Black Organizers Are Preparing for a New Era of Voting Rights Battles

The mobilization effort was swift once it became clear that Black Georgians stood to lose political representation.

LaTosha Brown and other voting rights advocates sprang into action after Georgia Republican Gov. Brian Kemp on May 13 called a special session to redraw the state’s congressional and legislative maps in ways that could erode Black voters’ ability to shape election outcomes.

“Ultimately, pain births new possibilities,” said Brown, the co-founder of Black Voters Matter. “What we’re experiencing right now are possibilities, and we have to shift from seeing ourselves just as citizens of this nation and start seeing ourselves as mothers of the new nation — we’re the architects.”

By the time lawmakers prepared to convene on June 17, tensions had reached a fever pitch. Hundreds gathered at the Georgia State Capitol carrying signs reading “Protect Black Voters” and “Reject Racist Redistricting,” among other things. Then, a few hours before the session was set to begin, Republican leaders scrapped their redistricting plans. They cited administrative challenges, while advocates hailed the outcome as proof that public scrutiny could shift the political landscape.

It was a rare win for Black Americans following the U.S. Supreme Court’s April 29 decision that weakened the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and opened the door for Republican lawmakers across the South to erase heavily Black districts. Into this rapidly changing environment have stepped advocates determined to keep the country from further chipping away at voting rights.

Based in Atlanta and born in Selma, Alabama, Brown is a daughter of the South and carries with her the history of the region’s long and ongoing fight over the ballot.

While no single strategy will be a silver bullet, there’s been renewed focus on several fronts: state Voting Rights Acts to preserve protections on a more local level, youth-led movements to ramp up public pressure, and grassroots organizing to help voters navigate an increasingly fraught election system.

These efforts are meant to address the uncertainty plaguing many Black Americans not because they lack resolve, but because the scale of recent setbacks has left them concerned about what happens next.

Like Brown and others, Democratic Maryland Gov. Wes Moore sees the fight as only just beginning. He has watched Maryland become part of the broader redistricting struggle — a crisis that he has described as “the greatest form of political redlining we’ve seen in generations” — though Democratic lawmakers’ attempts to redraw the state’s congressional map and counter Republican gains elsewhere have stalled.

“I look at what’s happening right now as the early innings of a much larger battle that we’re now engaging,” he told Capital B.

Passing state Voting Rights Acts

Royce Duplessis could sense where things were headed.

In March, as the Supreme Court prepared to decide a case that advocates feared would further weaken the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Louisiana state senator and dozens of his colleagues introduced legislation to create a state Voting Rights Act, one that would maintain legal protections if the federal ones were walked back.

“We don’t know how the Supreme Court is going to rule, but that doesn’t take away our rights and responsibilities as a state to say where we stand,” Duplessis said. 

His bill died in committee. And weeks later, the Supreme Court handed down a decision that dramatically undercut the federal Voting Rights Act — the very possibility Duplessis had been anticipating.

Despite this setback, his effort illustrates one of the strategies gaining traction in the wake of the court’s decision: crafting state Voting Rights Acts. The logic of this legislation is straightforward. Since state laws aren’t tied to the fate of federal laws, states can develop their own safeguards if federal courts erode national protections, providing voters with additional ways to challenge racially discriminatory maps and election systems.

Ten states have already enacted their own Voting Rights Acts, according to tracking by many election law groups: New Jersey (2026), Maryland (2026), Colorado (2025), Minnesota (2024), Connecticut (2023), New York (2022), Virginia (2021), Oregon (2019), Washington (2018), and California (2002).

That number could rise in the near future. In June, the Delaware Senate passed the Delaware Voting Rights Act, after the state House did the same earlier that month. The bill now heads to Democratic Gov. Matt Meyer for his signature. Black Delawareans make up about a quarter of the state population, according to Census Bureau data.

“What we’re experiencing right now are possibilities, and we have to shift from seeing ourselves just as citizens of this nation and start seeing ourselves as mothers of the new nation — we’re the architects.”

LaTosha Brown, Black Voters Matter co-founder

Minnesota offers another glimpse of how quickly some states have responded to the weakening of federal voting rights protections. Lawmakers there approved a state Voting Rights Act after the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals severely limited who can sue under the federal Voting Rights Act.

Minnesota state Sen. Bobby Joe Champion, who helped to draft the legislation and has roots in former Jim Crow territories, said that Minnesota was responding to a need that the federal government had refused to satisfy.

“Usually,” he told Capital B in the days after the Minnesota Voting Rights Act was enacted, “you get rid of protections when there’s been improvement, when you can conclude that a particular need no longer exists. But that’s not the case. It’s not even close.”

Geography is the greatest obstacle to circulating this approach. The states where Black voting power faces the steepest hurdles are in the South — the very region where Republican lawmakers have shown little appetite for strengthening voting rights protections.

Still, advocates argue that state Voting Rights Acts represent one of the most promising paths forward in a post-April 29 world.

“At the LDF, we’re pushing for state Voting Rights Acts across the country,” Janai Nelson, the president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, said hours after the Supreme Court’s decision. “We’ll use that tool where possible and be as aggressive as we can in trying to get them passed in even the most unlikely states — like Louisiana, Mississippi, and other states known for their rampant racial discrimination.”

Bolstering youth-led activism

In 1965, players in the American Football League boycotted the league’s All-Star Game after many of the Black players confronted racism in New Orleans. Ultimately, the league’s officials relocated the game to Houston, an outcome that illustrated the political power athletes possess when they join together.

That episode came to mind for Omar Wasow, a political scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, in the weeks after the NAACP called on Black athletes to reconsider playing at schools in the South, giving fresh attention to the potential of youth to influence politics.

“Athletes have leverage most activists can only dream of — attention, moral standing, and, in the South especially, a grip on a multibillion-dollar engine that schools and states can’t easily replace,” Wasow, whose research has focused on civil rights protests, told Capital B.

The NAACP has framed its campaign, “Out of Bounds,” in similar terms.

“Across the South, Black athletes have helped build some of the most profitable college athletic programs in America, generating hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenue,” the NAACP said when announcing its boycott, adding, “Universities can’t actively recruit Black athletes without also advocating for their civil rights.”

NAACP President and CEO Derrick Johnson has described some universities in the South as attempting “to reinstitute a sharecropping reality.”

The strategy also mirrors a longer tradition of youth-led advocacy, Wasow said. During the 1963 Children’s Crusade in Birmingham, Alabama, more than 1,000 students skipped school to gather at 16th Street Baptist Church and challenge racial segregation. The images of officers setting police dogs on the children and turning fire hoses on them enraged observers, helping to galvanize federal support for the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

That advocacy is being revived in another way, too. This summer, the Southern Black Girls and Women’s Consortium launched its Joy and Justice Tour, an initiative focusing on Black girls and women and combining celebration with civic engagement across the South.

Wasow said that earlier youth-centered movements succeeded at least in part because they blended moral urgency with a clear, concrete objective, and athletes today have that same power to dramatize an injustice.

Whether the NAACP’s campaign will yield fruit — or prove replicable throughout the South — remains to be seen. Wasow cautioned that today’s advocates face a more complicated target than their predecessors.

“Birmingham and New Orleans had visible, immediate grievances and a feasible ask, while gerrymandering is structural and slow,” Wasow said. “The movement’s task is to connect the leverage — who plays where — to a demand concrete enough that withholding it can actually move a legislature or a court.”

Additionally, advocates ought to be prepared for resistance.

“They should expect counter-mobilization — the ‘keep politics out of sports’ backlash — so the tactics likely to be most persuasive are disciplined, nonviolent, and morally legible,” Wasow said.

For Calvin Joyner, an educator in Charleston, South Carolina, that challenge is precisely why this moment matters for young people, especially athletes.

“Right now is the perfect time for them to step up and really get involved in their communities,” he told Capital B. “A lot of what happens within our districts — within our towns, cities, and states — it ultimately affects them and their futures.”

Protecting every ballot

In the spring of 2024, more than 6,000 voters in Alabama’s brand-new, heavily Black congressional district received postcards incorrectly telling them that they resided in a different district. This happened right as they were about to vote in one of the most consequential contests in years.

Election officials explained the error as a software glitch and said that voters ultimately were allowed to cast the correct ballots. But to advocates, who drew attention to the issue and made sure that it was remedied, the episode was yet another reminder of how easily confusion and misinformation can serve as barriers to the franchise.

One of the most immediate responses to the Supreme Court’s April decision might also be the oldest one: help people to vote anyway. Unlike trying to pass legislation, this strategy doesn’t depend on sympathetic lawmakers and as a result can be replicated anywhere.

For Shayla Mitchell, who coordinates election-protection efforts in Alabama, this work means spending numerous hours helping voters to understand everything from where they can vote to what identification they need to cast a ballot to what they should do if something goes sideways at the polls. In May, she contributed to an in-person convening in downtown Montgomery, where attendees learned about supporting safe, fair, and peaceful elections in their communities.

“Local means vocal,” she told Capital B, underscoring the necessity of vigilant grassroots organizing and poll monitoring. “This is how we hold the line here.”

She noted that election issues aren’t always dramatic — such as a mob storming the U.S. Capitol. Sometimes, the issue is a ballot being misprinted, a polling site unexpectedly being moved, or a location not being accessible to voters with disabilities. But these seemingly small issues can have a major impact, she explained, especially if they discourage people from exercising their fundamental right to vote.

“These things deter voters from participating, and they’re things that can happen so quietly that people don’t understand the impact on the community,” Mitchell said.

“Local means vocal. This is how we hold the line here.” 

Shayla Mitchell, election-protection coordinator

Local poll monitoring might only grow in importance in the months ahead. The Trump administration announced earlier this year that it’s considering rolling back a federal election observer program. The program, created under the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and launched the following year, sent some 1,000 federal observers to states with histories of racial discrimination in 2012. 

The administration didn’t respond to Capital B’s request for comment.

Victoria Wagner, counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, acknowledged the extreme limitations of relying on local organizations to fill the void.

“At the end of the day, there are never going to be enough resources within the nonpartisan, 501(c)(3), nonprofit space to truly match the need when it comes to protecting our elections,” she told Capital B.

Even so, she added, the stakes of elections are too great to make no effort to fill gaps.

“The clock expires on elections,” Wagner said, explaining that once Election Day is over, opportunities to correct problems become far more limited. “There are no re-dos.”

Read More:

• The Plaintiffs Behind Alabama’s Voting Rights Case Are Ready to Fight Again
• Jim Clyburn’s District Is at the Center of a New Fight Over Black Voting Power

This story was completed with support from the Solutions Journalism Network.

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