The Second Reconstruction Ended Today
Sixty-one years after Selma, the Court has decided representation is optional
On March 7, 1965, John Lewis crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, and an Alabama state trooper hit him in the head with a billy club hard enough to fracture his skull. Lewis later said he thought he was going to die that day. He didn’t, and he spent the next fifty-five years defending the law his beating produced. On April 29, 2026, six justices of the United States Supreme Court declared, in effect, that what he bled for was constitutionally optional.
What was bought at Selma
Eighteen days before Lewis was beaten on the bridge, an Alabama state trooper named James Bonard Fowler shot a 26-year-old church deacon named Jimmie Lee Jackson in the stomach inside Mack’s Café in Marion, Alabama. Jackson had tried to register to vote four times. He died eight days later. His funeral, eulogized by Martin Luther King Jr., produced the call for a march from Selma to Montgomery.
Two more died in Selma that month. James Reeb, a Unitarian minister from Boston, was beaten to death in the streets after a memorial service for Jackson. Viola Liuzzo, a Detroit mother of five, was shot in the head by Klansmen after she finished shuttling marchers between Selma and Montgomery.
The Brennan Center’s account of those weeks is the standard one. ABC interrupted the network television premiere of Judgment at Nuremberg to broadcast the footage of state troopers attacking the marchers on the bridge.
It is worth pausing on the company those names keep. Jackson’s grandfather Cager Lee, age 82, had been beaten the same night his grandson was shot. Amelia Boynton Robinson, a longtime Dallas County voter registration organizer, was clubbed unconscious on the bridge and photographed lying in the road.
The Voting Rights Act was bought with their blood. Anyone arguing otherwise is selling something.
The bipartisan compact six justices have now overruled
What that violence produced was the Voting Rights Act of 1965, introduced by Lyndon Johnson in a joint session of Congress eight days after Bloody Sunday. He called Selma a turning point on par with Lexington and Concord. Members of Congress interrupted the speech with applause forty times. Johnson borrowed the words “we shall overcome” from the movement and gave them back to it as policy.
The bill passed the Senate 77-19 in May 1965 and the House 333-85 in July. Johnson signed it on August 6. For the next sixty-one years, Congress reauthorized it five times, under presidents of both parties: Nixon in 1970, Ford in 1975, Reagan in 1982, the elder Bush in 1992, and the younger Bush in 2006.
The 2006 reauthorization was named for Fannie Lou Hamer, Rosa Parks, and Coretta Scott King. It passed the Senate 98-0 and the House 390-33. President Bush, signing it on the South Lawn, told the country that Congress had “reaffirmed its belief that all men are created equal.” That sentence is now the legal equivalent of a wedding photograph from a marriage that ended badly.
Alito’s sleight of hand: the Fourteenth Amendment turned upside down
Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the 6-3 majority, opened his opinion with a sentence designed to do most of the doctrinal work the rest of the opinion couldn’t quite manage on its own. “Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965,” he wrote, “was designed to enforce the Constitution, not collide with it.” The whole ruling turns on that move. The Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868 to remedy the racial subordination written into the antebellum Constitution, has now been reread to forbid the very remedies Congress passed under its explicit Section 5 enforcement authority.
Justice Clarence Thomas, joined by Gorsuch, went further in concurrence, arguing as he has since 1994 that Section 2 should not apply to redistricting at all. The substantive effect of the ruling is that plaintiffs must now prove intentional discrimination by sophisticated state legislators who know better than to leave evidence of it. As Sarah Chen of the Texas Civil Rights Project told Houston Public Media, plaintiffs would now need a smoking gun of legislators saying “I hate Black voters,” and even that might not be enough.
Justice Elena Kagan, in dissent for herself, Sotomayor, and Jackson, called the ruling “the latest chapter in the majority’s now-completed demolition” of the Voting Rights Act, rendering Section 2 “all but a dead letter.” “I dissent,” she wrote, “because Congress elected otherwise.”
The counter-argument and what it conceals
The strongest available defense of the ruling is the colorblind one. Government drawing district lines on the basis of race is itself a violation of equal protection, the argument runs, and the Court is enforcing a neutral constitutional rule against the use of racial classifications. That argument conceals a fact the Reconstruction Congress would have found self-evident: the Fourteenth Amendment was passed in 1868 by men who had just fought a civil war over racial subordination, and was passed precisely to enable race-conscious federal remedies for it.
Section 5 of that Amendment empowers Congress to enforce its guarantees “by appropriate legislation.” The framers of that section did not believe they were writing a prohibition on civil rights statutes. They were writing the authority for them.
The names the Court could not bring itself to mention
Read the majority opinion and a curious absence becomes visible. The names of the people who died for the law the opinion has just rewritten do not appear.
There is no Jimmie Lee Jackson. No James Reeb. No Viola Liuzzo.
There is technical discussion of Gingles preconditions and racially polarized voting and the Brnovich totality-of-circumstances framework. There is no acknowledgment that the statute being narrowed was, in 2006, named for three women who gave their lives, in different ways, to the cause of voting rights.
The opinion treats Section 2 as a doctrinal abstraction. It treats the Voting Rights Act as a kind of bureaucratic mistake the Court has finally found the courage to correct. That absence is the giveaway.
The doctrinal argument the majority makes can be made only by treating sixty-one years of constitutional bargaining, civil-rights struggle, and bipartisan congressional consensus as legally inert. It can be made only by treating the 98-0 Senate vote of 2006 as evidence of Congress acting in error rather than acting with purpose. The Court has not refuted the historical record. It has decided the historical record does not bind it.
The cascade is already visible
Within hours of the ruling, the Florida legislature passed a redrawn congressional map adding four GOP-leaning seats. Texas’s gerrymandered map cleared two days earlier. Analysis by Fair Fight Action and Black Voters Matter projects that as many as 19 majority-minority House seats could flip across two cycles.
ABC News reported that a quarter or more of the Congressional Black Caucus is now structurally vulnerable. Sabato’s Crystal Ball estimates that the redistricting fight will spill into 2027 and 2028, and that the 2030 census redistricting cycle, the next decennial reset of every congressional, legislative, county, and school-board map in the country, will be conducted under Callais rules.
Reconstruction did not end in 1877 by amendment. It ended by judicial decisions like the Slaughter-House Cases of 1873 and the Civil Rights Cases of 1883, by the political compromise that withdrew federal troops from the South, and by a national exhaustion that decided the experiment was no longer worth defending.
The Second Reconstruction had a longer run. It produced the Voting Rights Act, the dismantling of legal Jim Crow, and the slow incorporation of Black and Latino political power into national institutions. It ended this Wednesday, on a 6-3 vote, in an opinion that did not bother to mention the names of the people whose deaths produced the law it has just rewritten.
John Lewis died in 2020. He never had to read this opinion. The marchers he led, and the Klansmen who killed two of them, are now the same to the Court: equally relevant to the constitutional question, which is to say not at all.