This is a transcribed presentation of Chairman Omali Yeshitela from a pop-up live broadcast hosted by the Black is Back Coalition for Social Justice, Peace and Reparations, themed “The Voting Rights Act – Then and Now.” The broadcast aired on May 15th, 2026 on The Burning Spear TV YouTube channel and featured presentations from Coalition members, Efia Nwangaza, Paul Pumphrey, Lisa Davis, Betty Davis, Belinda Parker-Brown and Yusef Doucet.
In a landmark 6-3 decision on April 29, 2026, Louisiana v. Callais, the Supreme Court significantly narrowed the enforcement of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The ruling made it much harder to challenge gerrymandered districts by requiring plaintiffs to prove intentional racial discrimination, rather than simply showing a discriminatory impact. The ruling allows states to break up majority-minority districts if they can cite political motivations, directly impacting representation in Congress, state legislatures, county commissions and school boards.
The ruling removes the remaining teeth of the Voting Rights Act. The Black is Back broadcast was held to address this.
The right to vote was won outside of the electoral process. We didn’t go and vote to be able to vote. We made struggles, and SNCC (Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee) was central to much of that.
I think about 1964, the summer project in Mississippi, where SNCC played such a fundamental role. I think about Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner and how they were murdered just for trying to vote, just trying to organize people to vote. And part of what I think is really important, especially with the development of SNCC and particularly with the kind of role that Sister Efia played in this process of pushing from within the boundaries of the Civil Rights Movement, where joining inside the system had been such a critical thing—SNCC pushed beyond that.
In fact, it caused a crisis inside the organization itself, where SNCC began to talk about the actual achievement of Black Power, which was an anti-colonial demand. When you say anti-colonial, what you mean is removing the capacity of a foreign and alien power to dominate your lives and make laws that they can give one day and take back the next day.
We have always fought for democratic space
I believe that we are on a different kind of trajectory, or have the potential. I think what the system always does, without necessarily intending to do so, is shut the doors for a sector of the population, those who opposed Black Power, those who felt like the only solution was to integrate into the system. They shut every door that was presumed to be available to integrate into the system to solve the problem.
That puts us in a situation where we have to go outside or have to be willing to go beyond what happens in the system to solve the problem. And one supposed complication that is offered to us by such a ruling as this, as many of the other things that we’ve noticed happening in the recent period, is that they attempt to take away all the democratic space that we have. We fought for that space. People like to say we fought and died for the right to vote. We fought for that democratic space. And the significance of that democratic space is that it gives us room to advance our struggle in a way that doesn’t necessarily call for us to act precipitously before we’ve gained a certain kind of capacity.
The vote gives us access to stuff we’ve never had before in terms of being able to reach all kinds of people because it was institutionalized—not for black people. We didn’t even have the right to vote. In fact, we were still suffering up until, [the Dred Scott decision]. It was the Civil War that overturned the Dred Scott decision that said black people have no rights that white people had to respect.
We must govern ourselves
We find ourselves in this situation of developing what we had come to conclude years ago. First of all, I talk about SNCC, but SNCC benefited from [Marcus] Garvey. SNCC benefited from conclusions that Malcolm X was taking us to, etc.—that we have to have our own capacity for self-government, because as long as somebody else controls you and controls what is legitimate for you and controls the ability to feed, clothe, and house you, you’re in trouble.
I remember this situation where these white people who were hunting—might have been in Alabama—I can’t remember all the details. And one of them, they were saying, “Well, you know, we got nothing to do. Let’s go kill a nigger.” This is how they talked. And they went out and killed some Africans just because they were bored. And this is what they had the ability to do. And they could do it without any meaningful kind of repercussions coming from the system.
We have to grow a capacity to build our own power. This is what I think is really important—not to say that we don’t fight for that democratic space. We need as much of that space. We don’t concede that to anybody. We need that democratic space to actually elevate ourselves to a higher capacity. We need it to win African people.
Voting Rights Act passed following intense struggle
As our movement was moving—’64, we’re talking about the summer project. We’re talking about the kind of stuff that happened with the Pettus Bridge and the brutality imposed. And this was something that went all around the world and was taken advantage of by the Soviet Union and other people who were contending for the same forces internationally that the United States was contending with. This informed the political terrain that we were working with and struggling with.
Those are important considerations. It has something to do with the fact that the United States government attacked us in July of 2022 because they said we were working for the Russians. At the same time, the United States is in this contest with Russia for “autocracy versus democracy” as they call it. But we black people in this country are the glaring example of there not being democracy. What they try to do is neutralize our criticisms by saying that if you criticize the condition of black people, it’s not because it’s true—it’s because some alien power, some Russians, paid you to do this.
Let me just say this finally: You had to be alive and sometimes be there to understand the intensity of the struggle that we were involved in during this period, which went to Chicago and other kinds of places. In 1965 the Voting Rights Act was passed. In 1965 they killed Malcolm X. Malcolm X told us about Black Nationalism, which said something about when you vote you control the politics in your own community, you control the economy in your own community, etc.
They killed Malcolm in 1965. In 1968 they killed [Martin Luther] King, who built this massive movement. Whatever else one thinks, King had this extraordinary capacity to mobilize millions and millions of African people here and around the world. And that was dangerous because we had entered into a period of anti-colonial struggle all around the world, and King had to be heading in that direction as well and almost said it.
In 1969, they killed Fred Hampton. They carried out massive attacks on the Black Panther Party. In fact, the attorney general of the United States, John Mitchell, said by the end of 1969, “We will have destroyed the Black Panther Party.” So what that meant was even though we won the right to vote, they destroyed our organizations—independent organizations. They destroyed our own independent programs, as represented by Malcolm, as represented by King, as represented by the Black Panther Party, as represented by all these other independent forces—and then gave us the Democratic Party.
Build our own power
The majority of African people are not members of the African People’s Socialist Party, the Uhuru Movement, or the Black Is Back Coalition. The majority of them, who are engaged in political life, are members of the Democratic Party. And even that is becoming shakier every day because many people are moving outside of it.
We’re going to have to build on our own, and we’re going to have to take whatever spaces can be taken in our own communities. We’ve got to raise the question that Sister Efia just mentioned about reparations—it has to become a critical thing that we deal with and win masses of African people to. I think most of our work should revolve around building our own power. I think that’s what most of our work should be around–as opposed to simply fighting them because they didn’t do what we wanted them to do.
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