My Grandmother Knows This Story
The Supreme Court’s VRA decision is the latest chapter in a familiar story
I spoke to my grandmother some days ago. The Supreme Court had dealt a blow to voting rights with its decision in Louisiana v. Callais. She is 92 years old, a Black woman born and bred from the South Carolina dirt. I asked her about her morning, and she replied: “I’m just here alone, I misplaced the TV remote.” She hadn’t cooked yet. It’s been four years since Grandaddy died, the image of his face resting serenely on a white box on the mantle near the table where we all play cards.
She does not move much anymore. The years have been both good and hard. Loss, failure, meals, church services, sitting on the front porch, awaiting the arrival of family, departures, and loneliness. What lingers most is memory: of her lover, of her meals, of her courage, of the South. “I was born in the South, I live in the South, I’m going to die in the South.”
That ol’ wretched and magnificent place where both the ghost of Jim Crow and the magic of the Black Belt dwell. The place that saw the country’s first majority-Black state legislature form during Reconstruction, only to see it dismantled after President Rutherford B. Hayes pulled troops back from former Confederate states. The place that had been the home of both “Redeemers” — white Southerners hell-bent on forcing Black people back into slavery — and resisters like my grandmother, who refused.
Kwame Ture, who changed his name from Stokely Carmichael in homage to his black revolutionary heritage, once said, “If a white man wants to lynch me, that’s his problem. If he’s got the power to lynch me, that’s my problem. Racism is not a question of attitude; it is a question of power.”
As soon as the Court’s decision was handed down, white Southerners started flexing their power.
Last week, Republican lawmakers in Tennessee passed a new congressional map that carved up the city of Memphis, erasing the state’s only majority-Black House district. It was one of the first major redistricting moves since the Court’s ruling, and other Southern states — South Carolina included — are rushing to follow suit. This is not just about a court ruling; this is racism and white supremacy in practice. It follows a long, bitter, and familiar history of white violence — both literal and metaphorical.
Between 1892 and 1939, Shelby County, Tennessee — one of the areas included in the Republicans’ power grab — had the highest number of documented lynchings in the state: three people were killed after defending their grocery store from a white mob; Ell Persons was burned with thousands watching after being accused of a crime; Jesse Bond was killed and dumped in the Loosahatchie River after a dispute over a receipt. In every instance, no one in the lynch mob was convicted of any crime. No one was held accountable.
A country is more than a place. It is its own kind of story, told again and again, beat into form by the determination and grit of weary hands. Black people have always been the heartbeat of American democracy. And America has always found a way to betray us, even as we hold out the promise of the nation’s liberation and healing. “Black people still ain’t all the way free,” my grandmother said when I asked her if she saw the news of the ruling.
When someone shows you who they are, as one of our poets said, believe them.
As I think of our conversation, and the days since, I don’t think we actually understand just how devastating and depressing — and enraging — the ruling is. The conservative majority on the Supreme Court has reinterpreted a key provision of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which is meant to ban voting practices that discriminate on the basis of race and color. The decision removes the already weakened protections for at least 15 House districts across the country with significant Black populations, which exist precisely so Black folks can claw back some of the political power we lost after Reconstruction.
This may mean very little to some, but to those of us who have had to be strong enough to fight against this country and wise enough to survive it — this means everything. The political shift of the last few years was never just about “book bans” or “wokeness” or “patriotism.”
When they spoke of these things, they were always talking about Black equality, Black dignity, and Black liberation. That is what they hate. They are anti-Black. What’s happening now — what has been happening — has always been about white supremacy and power. It was always about the erasure of Black people and the gains we have made, that our ancestors fought so hard to protect and expand. The Constitution and flag and land we have lived and died for.
My grandmother likens Black Americans to Jesus — how he wrestled until his tears had become like blood. All of American history is marked by Black wrestling with the sheer audacity of white and conservative America’s desire to erase and demean us. The redistricting ruling is more than an opinion: it’s an invitation to roll back progress — one that Southern states are already eagerly accepting. It is once again a declaration that this country is really good at forgetting and undoing.
The deep anger and sadness that I feel has been felt before. It is old and ancestral. It is as old as my grandmother’s breath, as old as many of your grandmothers’ and grandfathers’ and aunties’ and uncles’ and cousins’ and friends’ breath, as old as their determination to build some kind of life in spite of the death and dying all around us, as old as their fighting and enduring and handing us the keys.
So turns my heart to the lyrics of a gospel song Aretha Franklin famously sang in 1972: “Lord, my soul just looks back and wonder … how I got over.” Like 2026, 1972 was a year of both triumph and tribulation for Black people — in the same year as Shirley Chisholm’s historic run for president, the barbaric Tuskegee experiment on Black men was exposed.
In such a moment, the power of Franklin’s voice and her song weren’t just about the content or composition alone; it was about the way she tended to the sacred garden of our grief, our frailty, our dreaming, our depravity, our goodness, our tiredness, our numbness. She wondered. And not all wondering is bad. There is the kind of wondering where we feel the very real, present, and human doubt, and then there is the kind of wonder that is astonishment at the mystery of things, their beauty and grandeur.
Right now, we need both.
I, too, wonder. I wonder how we escaped the bitter and brutal chains of chattel slavery. How we were left with nothing in its aftermath, only to have what little we built taken from us during Reconstruction. How we have survived each great American betrayal. How we marched when our children, women, and men were killed. How we went to school when they locked us out.
How we have fought in the wars and returned home with nothing to show for it. How we have ascended to the highest places in the land, while at the same time being forgotten in the darkest corners of the country. How we have kept our hearts open and fought for more than just our freedom alone. How we have created and danced and lived and loved in spite of everything this country has done to us.
Black people should not have to be perfect to be seen, be accounted for, be protected, be represented, be loved, be alive. We deserve all these things and more. We deserve it because we’re American, because we’re human, because we’re still here. Is that too much to ask?
My wife and I recently took a trip to Charleston, South Carolina, 96.6 miles from my grandmother’s home. The skies were gloomy, heavy with rain and wind, until the sun began to break just as we were leaving. While there, I made a trip to the International African-American Museum. Walking in was a kind of homecoming, a brief and powerful reminder of the blood and love that are soaked in our South Carolina soil.
For all the ways Black South Carolina is erased in America at large, a placard inside the museum reads in small white letters that we had “spearheaded groundbreaking changes through the region, state, nation.” There’s the story of Robert Smalls, the Congressman who famously hijacked a Confederate ship, securing the freedom of his family. There’s the Penn School, erected before the end of the Civil War, which resisted the prohibitions against Black literacy. From there, we can draw a straight line from the 1860s to the 1960s, when the children of Black South Carolina fought the racist Jim Crow segregation of schools.
Decade by decade, epoch by epoch in American history, I was drawn into the story of my ancestors in the state who braved the streets to vote, who stitched quilts for the next generation, who stood resolute in the face of mob violence, who went to the most forbidden and forgotten cracks of the state to report on the story of what Black South Carolina endured, exposed, and defied. Many left in the Great Migration. Many remained and took on the beautiful and terrible work of repair. Whether they left or stayed, their stories washed over me like a baptismal pool and I felt some sense of renewal.
Of all the present ways this country has tried to erase the past, the witness of our humanity is carved into history’s stone, etched in every sentence at the museum that tells the truth of who we are in Charleston, in South Carolina, in the South, in America, in the world. Of all the ways this moment threatens to push us beyond the brink of despair, I read the words in bold, black, brilliant letters beneath my feet: STILL HERE.
That phrase reminded me of the words of James Baldwin: “I have always felt that a human being could only be saved by another human being,” he wrote. “I am aware that we do not save each other very often. But I am also aware that we save each other some of the time. And all that God can do, and all that I expect Him to do, is lend one the courage to continue.”
The Supreme Court’s decision is a slap in the face of Black America — really all of America. This country is turning 250 years old this year and has barely moved beyond its racist and bigoted adolescence. But no matter what, the court can’t make a ruling on our existence and humanity. We refuse.
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I remember the celebration of our country’s Bicentennial. I’d just finished 7th grade. There was so much activity, concerts, celebration in the schools, communities, etc. Today I don’t feel there is anything to celebrate as we approach 250 years. Independence Day has become meaningless.
Someone once said that America is a great idea that hasn't happened yet. This ruling is yet another step backwards from that idea, from a more perfect union.