When They Target Black Votes, They Attack Freedom for All Americans

Black voters are democracy’s most reliable engine for progress, so an attack on our power is the first move in a broader assault on everyone the powerful decide is expendable.

This weekend, thousands of people marched in Selma and Montgomery, recognizing that this moment is not a narrow dispute over maps, but a direct hit on Black political power and democracy itself.

The morning after the Supreme Court’s Callais decision, Black voters were not the only people who woke up more vulnerable. LGBTQ+ families did. Women did. Workers did. Disabled people did. Immigrants did. Every person whose rights depend on equal protection, enforceable civil‑rights law, fair representation, or an independent judiciary did. Rights in America do not stand alone. They stand together or they fall together.

Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA) speaks Saturday at the All Roads Lead to the South rally in Alabama. (Photo courtesy of Melissa Bender)

The Supreme Court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act is more than an attack on Black America. It is the check‑engine light for American democracy, because every time this country weakens the protections built by Black struggle to dismantle Jim Crow, it loosens the democratic foundations everybody else is standing on.

Every expansion of American freedom has run through the advancement of Black rights. Every attack on the rights of Black people eventually spreads outward to women, workers, immigrants, LGBTQ+ people, disabled Americans, and anyone else the powerful decide is expendable.

Most Americans do not know this yet. The people dismantling voting rights do.

For decades, conservative legal and political movements have worked to weaken the protections built during the civil rights era. They understand that Black political power has been one of the main engines driving multiracial democracy in America. Weaken that power, and you weaken the coalition behind voting rights, labor protections, reproductive freedom, civil rights enforcement, and democratic accountability itself.

Last month, when the court made it dramatically harder to fight back against racially drawn maps, it weakened one of the core enforcement tools that helped dismantle Jim Crow.

Black voters have reliably been the decisive margin in elections that expanded or defended American freedom. Remove that margin, and you weaken the force that has driven nearly every major expansion of rights and freedoms in this country.

Kevin Roberts, the architect of Project 2025, built his academic career studying the lives of enslaved Black people, including communities in Louisiana. It is hard to ignore the cruelty of using that understanding to help reverse-engineer the very progress Black struggle helped build while serving as the chief architect of a political project that has worked to weaken those very protections.

Attacks on Black rights are never isolated, which is why they came for the Voting Rights Act first. The legal architecture the court just weakened is the same architecture that protects Latino voters in Texas, Native voters in Montana and Arizona, Asian American voters in California, and newly naturalized Americans in Atlanta, Houston, and Phoenix. I have been doing this work for more than 40 years and I have never once seen the damage stay with the community it was aimed at first.

When this country denies Black people equal protection, the tools used to do it get sharpened, normalized, and turned outward on everybody else. When this country expands our rights, the protections we win get written into law for the rest of the country too.

The Reconstruction Amendments were a fight over Black freedom. They ended slavery, established birthright citizenship, and put equal protection into the Constitution. Every modern civil rights case you can name stands on that foundation. Gender discrimination. LGBTQ+ protections. The Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act, won by Black people and courageous allies organizing against Jim Crow, became the legal basis for protections against discrimination on the basis of sex, religion, and national origin, and the broader civil-rights framework they established helped shape later disability and LGBTQ+ protections. The 1965 Immigration Act, passed in the same political moment, abolished overwhelmingly white-only racial quotas.

The pattern runs the other way, too. Tools developed to control Black people—mass disenfranchisement, criminalization, debt peonage, racial terror—normalized a broader authoritarian order that disciplined poor white people and immigrants. The policing and surveillance regimes that fell hardest on us helped build the carceral state that now jails more people of every race than any other democracy in the world. Redlining and predatory extraction helped create a housing economy that still traps working families of every race in debt, instability, and shrinking opportunity.

Anti-Black policy is the lab. Whatever works on us gets exported.

By the time the rest of the country notices the machinery, it has already been built.

You do not have to formally repeal every right if you can dismantle the systems people rely on to defend them. Capture the courts. Weaken enforcement. Silence targeted voters. Manipulate districts. Intimidate institutions. Flood the public sphere with confusion, exhaustion, and fear. Rights that still technically exist become harder and harder to exercise in real life. Once that machinery exists, it never stays aimed at one community for long.

You can already see the next phase forming. Lawmakers are testing how far they can go in tying fundamental rights and civic participation to documentation, debt, and bureaucratic vulnerability. They are not revoking passports over child support debt because they suddenly care about children more than they care about power. They are testing whether Americans will accept the idea that rights can become conditional for people with fewer resources and less political protection. Once the public gets used to that logic, there is little stopping the same machinery from expanding to student loan debt, medical debt, court fees, and anyone whose paperwork is deemed “not in order”.

The corporations are not coming to save anybody. Some CEOs have adopted the plunder mindset of this administration’s inner circle of billionaires. Others are content to look the other way. Too many CEOs now fear this administration more than they fear public accountability while seeing their own economic fortunes tied to staying personally in Trump’s good graces. They wrapped the retreat in the language of neutrality, as if refusing to confront injustice places you above politics instead of directly inside them.

In practice, that “neutrality” has meant quietly walking away from the racial justice, voting‑rights, civil‑rights and fair workplace commitments they once promised to uphold.

I am saying this as the president of an organization that has spent 20 years winning corporate accountability fights: voluntary corporate compliance with those commitments will never produce durable change for our community or our country. The only effective answer to that kind of capitulation is collective pressure strong enough to make capitulating to authoritarianism economically painful.

The people dismantling democratic protections depend on exhaustion and confusion. They want us overwhelmed enough to stop connecting the dots. Our job is to connect them anyway.

Politicians still need votes, and that remains the leverage point that has not closed. Durable change runs through policy and jurisprudence written into law, enforced, and made hard to roll back. It also runs through our economic clout and our refusal to keep propping up systems that endanger us, from where we spend our money to where we lend our labor and credibility. It requires a public loud enough that the people who can change the rules have to listen, and voters who can put them in office or take them out.

That is the work Color Of Change has been doing for 20 years. We organize at massive scale, refuse to be compromised by corporate money, and translate digital reach into real-world mobilization. In 2024, our PAC reached 8 million voters. In 2026, we are mobilizing across eight states in the races that could decide whether the rules of American democracy hold or break.

If you are not Black, the question is whether you understand yet that attacks on Black freedom have always been the core test of what this country is. They are the frontline indicators of whether democracy itself is surviving. The only real question now is whether you will treat this as our problem, or as the warning flare it is for your own future.

They knew they would have to come through us to get to you.

They just did.

Nadine Smith is president and CEO of Color Of Change, the largest online racial justice organization in the United States.

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