NEED TO KNOW

• Supreme Court's April 29 Callais ruling gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, 6-3.
• Alabama, Tennessee, Louisiana, Florida, Missouri, South Carolina all moving on new maps.
• Alabama AG publicly states goal of flipping the state's House delegation to 7-0 Republican.

MONTGOMERY, Ala. (TDR) — Thousands rallied Saturday at the Alabama Capitol, where the Confederacy was founded and where Martin Luther King Jr. ended the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery march, to protest mid-decade redistricting that voting rights groups say will erase Black-majority congressional districts across the South.

The big picture: A Supreme Court ruling three weeks ago rewrote how racial discrimination in redistricting must be proved.

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• The April 29 Louisiana v. Callais ruling, 6-3, held majority-minority districts created under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act violate the Fourteenth Amendment
• Plaintiffs must now prove intentional discrimination, not statistical vote dilution
• SCOTUS on May 11 vacated a lower-court injunction blocking Alabama's 2023 map

Why it matters: Six states are redrawing maps before the midterms, with the U.S. House majority potentially in the balance.

• Alabama will hold a special primary August 11 for four districts alongside its May 19 statewide primary
• Louisiana suspended its May 16 House primary; Tennessee enacted a new map targeting Rep. Steve Cohen's Memphis seat
• Florida passed maps that could net Republicans up to four seats; Missouri's supreme court affirmed a GOP map flipping a Democratic seat

Driving the news: Sen. Cory Booker called Montgomery "sacred soil." Bloody Sunday veteran Kirk Carrington, 75, recounted being chased through Selma streets by a man on horseback in 1965.

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• Alabama AG Steve Marshall stated his goal is to enable a 7-0 GOP delegation from a state where Black voters are 27% of the population
• President Trump has publicly pressed Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee on the Memphis map
• Plaintiff Shalela Dowdy told the crowd: "We are not going down to Jim Crow maps"

What they're saying:

• LaTosha Brown, Black Voters Matter Co-Founder — "We are seeing a full-fledged, coordinated attack on Black political power that can actually reshape the entire political landscape."
• Steve Marshall, Alabama Attorney General — "The Alabama in 2026 is not the Alabama of the early 1960s. It's a new time and a different era."
• Justice Sonia Sotomayor, dissenting — "Vacatur is thus inappropriate and will cause only confusion as Alabamians begin to vote in the elections scheduled for next week."

Yes, but: The Alabama trial court's Fourteenth Amendment finding of intentional discrimination is independent of the VRA standard Callais changed.

• South Carolina's special session stalled this week when Republicans joined Democrats, worried eliminating Rep. Jim Clyburn's district would expose safe GOP seats
• Tennessee's mid-decade map broke a 50-year state precedent against drawing lines outside a census cycle
• Voters had already cast ballots under the prior map when SCOTUS ordered the switch

Between the lines: Both parties gerrymander when they hold the pen. Callais ended a 60-year framework under which courts could order remedies when minority voting power was statistically diluted, without proof of intent. Every other partisan gerrymandering tool remains untouched. Republicans frame the ruling as ending race-based districting; civil rights groups frame it as ending the only practical check on racial dilution where voting still splits along racial lines. The Court did not say discrimination is acceptable. It said the evidence to prove it must now include intent — exactly what plaintiffs spent decades arguing was too high to meet.

What's next:

• Alabama May 19 statewide primary proceeds; congressional special primary August 11
• ACLU's Tennessee challenge seeks injunction before the August primary
• Federal courts on remand will rule whether intentional-discrimination findings survive post-Callais review
• South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster may still call a special session

If statistical evidence of racial vote dilution is no longer enough — and proof of intent is rarely available in public — what evidence should courts accept to enforce the Voting Rights Act at all?

Sources

This report was compiled using reporting from Boston Globe / AP, CBS News, NPR, CNN, and SCOTUSblog.

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