More than 5,000 demonstrators gathered in and around Selma and Montgomery this weekend for one of the largest voting rights protests in the South in recent years.
The mass movement was a direct response to the recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling that gutted core protections of the Voting Rights Act. The demonstrations were organized under the banner “All Roads Lead to the South,” a coordinated campaign by civil rights organizations, faith leaders and voting rights groups. The protest ruling by SCOTUS instantly diluted Black political representation through redistricting. The protests began in Selma at the Historic Tabernacle Baptist Church before marchers silently crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge. The bridge is the same site where civil rights activists were brutally attacked on Bloody Sunday in 1965. That horrific, widely publicized violence helped lead to passage of the Voting Rights Act later that year.
Supreme Court’s recent decision in the Louisiana v. Callais case effectively gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Section 2 had long been used to challenge electoral maps that weakened the voting strength of Black communities. The Court’s conservative majority ruled that plaintiffs must now prove intentional discrimination instead of simply demonstrating that maps reduce minority/Black representation.