I am writing to you in grief.
The Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais has all but eviscerated the protections afforded by Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Post-Callais, state lawmakers are racing to eliminate all Black congressional representation across 10 Southern cities. Advocates have been clear: erasing Black and Brown political representation at this scale would return us to the pre-1965 Jim Crow era, with devastating consequences for healthcare, education, housing, economic opportunity, climate, and more.
At the core of this decision, as with so many before it, is anti-Blackness as architecture. It is a coordinated, deliberate blueprint that has always asked the same people and geographies to stand up repeatedly, while the nation refuses to listen.
Across the South, attacks on Black political representation are accelerating in coordinated and deeply consequential ways. This is a rollback of freedom that is core to our Constitution and to which this nation claims to be. This has always been part of the nation’s story. We have stood in this place before. And we know what it has required of ordinary people to move us forward.
“I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired.”
— Fannie Lou Hamer, 1964 Democratic National Convention
Fannie Lou Hamer stood before the nation sixty years ago and refused to let it look away. On that Atlantic City stage, she named the violence. She named the suppression. She and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party challenged an all-white delegation and demanded that equal representation be treated as the moral emergency it was. She laid the groundwork for the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
We are called to remember that lineage now, as history and instruction. And first, we must grieve.
Malkia Devich-Cyril reminds us in Convergence Magazine’s Anti Authoritarian Podcast, “Grief can be a landscape for liberation; it is a terrain for transformation.”
Grief is not weakness. Grief is not a pause in the work. Grief is a loving refusal to disappear. It is a presence amid pain that allows us to continue. Grief carries the radical imagination of our ancestors, insisting that even in sorrow, another world remains possible.
We will not bypass grief in favor of a press release or a pivot to strategy. The communities we are part of have endured generations of disinvestment. We continue to absorb escalating attacks on our political power, our bodies, and our futures. We deserve the dignity of being fully in this grief. And, I hold it with you.
Moreover, when we are ready, and we will be ready, we call in those who have been watching from the banks.
In Ordinary Notes, Christina Sharpe, Black feminist queer writer and scholar, draws on a formulation offered by Katrina Browne in her documentary Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North, in which Browne, a white woman, reckons with her own family’s complicity and silence in the slave trade (Sharpe, 2023; Browne, 2008). The movement Sharpe takes up is this: from guilt to grief. Guilt keeps us fixed. Guilt is self-referential; it circles back to the one who holds it and goes no further. Grief, by contrast, opens outward. It demands relation. It pulls us into entanglement with one another, into the labor of genuine accountability.
Engagement and the labor of genuine accountability are what this moment requires of those who have been watching from a distance. Not the performance of guilt but the harder, reorienting work of grief, grief as a position of relation.
To those who do not yet see the connections and who do not yet recognize their own implicit roles in the systems of anti-Blackness that made this decision possible: this decision is not separate from you. It is a stepping stone toward restrictions on your own freedoms. Interrogate your silence. Reorient your guilt toward grief. Then move. Not toward us, but entangled with us in the labor of genuine accountability for racial equity and democracy.
Black and Brown communities have always been the litmus test for democracy. We are the labor of it. We are the holders of it. As Indigenous traditions teach us to honor seven generations behind us and hold responsibility for seven generations ahead, we call on our ancestors in this moment. We call forward to my granddaughter’s great-great-grandchildren and to the future we are required to protect.
Some will say this decision was not a surprise. It is part of a strategy that has always been with us, sometimes hidden, sometimes bold, always insidious, built to erase, to exhaust. However, our mandate has not changed.
Democracy and racial equity are not separate causes. They are one.
The path forward is narrow, but clear. We must:
- Commit to sustained, flexible, trust-based investment from philanthropy — not after the next ruling. Not once the dust settles. Now.
- Turn toward radical imagination — we have always been the architects and conductors of freedom beyond our current conditions.
- Demand that the Court uphold Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act — the hard-won protection that has stood as the floor of Black and Brown political power for sixty years.
- Demand that states refuse to consider or adopt racially discriminatory maps — if the Supreme Court guts Section 2, the fight moves to statehouses, and we must be there.
- Generate a massive turnout for the 2026 midterm elections — the ballot box remains, and we will use it.
- Use whatever chamber of Congress is won in 2026 to pass pro-democracy legislation, investigate unfair maps, and hold a far-right Court accountable.
What we cannot do, what we will not do, is leave this to someone else.
Flozell Daniels, Jr.
Chief Executive Officer
Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation
Photo Credit: Corey Minor Smith of Canton, Ohio holds a “Black Voters Matter” sign while marching over the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama on May 16, 2026. Faith leaders gathered in Selma Saturday for a prayer event as part of the “All Roads Lead To The South” protests, aimed at mobilizing voters amid Republican efforts to eliminate majority-minority districts. (Ralph Chapoco/Alabama Reflector)
