MONTGOMERY, Alabama — On the morning the U.S. Supreme Court all but finished gutting the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Anneshia Hardy met with funders about investing in the Deep South in this majority-Black city, where physical reminders of the country’s brutal history of enslavement are scattered among cafes, bookstores and minor league baseball fields.
A self-described “daughter of the Deep South,” Hardy was born and raised in Montgomery — the first capital of the Confederacy, a major slave-trading outpost and the birthplace of the civil rights movement. She cares deeply about where she grew up and the people living there. She has made it her work to tell the story of the South, which is also the story of Black Americans.
“I think years from now, people will ask: ‘How did we get here?’ Part of our responsibility, in this moment, is making sure history cannot say nobody saw it coming,” Hardy said.
She believes that it is more important than ever to counter a whitewashed narrative about the country that she fears is taking hold, as the rights of Black Americans hang in the balance, including her own.
Hardy left the meetings with potential funders and quickly made her way to her car. She needed to hit the road for a meeting later that day in Louisiana with other voting rights advocates to discuss the court’s expected decision in Louisiana v. Callais, a case with the potential to undo decades of gains in Black political power.
She checked her messages as soon as she settled in.
The court’s conservative majority had ruled that a Louisiana voting map creating a second majority-Black district in the state was illegal, undercutting a key pillar of the Voting Rights Act. She knew this outcome was a possibility. Still, she froze. She felt the weight of the court’s decision hit. Her central nervous system began to tingle.
Hardy sat with the irony: She had just left a new convening space and hotel opened by a prominent civil rights attorney to honor the Black struggle for freedom and voting rights when she learned the court had undone a key piece of legislation inspired by that same struggle.
Then, she heard her mother’s voice in her head: “Baby, the Black struggle is your ancestral truth, and you are not privileged enough to be far removed from the direct impact of social issues in this country.”
She started to cry.
“I wept for 30 minutes — and the reason I wept is because I realized this fight that we are in, this is not a fight that started in my lifetime, and unfortunately, it might not end in mine, and that hurt,” Hardy said.
Hardy, 41, is a narrative strategist. She helps clients tell stories, specifically those that depict the U.S. South, where more than half of Black Americans live. In 2021, she founded the nonprofit Alabama Values to “keep the narrative drumbeat going around critical issues,” including voting rights. Black Americans are about 13 percent of the overall U.S. population, but they account for more than a quarter of Alabamians. In neighboring Mississippi, the Blackest state in the country, the percentage is nearly 40 percent.
The thread unifying a series of Supreme Court opinions that decimated the Voting Rights Act is the idea that racism has improved to such a degree in the United States since the law’s enactment that guardrails to protect the voting rights of non-White Americans are no longer needed. Chief Justice John Roberts dealt the first blow by concluding in Shelby County v. Holder, a case out of Alabama in 2013, that “things have changed dramatically” in the South.
The court’s most recent ruling, in the Louisiana case, landed amid a broader push by President Donald Trump to “restor[e] truth and sanity to America’s history” as the country marks 250 years since its founding. He has targeted the Smithsonian, the country’s largest public cultural institution, for centering a “divisive, race-centered ideology.” He directed the National Park Service to remove exhibits depicting slavery in Philadelphia. His administration has also eliminated the diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, programs across the federal government that led to greater parity in employment for racial minorities, women and LGBTQ+ Americans, and pressured private organizations to do the same.
Hardy rejected the idea that racial discrimination has ended. “Don’t tell me you’re done abusing me while I’m still taking licks,” she said.
(Mike Stewart/AP)
On Friday, Hardy met Laketa Smith and Shayla Mitchell, who also do voting rights work in the South, at the Legacy Museum in Montgomery ahead of the “All Roads Lead to the South” demonstrations happening in Alabama the next day. The museum is one of several historic sites developed by the civil rights attorney Bryan Stevenson and his nonprofit Equal Justice Initiative.
Smith, Mitchell and Hardy paused at an exhibit titled “Redistricting Black Voter Participation.” In it, they read sheets of paper in front of jars of jelly beans — “TO REGISTER TO VOTE IN THIS STATE, YOU MUST CORRECTLY ANSWER THE QUESTIONS IN THIS EXAMINATION.” There were also numbered questions used on actual Jim Crow-era literacy tests — “How many jelly beans are in the jar in front of you?” “What does a Writ of Certiorari, Writ of Error Coram Nobis, and Subpoena Duces Tecum mean?”
Nearby, a placard explained how, after women won the right to vote via the ratification of the 19th Amendment, “the impact of Black voter disenfranchisement intensified as white women could now vote in most places, but Black women were still subjected to racial barriers.”
Hardy told The 19th that she wanted to talk about the Callais ruling at the museum because it allows for an “understanding that all of this stuff is rooted in the legacy of slavery, the legacy of white supremacy and anti-Blackness is still there, it’s just got on new clothes.”
“Don’t gaslight me and tell me anything differently. We are not in a post-racial society,” she added.
Here is the political reality as it relates to Black representation in Alabama:
It wasn’t until 1992, nearly 30 years after the enactment of the Voting Rights Act, that the state elected its first Black congressional representative in modern history. It was nearly 20 more years before Alabama elected its first Black woman to Congress, Rep. Terri Sewell, herself the daughter of the first Black woman to be elected to Selma’s city council.
Though roughly 27 percent of Alabama’s population is Black, last year marked the first time that Black lawmakers held two of the state’s seven U.S. House seats; Rep. Shomari Figures was elected in 2024 after a second majority-Black district was created following a separate Supreme Court ruling. Both his and Sewell’s districts were swiftly redrawn by Alabama Republicans after the Callais decision. Figures is thought to be particularly vulnerable to losing his seat in November if the GOP maps remain in place.
“What we are seeing in the wake of the Supreme Court decision is a coordinated effort to erase our hard-fought progress and to silence the voices of Blacks and minorities,” Sewell said Saturday at the Tabernacle Baptist Church in nearby Selma as hundreds prepared to march to the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
The bridge was the site of what’s become known as Bloody Sunday, when police violently attacked a group of 600 peaceful civil rights activists trying to march from Selma to Montgomery in a 1965 push to enact the Voting Rights Act. One of its leaders, John Lewis, later represented Georgia in Congress from 1987 until his death in 2020. An unfinished piece of his legacy was passing the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.
Candace Howard, a 49-year-old teacher from Birmingham, waited at the base of the bridge holding a sign: “I teach history, I didn’t expect to repeat it! Black educator 4 justice!” Howard said her grandmother and great-grandmother, who were also educators, “always [made] sure that we knew our rights and knew that we had the right to vote, because at one point in their lives, they weren’t able to.”
Several hours later, thousands disembarked from chartered buses and independently organized carpools in front of the state capitol, hailing from various destinations in the South. Many wore matching “We Got Us” t-shirts and carried signs that read “Louisiana says protect the vote” and “Protect the South: No Jim Crow Maps,” distributed by civil rights organizations.
Searcy Crawford, 84, came down from Birmingham with her family to be at the capitol. She was among the thousands of Birmingham “foot soldiers,” the everyday citizens who marched on the city’s streets in the 1960s, denouncing racism and demanding change. She didn’t expect to see the Voting Rights Act undone in her lifetime — “We’ve got to vote,” she said.
Hardy had explained the day before, “Alabama does not have a voter registration issue.”
“At all,” Mitchell chimed in.
“It has a turnout issue,” Hardy continued. “I often say that poverty is one of the biggest voter suppression tools out there; misinformation and disinformation is one of the biggest voter suppression tools out there.”
Hardy did not attend the demonstrations on Saturday; she stayed focused on getting out the vote ahead of the state’s primary elections on Tuesday. Alabamians will cast ballots in all races, though there is an unusual twist: The outcomes for the four U.S. House districts impacted by the GOP’s redistricting after the Callais ruling, including those represented by Sewell and Figures, will not be binding. There will be an August special election to hold primaries for these four seats.
She knows what she’s up against. The racial turnout gap in Alabama hit a 16-year high in 2024, in part because a “surge in restrictive voting laws since the Shelby County v. Holder decision has likely played a role in depressing turnout among Black voters,” according to the nonpartisan civil rights group Brennan Center for Justice. It’s a tough battle ahead, Hardy acknowledged, and one that will require telling the story of how the country got here and how Black Americans can fight back — again.
But, she added, “Our ancestors left us a blueprint.”