Washington, D.C. (March 21, 2025) — On the heels of the 60th Anniversary of Bloody Sunday, the United States Supreme Court will hear Louisiana v. Callais on Monday, March 24, to decide if a Louisiana congressional map enacted in 2024 is unconstitutional on racial gerrymandering grounds.
This 2024 map was enacted after lower federal courts held that Louisiana’s 2022 congressional map likely violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 for diminishing the rights of Black voters, leading the Louisiana Legislature to redraw the map in 2024 to include a second majority-Black district in a state where one-third of the population is Black. This map was subsequently challenged as a racial gerrymander by non-Black voters and overturned by a divided panel of three federal judges and is now before the U.S. Supreme Court for a decision with potential lasting effects on federal voting right protections.
The following is a statement from the Voting Rights Working Group, a coalition of civil rights attorneys:
“We will mark 60 years of the Voting Rights Act this summer, a landmark piece of legislation that righted the wrongs that kept millions of Black Americans and other people of color from exercising their fundamental right to vote. Now, the Supreme Court will decide if it will weaken these protections, or if the Court will preserve the current state of the law which allows for the use of race to ensure compliance with the VRA. We urge the justices of the Supreme Court to uphold their own precedent and reject this dangerous attempt to undermine the voting rights for people of color in our country.”
Note: The Voting Rights Working Group is a consortium of 11 of the nation’s most prominent and experienced non-profit organizations pursuing voting rights litigation on behalf of racial minorities. Member organizations are non-partisan legal advocacy groups with decades of experience in using the law to promote and protect the voting rights of people of color, and include:
- American Civil Liberties Union
- Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund
- Asian Americans Advancing Justice – AAJC
- Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law
- Dēmos
- LatinoJustice PRLDEF
- Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law
- Legal Defense Fund
- MALDEF (Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund)
- Native American Rights Fund
- Southern Coalition for Social Justice