The Work Was Never Finished

Dear Kind and Curious Human,

On April 4 of this year, I sat on a leadership panel at the John Lewis Institute Good Trouble Summit at Emory’s Goizueta Business School. Six blocks, more or less, from where John Lewis used to walk to his office. A few miles from the King Center. In a city that built a rainbow crosswalk in Midtown and held the motorcade at it on the day Lewis was buried, because his life refused to be compartmentalized and the city he served knew it.

That morning I quoted him from the stage. The line is from Across That Bridge. “You are a light. You are the light. Never let anyone, any person or any force, dampen, dim or diminish your light.” It is a line I have carried for years. It is the spine of how I try to lead. It is also, almost word for word, the theme I built for Pride 2026 before I knew Lewis had written it first.

Twenty-five days later, on April 29, six justices of the United States Supreme Court did something John Lewis spent his life trying to prevent.

I want to tell you what they did, because most of the headlines did not. I want to tell you what has happened in the nine days since. And I want to tell you what I think we owe him, and what I am asking of the leaders, especially the white American leaders, who read what I write.

The case is Louisiana v. Callais. The vote was 6 to 3. The majority opinion was written by Justice Samuel Alito and joined by Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Thomas, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett. The Court ruled that Louisiana’s congressional map, which contained a second majority-Black district, was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander under the Fifteenth Amendment.

The Court did not formally strike down Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. It did something more efficient.

In her dissent, Justice Elena Kagan, joined by Justices Sotomayor and Jackson, wrote that the majority opinion rendered Section 2 “all but a dead letter.” She wrote that the decision was the latest in a long-running effort by the Court that has had its sights set on the Voting Rights Act for over a decade.

If you do not know what Section 2 does, here is what it does. For forty years, Section 2 allowed courts to look at a state’s congressional map and ask whether the lines themselves, regardless of the legislature’s stated intent, produced discriminatory results for Black voters and other voters of color. The protection led to the election of scores of minority-preferred candidates in Congress and at the state and local level, and it is the reason about a quarter of Congress today is represented by a person of color.

After Callais, states can defend a discriminatory map by saying they were not drawing it on race, they were drawing it on partisanship. Going forward, voters will have to clear new evidentiary hurdles, and states can defend against virtually any claim of racially discriminatory map-drawing simply by claiming they instead discriminated based on political party.

In the South, where Black voters and Democratic voters are often the same voters, that distinction is a fiction. The Court knows this. The Court ruled anyway.

Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act was not passed to protect “everyone’s vote.” It was passed in 1965 to address one specific historical injury: the deliberate, century-long, well-documented project of preventing Black Americans from voting.

This is not opinion. It is in the Callais majority opinion itself. The Court’s own ruling acknowledges that states employed a variety of notorious methods, including poll taxes, literacy tests, property qualifications, white primaries, and grandfather clauses, in a blatant effort to suppress Black voting.

The Court acknowledged the history. Then it weakened the protection.

If you are a leader who reads the news in headlines and moves on, here is the headline most outlets did not write. The Voting Rights Act, the law John Lewis was beaten for on a bridge in Selma in 1965, the law he stood on the floor of Congress to defend in 2006, the law he made the work of his life, is not what it was on April 28. It is something less, and it will be something less still by the time you finish reading this.

I want to name the thing that white American leaders, including me, got wrong. The thing was this. We were told the Civil Rights Era ended. It did not end. The architecture held the line for sixty years and then started cracking, and a generation of leaders mistook the holding for the winning. Quiet is not the same as progress. The work was never finished. We just stopped paying attention.

Before I tell you what has happened in the nine days since the ruling, let me name something so we can clear it out of the way. Yes, both parties have drawn unfair congressional maps. Yes, there is a bipartisan gerrymandering arms race in this country right now, and it is ugly on both sides. This essay is not about that. This essay is about the specific, deliberate dismantling of the legal protection that prevented states from drawing Black voters out of representation. That is a different argument, with a different history, with a different moral weight. Hold the distinction.

On the same day the Court ruled, the Florida House passed a redrawn congressional map that targets five incumbent Democrats representing majority-minority districts, three of whom are women. Five seats. Real districts. Real voters who, by Wednesday afternoon on April 29, had less voice than they had on Wednesday morning. The Florida map was on the floor within an hour of the decision coming down. That is not a coincidence. That is a queue.

On Tuesday, May 5, six days after the ruling, the United States Supreme Court took the unusual step of fast-tracking its own judgment in Callais, bypassing the standard 32-day waiting period. The Court did this so Louisiana could redraw its congressional map mid-election. Early voting was already underway. More than 104,000 Louisianans had already voted. Justice Alito wrote that the dissent “would require that the 2026 congressional elections in Louisiana be held under a map that has been held to be unconstitutional.” In other words: the Court that took fourteen months to issue this ruling could not wait one more month before forcing a state to throw out its map in the middle of an active election.

On Thursday, May 7, eight days after the ruling, the Tennessee Legislature passed a new congressional map. The map splits the majority-Black city of Memphis into three districts. The state’s only Democratic-held seat, currently held by Steve Cohen, will be redrawn so the district that includes Memphis stretches a couple hundred miles eastward toward the Nashville suburbs. The state senator Charlane Oliver, a Democrat from Nashville, stood on her desk during the debate holding a sign that read “No Jim Crow 2.0, Stop the TN Steal.” The bill passed on party lines. Governor Bill Lee signed it the same day. The map is expected to give Republicans all nine of Tennessee’s congressional seats.

Alabama, which had been required to include two majority-Black districts under the Court’s 2023 ruling in Allen v. Milligan, filed an emergency motion the day after Callais seeking to scrap those districts. Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri, Mississippi, and South Carolina are all in play. Across at least six states, Republicans could gain as many as fourteen House seats from redrawn maps. Democrats can afford to lose only two.

This is happening in your country, in 2026. Not 1965. Not “back then.” This week. Last week. The week before.

And it is happening, mostly, in places where the cost will be borne by Black voters and other voters of color. Memphis. Birmingham. Baton Rouge. Jackson. The cities and the districts where Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act was, until April 29, the wall that kept legislatures from drawing communities out of representation. The wall came down on a Tuesday morning. The mapmakers were waiting on the other side.

I am 61 years old. I have voted in every election since I turned 18. I have written checks. I have shown up at fundraisers. I have spoken from podiums about leadership and equity. I have built a career on the idea that leaving your corner of the world better than you found it is the actual job.

And.

There were years, many years, when I treated voting rights as a problem that had been solved. I did not call my senator about Shelby County v. Holder when it was decided in 2013. I did not march. I did not write. I assumed the architecture would hold because the architecture had always held, in my lifetime, in the rooms I worked in, in the cities I lived in. I read the headline and I went back to my quarterly earnings call.

I was wrong. I was comfortable. The comfort is the thing I am confessing.

I am writing this because I think a lot of leaders who look like me, leaders who walk into rooms and lead teams and sit on boards and write checks, made the same mistake. We treated the Voting Rights Act like a finished building. It was a scaffolding. It was always a scaffolding. And the people who wanted to take it down never stopped working.

This is not a piece that ends with “speak up.” Speak up is what every essay like this ends with, and it is why none of them work. I am going to give you three asks. They are specific. They are costly. Do them this week.

One. Read the dissent. Not the news coverage. Not the takes. Read Justice Kagan’s dissent in Louisiana v. Callais. Then read John Lewis’s floor speech from the 2006 Voting Rights Act reauthorization. Two documents. Three hours. Do it before next Sunday. You cannot lead on a thing you have not read.

Two. Contact the office of one elected official, in your own state, by name. There is no shortage of specific things to ask about right now. The Tennessee map signed Thursday. The Louisiana fast-track from Tuesday. The Alabama emergency motion. The John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which has been sitting in Congress since 2021. A real letter. A real call. A scheduled meeting. Use your full name. Say what you do for a living. Say why this matters to you. White professional voices, identified, on the record, are voices these offices count differently. Use that. That is not pretty. It is true.

Three. Tell one peer who has gone quiet that you have noticed. Not a customer. Not a stranger on the internet. A peer. Someone in your industry, your boardroom, your alumni network, your golf club, who used to say something and stopped. Tell them you noticed. Tell them you miss the version of them that spoke. Do not lecture them. Do not perform for them. Be a witness who shows up. Most of the silence in American leadership right now is happening between people who could change it for each other in a single conversation and have not had it.

The mural of John Lewis on Auburn Avenue is still there. The bridge in Selma is still there. The work he did was not undone on April 29. It was made harder.

Harder is not the same as impossible. Harder is the assignment.

I sat on a panel six blocks from where Lewis used to work, three weeks before this ruling came down, and I quoted him on light. I meant it then. I mean it more now. The light was never going to hold itself up. It was always going to need the people standing under it to keep their hands raised.

Memphis is watching. Baton Rouge is watching. Birmingham is watching. The question is not whether the work continues. Black voters, Black organizers, Black lawyers, Black communities have never stopped doing the work. The question is whether the rest of us, white American leaders who have spent a lifetime in rooms where the architecture held, finally pay the kind of attention this moment requires.

We do not get to go back. We only get to go forward, paying attention this time.

In Community and Conversation,

Jim