that came into existence to represent the defence of slavery." p190

"White immigrants have another reason to support measures aimed at honoring the slaves and redressing the lingering negative effects of slavery. Immigrants necessarily assume the liabilities as well as the assets- the negative legacies as well as the positive legacies, slavery as well as the Declaration of Independence- of our country or any other country to which they emigrate. A Russian immigrant to the United States will enjoy the freedoms this country has to offer, but she will also spend a good portion of the rest of her life paying off the national debt, even though she had nothing to do with its establishment or accumulation. Whether a recent arrival or a member of an old-line family, an inhabitant of a country cannot pick and choose from among aspects of the country's history. Certainly the nation's largest and longest moral debt, slavery carries over from generation to generation until it is paid off. There is a corporateness to any country that cannot be gainsaid." p190

"The identity-politics, or victimhood, argument, which is a recurring protest among black conservatives levied against anything that does not smack of black self-help, can be quickly disposed of. Pursued through the atonement model, the claim for slave redress does not reduce itself to identity politics, any more than redress claims advanced over the years by Japanese Americans, Native Americans, black South Africans, Jews, or the Comfort Women. Slave redress under the atonement  model is about standing up for one's human dignity." p191

"Finally, as I mentioned earlier, atonement, apology and reparations, cannot logically begin until the atrocity ceases. Ending slavery itself cannot be viewed as redress for slavery. That undertaking simply brings the injustice to an end, a precondition for atonement, but it does not itself constitute atonement for the injustice. Atonement can only come after the injustice has ended. For example, the act of liberating the Jews from Nazi concentration camps is not a reparation or an apology for the Holocaust." p194

"Ward Connerly and Dinesh D'Sourza argue that blacks have nothing to complain about because they are better off as a result of slavery. Should American Jews then be thankful for the Holocaust because it caused many of them to leave Germany for the United States and helped to establish the state of Israel in 1948?" p194

"There is little logic in atoning for the holocaust by providing general aid to the citizens of Germany, or in atoning for Japanese American internment by strengthening Title VII or opening welfare eligibility. " p196

"Martin Luther King is a national hero today, but when he was alive pushing for civil rights, both symmetrical and asymmetrical, he was vilified by the majority of whites. Had he ceased his efforts so as not to upset whites, the nation's civil rights record would be far worse than it is today. " p196

"A frequently asked question by white persons goes as follows: "I'm sure there is some black blood in my family. Am I entitled to a reparation?" The recipient should be a person who has always represented himself as a Black person. There was a case in Boston where two Italian brothers sought to benefit from an affirmative action program created in the city's fire department by claiming their grandmother was black. The judge convened an evidentiary hearing for the purpose of determining their race sociologically; that is, whether they self-identified as blacks in their private and public lives. The photo they presented of their grandmother looked suspicious, and they could not establish that any of their friends or co-workers saw them as black. Their claim was a sham, and so it failed." p197

"If the reparations claimant can establish that she or he is sociologically black, then he must satisfy another requirement- namely, a familial connection to slavery or the first fifty years of Jim Crow. The family history requirement would naturally disqualify foreign-born blacks from the redress program for slavery and Jim Crow. They are not, however, left without remedy. The race based discrimination they face in America will have to be dealt with through our normal, symmetrical civil rights laws and enforcement." p197

"It would help if blacks stop talking about money and begin talking about atonement." p211

Ex-Florida gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum is back in jail after he was previously arrested in Alabama in July and charged with meth possession.

Per the Tallahassee Democrat, an order of commitment to jail signed by Baldwin County District Judge Scott Taylor indicated that Gillum’s bond was revoked during a court appearance on August 6. That was after the 47-year-old missed a drug screen and then tested positive for meth. 

The court docket also made mention of Gillum participating in drug court. People who participate in that diversion program have their charges dismissed if they undergo successful treatment. 

As previously reported by Face2Face Africa, Gillum was arrested for drug possession in Alabama back in July. 

Per TMZ, court documents stated that the 47-year-old was charged with one felony and two misdemeanor counts. The criminal complaint further stated that Gillum was charged with felony possession of a controlled substance (methamphetamine) as well as misdemeanor possession of marijuana for personal use and possession of drug paraphernalia. 

Officers arrested Gillum in Daphne after he was pulled over for driving waywardly. Authorities said officers found 3 grams of methamphetamine, 8 pre-rolled marijuana joints, 4 cut straws, 3 pipes and a bong in the car. 

Gillum checked into rehab for alcohol abuse in March 2022. He said in a statement that he had arrived at the decision after “conversation with my family and deep reflection.”

Gillum’s personality in 2018 drew parallels with former US President Barack Obama. Beyond their personalities, Gillum, just like Obama for America, ran in Florida as a progressive with refreshing ideas for an electorate who were skeptical of the future.

In the end, Gillum lost to Republican nominee Ron DeSantis by a close shave, a percentage margin of 0.4. But pundits and the Democratic believed the story had only begun for a young bright star.

The 47-year-old previously served as mayor of Tallahassee from 2014 to 2018.  

Riley Rogerson

06/24/2026, 1:30pm ET

The leaders of several prominent House Democratic caucuses are proposing a Supreme Court overhaul as well as the Senate filibuster in response to the justices’ decision to narrow the 1965 Voting Rights Act earlier this year.

Their resolution obtained by POLITICO calls for the expansion of the Supreme Court and to establish term limits and a code of ethics for justices. It also calls for the elimination of the 60-vote filibuster in the Senate.

While the resolution stands virtually no chance of adoption, it is the latest indicator of how the Congressional Black Caucus and other key Democrats want to respond to the April decision that cleared the way for Republican states to redraw their congressional maps and eliminate majority-minority districts. The measure also lays down a marker for progressives — who will be emboldened next Congress after defeating several incumbents in New York City on Tuesday — as they seek to influence the Democratic agenda.

“The Court’s far-right supermajority poses a serious threat to any future attempts by Congress to realize the promise of a multiracial democracy, rein in executive power, champion worker’s rights, protect voting rights, and restore and strengthen the Federal protections against racial discrimination in the Voting Rights Act,” the resolution reads.

The measure is led by Democratic Rep. Greg Casar of Texas, who leads the Congressional Progressive Caucus; Rep. Yvette Clarke of New York, who leads the CBC, Rep. Grace Meng of New York, who leads the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus; and Rep. Hank Johnson of Georgia. Rep. Adriano Espaillat of New York, the Congressional Hispanic Caucus chair who lost his bid for renomination Tuesday to a hard-left challenger, is also a lead sponsor.

The leaders of the resolution will speak at a news conference Wednesday afternoon.

A Mississippi police officer shot 1-year-old Kohen Kartier Wiley while responding to a shoplifting call on Sunday, killing him and critically wounding an adult.

The June 14 shooting involved officers from the Senatobia Police Department and the Tate County Sheriff’s Department. The officer shot Wiley while he was inside a silver sedan in the parking lot of a Walmart.

Community members plan to gather on June 16, 2026, to protest the June 14 killing of 1-year-old Kohen Wiley. Photo courtesy Kohen Wiley family

The Mississippi Department of Public Safety released a statement on June 14, alleging that the shooting happened in response to one of two subjects driving “in the direction of” officers. A clip of cellphone video obtained by Fox 13 Memphis shows a car driving away from officers, but it does not appear to show the shooting itself. A photo of the car shows multiple bullet holes in the windshield, including a bullet hole on the passenger side of the front windshield.

Notably, the DPS statement appears to acknowledge that police witnessed the presence of Kohen Wiley prior to the individuals entering their vehicle, and before the officer discharged the weapon. The officer has not been identified.

“Law enforcement officers responded to a shoplifting call at Walmart on U.S. 51. Upon arrival, officers encountered two subjects and a juvenile child fleeing from the store into a vehicle. Officers attempted to stop the vehicle, but the driver drove in the direction of the officers, almost striking one,” the statement read in part. “An officer then discharged their weapon and the vehicle fled the scene. The subjects arrived at a local hospital where one juvenile child in the vehicle was pronounced deceased, and another subject had critical injuries. No law enforcement officers received any serious physical injury.”

Members of Kohen Wiley’s family have denied that any shoplifting took place. WREG reported that, before the shooting, a witness saw two women exit the store: one carrying a single box of diapers, and one carrying the infant child. Family told WREG that Kohen’s mother was riding in the passenger seat holding the child when the officer shot him and that the aunt, who was driving, was in critical condition. Another witness told the news station that she saw the car driving away with police officers chasing after it on foot just before hearing gunshots. At present, no arrests have been announced in the incident.

“Senatobia Police Department get away with too much stuff,” WREGH reported Kohen’s great-grandmother Carolyn Stokes, as saying. “I hear about it all the time. It’s in the news all the time. Y’all probably down here all the time, recording this stuff, but it’s just too much.”

Kohen Wiley, 1, died after a police officer shot into a sedan in Senatobia, Miss., on June 14, 2026. Photo courtesy Kohen Wiley family

The Senatobia Police Department released a statement on social media shortly after the shooting, acknowledging that the investigation had been turned over to the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation and promising eventual transparency.

“The Senatobia Police Department is currently investigating an officer-involved shooting that occurred today at approximately 2:05 PM at Walmart,” the June 14 statement said. “Preliminary reports indicate that officers responded to a report of shoplifting, which led to officers discharging their firearms.”

Walmart released a statement to Action 5 News in Memphis.

“We’re saddened by what took place at our Senatobia, MS, store,” the statement reads. “The safety of our associates and customers is a top priority. We’re working with law enforcement as they continue investigating.”

Update: Members of the community gathered at Senatobia City Hall at 5 p.m. on Tuesday afternoon to call for accountability for Kohen Wiley’s killing. At 6 p.m., Mississippi Department of Public Safety Commissioner Sean Tindell vowed a transparent investigation outside the Tate County Courthouse, even as protesters heckled him and demanded more action and information.

On Tuesday evening, Action News 5 reported that law enforcement officers teargassed protesters who gathered outside the Walmart where an officer shot and killed Kohen Wiley.

Correction: An earlier version of this story mistakenly said there was a bullet hole in the “passenger side window” due to an error introduced in editing. It should have said that the bullet hole was in the passenger side of the windshield. We apologize for the error.

By Nikole Hannah-Jones

May 22, 2026

On May 7, amid the din of protesters, Tennessee’s Republican-majority legislature met to vote on a bill that would eliminate the state’s lone majority-Black and Democratic House district, divvying its voters up between three heavily white ones. Outraged, State Representative Justin Jones of Nashville stood in the hallway of the State Capitol and set afire a paper replica of the Confederate battle flag. The words “We will not go back” were printed along the top.

But going back is precisely what the legislature voted to do, as Tennessee became the first of the former Confederate states to create and approve new congressional maps since the Supreme Court’s recent decision to eviscerate the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

A week and a day before the Tennessee vote, the Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice John Roberts, had finally achieved the right’s decades-long goal of nullifying what’s considered the most successful civil rights law in our nation’s ignoble racial history. After upholding unrestrained partisan gerrymandering in other recent decisions, the court now determined that creating congressional maps that sought to ensure political representation for racial minorities violated the Constitution.

For students of history, what Tennessee did on May 7 felt like a premonition. One hundred and fifty years ago, when this nation’s first experiment with interracial democracy began to collapse, Tennessee — a former slave state and the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan — was the first domino to drop. In 1870, the Tennessee legislature rewrote the State Constitution to disenfranchise Black men. As the historian Manisha Sinha writes in “The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic,” Tennessee “provided a template to other Southern states” for how to “overthrow Reconstruction.” Within three decades, Black representation, in Congress and in local and state offices across the former Confederacy, would be wiped out.

It was not just Tennessee that echoed history, but the Supreme Court as well. The case that felled the Voting Rights Act was Louisiana v. Callais. Louisiana is the state where in 1896, in Plessy v. Ferguson, another superlatively conservative Supreme Court used the 14th Amendment to license segregation, setting off a race across the South to strip Black people of the franchise and codify their second-class citizenship.

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State Senator London Lamar in Nashville on May 5 before the Tennessee General Assembly voted to redraw the state’s congressional maps.Credit...George Walker IV/Associated Press

The day after the Callais ruling, Gov. Jeff Landry took the unprecedented action of suspending the state’s U.S. House primary — in which tens of thousands of voters had already cast ballots — so legislators could redraw the election maps. Though one in three Louisiana residents is Black, Republicans intend to jettison at least one of two Black-majority districts. “Well, the failed narrative is actually that people in Louisiana are racist,” Landry insisted, “that basically we won’t elect Black people. I mean, I disagree with that.” In fact, since the Plessy era, Louisiana has sent only four Black people to Congress, and a Black candidate has never won in a white district there.

Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama and Florida quickly moved ahead with their own redistricting plans. And the governor of Mississippi — which has just a single Black U.S. representative despite having the nation’s highest percentage of Black residents, at 38 percent — announced his intent to do the same.

Voting and civil rights experts warn that America now sits at a familiar precipice. The Voting Rights Act helped transform the South: In 1965, the region had not a single Black representative in the U.S. Congress; today, it has 31. Now, Black representation may once again disappear in the South, where more than half of Black Americans live. This could lead to the largest decimation of Black political power since the fall of Reconstruction. And just like then, what is at stake is no less than American democracy itself.

In 1901, Representative George Henry White of North Carolina delivered a farewell speech for his entire race to the U.S. House. White, a Howard University graduate whose mother was most likely born into slavery, was elected in 1896. By the time he left office, he was the last of a cadre of Black men who had, during Reconstruction, integrated Congress for the first time.

As White looked out across a now all-white Congress, he said he spoke on behalf of “an outraged, heartbroken, bruised and bleeding, but God-fearing people, faithful, industrious, loyal people — rising people, full of potential force.” His departure might be Black people’s “temporary farewell to the American Congress,” he said, but “phoenixlike, he will rise up some day and come again.” It took more than half a century.

The Reconstruction era that White was elegizing had been snuffed out with dizzying speed.

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Representative George Henry White of North Carolina, circa 1894-1901.Credit...Library of Congress

It began in the wake of the Civil War as new constitutional amendments transformed the South, then home to nearly the entire U.S. Black population. The 14th Amendment ensured legal equality for the formerly enslaved, and the 15th Amendment guaranteed Black men the vote. Black men who had been enslaved, or were born to parents who had been enslaved, flocked to the party of Lincoln, casting ballots and taking political office. Together, Black and white Republicans created representative governments that passed the most progressive legislation in the region’s history — establishing public education, investing in public infrastructure and social programs, and initiating land reform and labor protections.

But former Confederates, led by the Southern plantation oligarchy and consolidated in the pro-slavery Democratic Party, never accepted interracial democracy. Many white Southerners engaged in mass killings, assassinations, electoral fraud, terrorism and coups to overthrow it.

At first, the Republican Party tried to protect democracy. President Ulysses S. Grant created the Department of Justice in 1870, expanding the federal government’s ability to enforce Black Americans’ civil rights. Congress passed the Enforcement Acts, what Sinha calls the nation’s first federal hate-crime laws, to guard against the wanton violence of white supremacists. The laws allowed federal officials to supervise elections in towns where white supremacists were interfering and to aggressively prosecute the Klan.

But over the next two decades, starting in 1876, the all-white Supreme Court thwarted the federal government’s attempts to enforce equality. It struck down all or part of the Enforcement Acts; it nullified the part of a law that mandated punishing state and local officials who worked to deny Black voters the franchise; it asserted that the 15th Amendment did not guarantee Black people the right to vote, but only prohibited states from explicitly using race to discriminate against voters.

Then the court struck down the 1875 Civil Rights Act, which had outlawed discrimination in public accommodations. Using the same logic that today’s Supreme Court did when it gutted the Voting Rights Act, the court determined, a mere 18 years after the abolishment of slavery, that “there must be some stage in the progress of his elevation when” Black Americans must no longer “be the special favorite of the laws.”

White Southern officials, following the road map the court laid out for them, immediately adopted so-called race-neutral tools that could disenfranchise Black voters without ever mentioning race. They implemented poll taxes and grandfather clauses and literacy exams. And because nearly all Black Southern voters identified with the pro-civil-rights Republicans, and nearly all white Southern voters aligned with the Democrats, white racists knew they could attack Black citizenship by dismantling the Republican Party. They used partisan gerrymandering to dilute Black voting power and eliminate Black seats.

After a while, white politicians in the North grew tired of trying to enforce Black Americans’ rights, and Northern business interests saw opportunity in the South’s exploitable Black (and poor white) labor. A political deal was struck that ended Reconstruction in 1877 and along with it any federal enforcement of Black political rights.

With the assent of the Supreme Court and the ambivalence of the federal government, the South increasingly became, once again, a region with one-party, white-only and often minority rule.

White Southerners had their own name for the end of Reconstruction: Redemption. America would not see another Black man in Congress for nearly 30 years. And it would take an additional 41 years after that before a Black person represented the South again.

Black Americans would spend nearly a century after Reconstruction’s demise fighting and dying to restore the rights they had lost, especially the right that secures all others: voting. Most Americans know the culmination of this effort as the civil rights movement, which led to the passage of the landmark civil rights legislation of 1964, 1965 and 1968. But many scholars also describe this period as the start of the Second Reconstruction. If that’s the case, we may be witnessing the Second Redemption.

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President Lyndon B. Johnson with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Ralph Abernathy and Clarence Mitchell Jr. after signing the Voting Rights Act into law in 1965.Credit...Corbis, via Getty Images

Today’s Supreme Court has thrown open the door for this, using the same logic as before — that efforts to ensure Black political representation illegally discriminate against white Americans.

A century and a half ago, Southern state legislatures knew partisan gerrymandering could provide cover for racist gerrymandering. While the party alignments are now reversed, the racial divide remains. “As long as Black folks have voted, there has been a party that’s basically pro-civil-rights and one that’s anti-civil-rights,” Theodore Johnson, a scholar of Black electoral politics and senior adviser at New America, told me. “Black folks have voted mostly uniformly against the party against civil rights. Most white people vote for the anti-civil-rights party.”

Since the end of Barack Obama’s second term as the nation’s first Black president, the racial partisan divide has only intensified, with Southern white voters moving even more fully into the Republican Party. White conservative politicians deeply understand this, though the court treats it as incidental.

The parallels to Reconstruction and Redemption are not perfect but they are conspicuous, the Yale historian David Blight told me. “You could argue here in big terms that Trumpism, in fact, that the modern conservative movement, has been a similar reaction to the modern civil rights revolution,” he said. Today’s rollback of civil rights relies largely on legal machinations rather than violence, but to Blight, its goal is no less radical.

Janai Nelson, who as president and director-counsel of the Legal Defense Fund argued the Callais case before the Supreme Court, told me that the court had greenlit a sort of wink-and-nod colorblindness, where majority-Black districts are automatically suspect but a legislative body can create voting maps where no Black people are elected, and as long as they do not say they are doing that for racist reasons, the Constitution is fine with that. And it is not just in the South that Black representation is imperiled. Illinois’s Democrat-controlled State Senate was planning to put forward a constitutional amendment to protect so-called majority-minority districts. After the Louisiana v. Callais ruling, it halted the effort.

The consequences for Black representation, in Congress and state legislatures, but also on school boards and county commissions and in judgeships, could be catastrophic — not just for Black Americans but for everyone.

Black rights movements have always been democratizing movements, and history shows this country cannot deny one and maintain the other. When Redeemers stripped Black Americans of their franchise and political representation, white Southerners who did not align with the Democratic Party also lost the ability to choose their leaders. These all-white conservative governments then decreased funding for public education and public services, implemented regressive tax systems that favored the elite and helped crush labor movements.

“It needs to be emphasized again and again: What is happening is an assault on democracy, and they’re using the easiest vector, which is anti-Black racism, because it’s the easiest thing you could do, the laziest thing you can do,” Nelson said. “They are cementing absolute minority control because they do not represent a majority of this country. And when they — if they — get away with the heist, we will be locked out of multiracial democracy for at least a generation.”

The South’s new redistricting fight could reach far beyond Congress

Black Democrats warn the Supreme Court’s Voting Rights Act ruling will impact Black representation across southern state legislatures.

Several Southern states have already eliminated majority Black congressional seats, and GOP leaders have indicated legislative redistricting will happen in the future. | Win McNamee/Getty Images

By Cheyanne M. Daniels05/16/2026 04:00 PM EDT

As Republicans across the South race to redraw congressional lines ahead of the midterms, Black Democrats warn that another sweeping challenge to Black political power is on the horizon: the erosion of representation at the local level.

Last month’s Supreme Court decision gutting the Voting Rights Act has kicked off the South’s political landscape being rewritten in real time. But the rush to redraw House lines ahead of November is only the beginning of the process, Black Democrats say, with a potentially yearslong effort to erase other majority Black districts in state and local politics coming soon.

“Congress is just one level, but it’s state legislatures, it’s county commissions, it’s city councils that’s a part of the conversation,” said Cliff Albright, co-founder of Black Voters Matter.

Members of the Congressional Black Caucus in Washington fear that roughly a third of its members could ultimately see their seats erased. But those numbers could be larger in Southern state legislatures; a report from Albright’s organization and Fair Fight Action issued before the Supreme Court’s sweeping decision in Louisiana v. Callais estimated that just under half of the roughly 270 majority Black legislative districts in chambers across 10 Southern states could be eliminated.

“The entire South is on fire,” North Carolina state Sen. Natalie Murdock said in an interview.

Murdock — who said she represents a district roughly 20 miles from where her ancestors were enslaved and whose grandmother was the first in her family to vote thanks to the VRA — said the ruling represented a dire threat for her community.

“People are expecting overt violence and clubs and fire hoses and pitbulls,” she said. “You don’t need that when you have the current Supreme Court that we have, when you have legislative bodies that do not want Black people to have representation.”

The result, legislators said, could be existential: Eliminating local Black political power and erasing the next generation of leadership threatens to stall progress across the board, they said, undermining equity in economic stability, education and health care.

“State legislatures control budgets. They decide where infrastructure dollars go, which schools get prioritized, how health care dollars are distributed, what economic development projects are funded and which communities are viewed as worthy of investment,” said Florida state Sen. Shevrin Jones.

“History shows us that communities without strong political representation often end up fighting harder for basic investments that other communities receive more easily, whether it’s hospital access, public transportation, environmental protections, affordable housing, or broadband expansion,” he added.

Several Southern states have already moved to eliminate majority Black congressional seats, as control of the House in November hangs in the balance. And while few have yet taken concrete steps to change legislatures — where Democrats are uniformly already in the minority across the South — ahead of the midterms, Republican leaders indicated that it would be coming down the road.

Georgia’s GOP Gov. Brian Kemp on Wednesday called a legislative special session to redraw congressional and state legislative lines for 2028. And Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves, also a Republican, said he expects state lawmakers to redraw legislative and state Supreme Court lines between now and the off-year elections in 2027.

“Today is not the end of the redistricting process — it is just the beginning!“ Reeves said in a Wednesday statement.

Even without any changes to maps, Democrats already have limited political power. But the shift to strike out Democratic-leaning, majority-Black seats can still have a critical effect on Black communities that often face significantly less funding and public investment than predominantly white neighborhoods. The loss of representation eliminates firsthand experiences, lawmakers said, and will only exacerbate the issues.

“The importance of Black representation isn’t just on its face beneficial. It is because the policies and the perspectives that Black elected officials bring are completely different than what our white Republican colleagues could ever understand,” said Tennessee state Rep. Justin Pearson.

Pearson was primarying Democratic Rep. Steve Cohen, who is white, in a majority Black congressional district based in Memphis. That district was broken up by GOP legislators, and while Pearson said he would run for the new, much redder seat, he now faces a steep climb to Washington should he win the primary.

The latest Supreme Court ruling risks returning the South to post-Reconstruction, Jim Crow-era levels of representation in local government, said Louisiana state Rep. Edmond Jordan, part of what he called a “systematic effort” to remove Black elected officials.

“In 1868 we had 42 African American legislators in this body. By 1898 they were down to two, and by 1900 they were down to zero,” said Jordan, the chair of his state’s Legislative Black Caucus. “We made great strides in a very short time, but I’ve told people before: We went from 42 to zero, don’t think that we can’t go from where we are now at 37 to zero.”

Black legislators said they are working to find ways to fight back — including litigation and stalling tactics in legislatures — and are still urging voters to cast their ballots in the upcoming elections.

But the fight has also exposed a growing generational divide, with younger Black Democrats in particular demanding the party pivot to the offensive — leading major protests and demanding the party start its own redistricting efforts in solidly blue states.

“We have to do all of the things, it actually isn’t just one strategy,” said Pearson, who like other Tennessee Democrats was recently stripped of his committee assignments for leading protests on the chamber floor.

“You’ve got to do the protesting,” he continued. “Organizing voters, registering voters, and turning them out is all of our job in addition to going to court. When democracy is dying, it’s going to require supporting each of those pillars of strategy, and not demonizing any of those pillars.”

Filed Under: 

• Elections
• Redistricting
• Voting Rights Act
• Gerrymandering
• The South
• 2026 Elections