Heather Cox Richardson sums up the struggle for equal rights since the Brown decision of May 17, 1954. The struggle has continued in the years since then, aided especially by the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
The VRA enabled Black Americans to have a voice, representation, and genuine political power. The U.S. Supreme Court decided on April 29, 2026, in Louisiana v. Callais that there is no longer any need for federal protection of voting rights for Black Americans, and they made a decision that is certain to lead to the loss of meaningful representation for Blacks, who–the Court majority decided–no longer needed federal protection. The former Confederacy proceeded to enact redistricting that will wipe out many Black-held seats in Congress. Racism is alive.
Seventy-two years ago tomorrow, on May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court unanimously decided Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. That landmark decision declared racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional because segregated schools denied Black children “the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment.”
Three years after the Brown v. Board decision, in the face of massive resistance to desegregation in the South, President Dwight D. Eisenhower proposed the Civil Rights Act of 1957 to protect the right of Black Americans to vote, using the federal government to overrule the state laws that limited voter registration and kept Black voters from the polls. To prevent the passage of the first federal civil rights legislation since 1875, South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond launched the longest filibuster in U.S. history, speaking for 24 hours and 18 minutes.
(Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) broke Thurmond’s record on March 31 through April 1, 2025, speaking for 25 hours, 5 minutes, and 59 seconds, but his speech was not a filibuster.)
Southern Democrats known as “Dixiecrats” managed to weaken the measure, but Senate majority leader Lyndon B. Johnson (D-TX) managed to wrestle the Civil Rights Act of 1957 through Congress, and Black Americans and their white allies began trying to register Black Americans to vote.
But the law proved too weak to force white registrars to allow Black voters onto the rolls, and by 1961, activists with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, pronounced “snick”) were at work in Mississippi to promote voter registration. In 1964 they launched the “Freedom Summer,” bringing college students from northern schools to work together with Black people from Mississippi to educate and register Black voters.
Just as the project was getting underway, three organizers—James Chaney, from Mississippi, and Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner from New York—disappeared outside Philadelphia, Mississippi. Lyndon Johnson, president by then, used the popular rage over the three missing voting rights workers to pressure Congress into passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, designed to try to hold back the white supremacists and to make it possible for Black Americans to register to vote. The measure passed, and on July 2, Johnson signed it into law.
On August 4, investigators found the bodies of the three missing men. Ku Klux Klan members working with local law enforcement officers had murdered them and then buried the bodies in an earthen dam that was under construction.
And still, white officials refused to accept the idea of Black voting. In Selma, Alabama, where the city’s voting rolls were 99% white even though Black Americans outnumbered white Americans among the 29,500 people who lived there, local Black organizers had launched a voter registration drive in 1963, but a judge stopped voter registration meetings by prohibiting public gatherings of more than two people.
Selma voting rights activist Amelia Boynton invited the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to the city to draw national attention to its struggle, and he and other prominent Black leaders arrived in January 1965. For seven weeks, Black residents made a new push to register to vote. County sheriff James Clark arrested almost 2,000 of them on a variety of charges, including contempt of court and parading without a permit. A federal court ordered Clark not to interfere with orderly registration, so he forced Black applicants to stand in line for hours before taking a “literacy” test. Not a single person passed.
Then, on February 18, white police officers, including local police, sheriff’s deputies, and Alabama state troopers, beat and shot an unarmed man, 26-year-old Jimmie Lee Jackson, who was marching for voting rights at a demonstration in his hometown of Marion, Alabama, about 25 miles northwest of Selma. Jackson died eight days later, on February 26. Black leaders in Selma decided to defuse the community’s anger by planning a long march—54 miles—from Selma to the state capitol at Montgomery to draw attention to the murder and voter suppression.
On March 7, 1965, the marchers set out. As they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge, state troopers and other law enforcement officers met the unarmed marchers with billy clubs, bullwhips, and tear gas. They fractured the skull of young activist John Lewis and beat Amelia Boynton unconscious. A newspaper photograph of the 54-year-old Boynton, seemingly dead in the arms of another marcher, illustrated the depravity of those determined to stop Black voting.
On March 15, President Johnson addressed a nationally televised joint session of Congress to ask for the passage of a national voting rights act. “Their cause must be our cause too,” he said. “[A]ll of us…must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.” Two days later, he submitted to Congress proposed voting rights legislation.
Under the protection of federal troops, the Selma marchers completed their trip to Montgomery on March 25. Their ranks had grown as they walked until they numbered about 25,000 people. That night, Viola Liuzzo, a 39-year-old mother of five who had arrived from Michigan to help after Bloody Sunday, was murdered by four Ku Klux Klan members who tailed her as she ferried demonstrators out of the city.
A bipartisan majority of Congress passed the Voting Rights Act by a vote of 77–19 in the Senate and 333–85 in the House. Dr. King and Mrs. Boynton were guests of honor as President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 on August 6. Recalling “the outrage of Selma,” Johnson said: “This right to vote is the basic right without which all others are meaningless. It gives people, people as individuals, control over their own destinies.”
And yet, on April 29, 2026, the Supreme Court gutted the protections for the Black-majority districts Congress provided for in the Voting Rights Act after years of weakening the law in other ways. In its wake, Republican-dominated southern state legislatures are rushing to redraw their district lines to dilute the votes of Black Democrats.
Today, thousands of Americans, including eighteen members of Congress, traveled to Selma and Mongomery to call Americans to action to protect voting rights. Pastor Kenneth Sharpton Glasgow told Joseph D. Bryant of Alabama news site AL, “This moment is bigger than Democrats or Republicans. This is about democracy itself. This is about whether Black communities, poor communities, rural communities, formerly incarcerated people, and marginalized voices will continue to have representation and political power in America.”
Speakers united around the theme that those trying to gerrymander their way into control of Congress in defiance of voters had reawakened a movement. “They think they can draw us out of power,” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) told an audience in Montgomery.
“They do not know the sleeping giant that they just awakened. Because it is not a coincidence, and our whole country must understand, that it was not until voting rights were ratified in this country that we got the Great Society. Because when Black Americans have the right to vote and that vote is protected, our schools get funded. When voted rights are protected, healthcare gets expanded. When voted rights are protected, our country moves forward. And Montgomery, that’s what they’re actually afraid of. They’re afraid of us coming together. They’re afraid of us protecting one another.”
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Notes:
https://www.eisenhowerlibrary.gov/research/online-documents/civil-rightAs-act-1957
https://www.booker.senate.gov/senator-bookers-marathon-speech
Bluesky:
Diane Ravitch's blog 
My fear is that the sleeping giant continues his nap
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THERE’S NO NEED FOR ANY MORE ELECTIONS…EVER —
On July 26, 2024, Trump told the crowd of Christian nationalists at the Turning Point “Believers’ Summit” in West Palm Beach, Florida, that they “won’t have to vote anymore” if he were elected President again. He said he would “fix things so good” that voting in America would end.
Back on July 13, 2019, Donald Trump told reporters that he has powers “that nobody ever mentions” that give him rights “that nobody had ever seen before.” Reporters shrugged off the comments as just Trump exaggeration — but it wasn’t an exaggeration. It was and is fact. Trump indeed does have powers that no one has ever seen before because his powers are contained in documents so secret that not even Congress or the Supreme Court knows what they contain.
Trump’s secret powers were given to all Presidents back in the early days of The Cold War in 1952. At that time when it seemed that Russian nuclear missiles would rain down on America at any moment, Congress decided that our nation needed a dictatorial leader to keep things together after an attack…so Congress created the “Presidential Emergency Action Documents”.
Here’s how the Brennan Center for Justice describes them: “Presidential Emergency Action Documents (PEADs) are executive orders that are prepared in anticipation of a range of emergency scenarios, so that they are ready to sign and PUT INTO EFFECT THE MOMENT ONE OF THE SCENARIOS COMES TO PASS, and they give ‘extraordinary presidential authority in response to extraordinary situations.’
“PEADs are classified “secret,” and NO PEAD HAS EVER BEEN DECLASSIFIED OR LEAKED. THERE IS NO DISCLOSURE REQUIREMENT FOR PEADs, AND THERE IS NO EVIDENCE THAT THE DOCUMENTS HAVE EVER BEEN SHARED WITH RELEVANT CONGRESSIONAL COMMITTEES.”
So, NO ONE BUT TRUMP knows what the PEAD documents contain and what powers they give Trump in a time of an “emergency” that Trump can easily cook up. Indications are that PEAD documents give Trump the power to:
Detain people whom Trump declares are “dangerous persons” or “alien enemies”. That could be anybody…even you. No evidence, no trial…just Trump’s say so.
Suspend the Writ of Habeas Corpus and detain people without any court hearing. Once the jail door clangs shut behind you, you’ve been “disappeared”.
Declare Martial Law, suspend all civil laws, and put cities or states or the entire nation under armed military control. Trump makes the laws and his army carries them out at gunpoint.
Issue a nationwide “General Warrant” to search private homes and to seize private property.
Establish “Military Areas” under military-only control. Entire Blue states and Blue cities could become military concentration camps.
Establish government control over all forms of communication, including, but not limited to, radio, television, Internet, movies, newspapers, magazines, telephones, and texting.
Trump’s January 6 insurrection WAS ONLY A WARM-UP for what’s coming just after the 2026 mid-term elections if Democrats win even a single House. Here’s the most likely scenario of how it will play out:
FIRST — After the election results are reported showing the Democrats have won even one House, Trump will do exactly what he did on January 6, 2020 — he will declare that the results are invalid because of massive voting fraud, and he will order the Republican Congress not to validate the election results. No Democrats who won seats in Congress will be seated.
SECOND — Furious that their winning candidates are refused seats in Congress, hundreds of thousands of voters in Blue cities and states will take to the streets in massive demonstrations. Trump will have seeded the crowds with his agents who will incite and even commit acts of destruction and violence.
THIRD — Using the secret PEAD powers given to him, Trump will declare the demonstrations are a “national emergency” and will impose Martial Law using armed military forces with orders to shoot to kill. Remember when protesters gathered at his staged Bible-thumping event, Trump asked the Army to shoot the anti-Trump protesters “in the legs”? — It won’t be in the legs this time.
TRUMP WILL BE IN SOLE CONTROL. If King Trump allows Congress to continue to exist after he takes over dictatorial rule, Congress will be only a rubber stamp for what he wants. Trump can just view Congress as unnecessary and dissolve it. The U.S. Supreme Court will also be irrelevant and perhaps told to go home.
This IS going to happen. Nothing can stop it. NOTHING — because Trump DOES INDEED have secret powers that virtually no one has ever seen or heard of: PEAD Power. Remember that: PEAD Power. Because you WILL be hearing about it.
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