Standing in the heat, as my shirt clung to my chest in sweat, history briefly repeated for a day. While there were no dogs and abusive hoses, the oppression still felt familiar. I, and thousands of other advocates marched forward over the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama — more than 60 years after Bloody Sunday.

We were gathered in protest in response to the Supreme Court doing all it could to send us backwards in access to the ballot box, delivering a fatal blow to the Voting Rights Act in Louisiana v. Callais. 

As we reflect heading into Juneteenth, a day that’s supposed to be about liberation, it is prudent to discuss the threats to our Black community’s existence that persevere. 

In 1965, Selma and Montgomery were catalysts for the passage of the Voting Rights Act. Under the Act, Black people were finally supposed to have equitable access to the ballot and representation. Getting there took sacrifice, it took blood, it took deliberate asks and pounding of pavement. Sixty-one years later, this massive victory was undone in Louisiana v. Callais with the ruling that states can dilute Black political power. 

Standing in the plaza in May, looking up at the building where the Confederacy was born and where Dr. King stood in 1965, the illusion of American progress completely dissolved for me. I realized we are living through a calculated, judicial re-engineering of disenfranchisement.

Following the Callais ruling, conservative state houses across the South rushed to resurrect gerrymandered maps designed to erase Black representation ahead of the upcoming midterms. The courts and state legislatures have made it abundantly clear, we are now fighting a defensive, exhausting action on the ground for rights we supposedly won sixty years ago.

This is the deep, structural connection between the fight for the ballot and the true meaning of Juneteenth. We have sanitized Juneteenth into a neat commercial holiday of definitive arrival — the day slavery ended. But history tells a more cynical story. 

Juneteenth was a story of a two-and-a-half-year delay, and General Order No. 3 didn’t bring true equality. It immediately shoved the newly emancipated into the economic bondage of low-wage labor and sharecropping. Instead of economic freedom, recently freed people were often only able to return to the very fields they worked for free, this time for poverty pay. 

The Voting Rights Act was another grand arrival that was seemingly never meant to be permanent. The United States consistently treats Black progress as a temporary concession. The moment we make gains, the rules of the game are rewritten. Today, we are told we are free to vote, but the most recent maps ensure we are never equal. 

Juneteenth itself was the byproduct of a prolonged denial of fairness, and that delay continued into 2020 when white America began to flirt with the idea of openly even acknowledging it happened in the first place. A similar lack of accountability and complicity is evident in the response to the current gutting of voting rights. The failure to grasp the anti-Blackness evident in the flurry of voting related policies or admit to their true intent was key to the point we have reached now. 

After the Court’s actions this May, there was no lack of outrage, but there was a lack of architecture in place for a coordinated response. One vital piece of information discussed by activists after the rally in Montgomery was to remind us of the actions taken during the Civil Rights Movement after similar gatherings. 

When the state terrorized Black residents in 1955 Montgomery, the response wasn’t just a rally. Jo Ann Robinson and the Women’s Political Council stayed up through the night to mimeograph 35,000 flyers to launch the Montgomery Bus Boycott. They didn’t just express anger; they gave direction. They targeted the financial arteries of the segregationist state and refused to fund their own oppression. 

Following the Selma to Montgomery march in 1965, the path was clear, but dangerous. Immediately following the march, the Ku Klux Klan killed Viola Liuzzo, a white woman from Detroit, for helping drive marchers back home. 

The danger was apparent but the endgame was voting access. To that end, as voting rights were imminent, groups like the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) pushed voting registration drives. On the legislative side, bipartisan groups worked around the clock to fine-tune the VRA and respond to the requests of the community. Voting and registration pushes were seen as a way to move forward. 

We must take note of these lessons to respond today. To achieve a genuine structural shift, we must transition our movement infrastructure from short-term election panic and quests to “save democracy” to long-term power building.

We need to organize, not just mobilize. We can use social media to organize communities for a long-term structural shift, rather than just mobilizing them for a single election day. This means using digital spaces for year-round political education and local strategy hubs.

We need to build permanent movement infrastructure. Instead of funding last-minute, transactional text campaigns, funders can invest in permanent, community-led coalitions that advocate for systemic voting rights and fair redistricting year-round.

We need to prioritize proactive community protection. We can counter restrictive polling environments by establishing local, community-governed voter protection and mutual aid networks that keep neighbors safe, informed, and empowered.

By pivoting from defensive, cycle-to-cycle reactions to sustained, structural organizing, we build a democracy that lasts. 

If this new era of marching from Selma to Montgomery is to achieve anything, we must move past the illusion of arrival. We cannot simply look to a federal judiciary to save us. We have to ask the hard, uncomfortable question that our ancestors answered so clearly: What is our 35,000-flyer message today?  \Until we find that collective direction, we are merely marching in place on blood-soaked ground, defending a franchise that the state is dismantling before our very eyes.