When Congress passed the Voting Rights Act in 1965, Bennie Thompson was seventeen years old—short of the voting age—so his parents reaped its benefits before he did. The family lived in Bolton, Mississippi, a town of about five hundred people twenty miles west of Jackson. Thompson’s mother, a schoolteacher, and his father, an auto mechanic, had never been able to register and vote.
The VRA essentially put states with histories of racial discrimination into federal receivership to force them to comply with the Fifteenth Amendment’s guarantee that the right to vote could not be denied because of race. As a first step, the federal government sent workers to the South to register Black citizens like Thompson’s parents. To assure further compliance, Section 5 of the act required those states to get approval from the Justice Department or a court before making any changes to their electoral systems. The federal registrars “created an opportunity to get registered without intimidation,” Thompson told me recently as we wandered through Bolton, where he still lives. “And the result was people like Bennie Thompson.”
Thompson discovered politics in the mid-Sixties as a student at Tougaloo College, a historically Black school and a civil rights hotbed in Jackson. He graduated in 1968 and, thanks to the new voters enfranchised by the VRA, won local office in Bolton the following year. (Prior to 1965, roughly 28,500 Black citizens in Mississippi—6.7 percent of those eligible—were registered to vote; within two years of the act’s passage, that number had soared to 264,000—59.8 percent.) Over the next two decades Thompson won a series of races for county-level positions in Mississippi and then, in 1993, a special election to Congress. He’s been reelected sixteen times. Thompson and Mike Espy, his predecessor in the seat, are the only Black people to be elected to Congress in Mississippi since Reconstruction.
Thompson has been the chair and ranking member of the House Committee on Homeland Security, but he came to broad national attention when then speaker Nancy Pelosi named him the chair of the special congressional committee charged with investigating the riot at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. In a series of televised hearings in 2022, Thompson’s committee laid out how a violent insurrection nearly upended the transfer of presidential power. “I named a lot of our most intelligent and skilled members to that committee,” Pelosi told me.
And you know how Congress is. They all thought they should be the chairman. But after it was over, they all came to me and said that Bennie was so fair and showed so much integrity and skill that they agreed that he was the right one to be the chair.
Thompson has lived his entire political life in the shadow—and, for a long time, under the protection—of the VRA. Throughout that period, Congress and the courts have wrestled with a central question about its meaning, one with fundamental implications for Thompson’s political career. Does the VRA protect Black voters and officeholders only from intentional discrimination by government officials, or does it also guarantee Black candidates a fair chance of victory at the polls? To put the question in voting rights shorthand, is it an “intent” law or a “results” law?
Earlier this year the Supreme Court appeared to settle the question. In Louisiana v. Callais, a 6–3 majority in effect established that the VRA prohibited only intentional discrimination. Republican-dominated states throughout the country, including Mississippi, took the decision as an invitation to gerrymander the seats of Black officeholders so they would have virtually no chance of winning reelection. Just two weeks after Callais was decided, Tate Reeves, the Republican governor of Mississippi, announced his intention to redraw the lines of Thompson’s district. “Congressman Bennie G. Thompson’s reign of terror on MS-2 is over,” Reeves posted on social media. “It is not a matter of ‘IF…’ Just a matter of ‘WHEN!’” The governor’s inflammatory language is revealing, especially because Thompson has had a scandal-free career; the only “terror” about Thompson, it seems, is that he’s Black and in Congress. While Reeves and his Republican allies in the state legislature ultimately decided against a new round of gerrymandering before the 2026 midterms, they are united in their determination to redraw not only Thompson’s district, but also those of Black officeholders in state and local positions across the state.
If the governor does end Thompson’s congressional career, it will mark more than the conclusion of a single politician’s time in office. It will signal the end of a grand experiment: a joint undertaking of the federal government and the courts to rectify enduring injustices in the American electoral system. More than half a century ago, the nearly absolute power wielded by white politicians in the South created the need for the VRA. Now, as a result of Callais and other Supreme Court decisions, the heirs to those politicians are reclaiming that power.
“Just to mention Mississippi, to cross the state line from Alabama and go there, it just created all types of problems in my own mind,” John Lewis once said, recalling his early days as a civil rights leader. “Alabama is bad; Alabama is hell. But to go to Mississippi at the time was worse than hell.”1
In Mississippi in the 1960s, racist violence was a horrible constant. In 1963 Medgar Evers, the first field officer of the NAACP in the state, was shot dead in the driveway of his house in Jackson. The following year, when caravans of students and others came to register voters during the Freedom Summer, their buses were torched and the passengers beaten. Three of them—James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner—were abducted and murdered by the Ku Klux Klan.
This was the Mississippi where Bennie Thompson grew up. In the months after the VRA was passed, there were two cross burnings in Bolton. As he took me through its streets, Thompson showed me the United Methodist church he first went to as a child. “I’ve been in one physical church my whole life. Not just one religion, one physical church—which just happened to be right next door to the Head Start center that the Klan burned down,” he told me. “So that was kind of part of my introduction.”
The Supreme Court purported to end segregation in public schools in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, but a decade later, Thompson was taught in what was still called the Bolton Colored School, which it was in fact if not in law. Most of Bolton’s white children eventually went to a private school called Central Hinds Academy just outside town. We took a drive to Central Hinds and happened on a football practice that featured, by my count, about two dozen white kids and one Black player. Thompson smiled and gestured at the lone figure: “He’s an athlete.”
A short distance from Bolton’s main drag, which has just a handful of storefronts, Thompson slowed down in front of a modest swimming pool. When he became mayor of Bolton in 1973, he learned that the town had donated $2,500 to the local nonprofit that had built the pool a few years earlier and then decreed that it was whites only. “My position was, the public money was donated, therefore, it’s a public pool,” he told me. “I closed the pool and said unless you make it a public pool, you can’t open.” In response, the nonprofit simply refunded the town’s $2,500: “They kept it all white.” (The pool is now in private hands.)
Meanwhile, the white politicians in charge of the Mississippi state government fought the VRA in every way they could. The local authorities could no longer stop Black citizens from registering, but the state had many other tools to preserve white rule. In 1966 the state legislature gerrymandered the state’s congressional districts so that Black voters in the Mississippi Delta region were split among three districts and were thus powerless to elect one of their own. (Then as now, Mississippi has the highest percentage of Black residents of any state: about 40 percent then and about 37 percent now.) The state also rewrote the rules in many white-majority cities and towns so that officials were elected at-large rather than by neighborhood, which might have given Black candidates a chance. In eleven communities, the state changed school superintendent positions from elected to appointed to prevent Black candidates from running and winning.
Some of those changes were challenged by the federal government. The early years of the VRA, when Thompson came of age, unfolded in a national political environment very different from today’s. The law enjoyed bipartisan support. Even though Richard Nixon embraced the “Southern Strategy,” playing to white racism in the South to win the presidency in 1968, he signed a reauthorization of the VRA in 1970; Gerald Ford did the same in 1975. During the administrations of these Republican presidents, the Justice Department used its authority under Section 5 of the VRA to veto some of the attempts by Mississippi and other states to thwart the intent of the law.
Still, progress for Black Mississippians often came slowly, including for Thompson. When the VRA was passed, Black residents were in the majority in two of the five supervisors’ districts in Hinds County, which includes Jackson. But county officials changed the election for supervisors to an at-large system. Black voters sued, and eventually, in 1977, the full Fifth Circuit declared that Hinds County violated the VRA. As Frank R. Parker, the lawyer for the plaintiffs, wrote in his book Black Votes Count (1990),
The board of supervisors was forced to adopt a new plan that contained two districts that were over 65 percent black. In the 1979 county elections—after eight years of litigation—two black county supervisors, Bennie G. Thompson and George Smith, were elected as the first black county supervisors in Hinds County since Reconstruction.
Whenever the subject of race and voting in Mississippi came up, Thompson always offered the same straightforward explanation: “If you look at the historical voting patterns, especially in the South, Black people vote for white and Black candidates, but for the most part, white voters still vote for white candidates.” To Thompson, enforcement of the VRA must take those facts into consideration or the law would have no meaning at all. If states are allowed to gerrymander legislative districts so that Black candidates have no chance of winning—regardless of what could be proved about the legislators’ racial intentions—then white domination of the political process would continue as before 1965. Still, in the early versions of the VRA, the text was ambiguous about whether it was an “intent” or a “results” law.
The Supreme Court offered an initial answer in City of Mobile v. Bolden (1980). According to the Court, it was not enough if Black voters failed to elect one of their own; they had to prove that the white majority intended to violate their voting rights. Civil rights supporters denounced the Mobile decision, asserting that in the modern era, white legislators knew better than to display racially discriminatory intent. Proving again the bipartisan support for voting rights at the time, Republicans and Democrats joined forces in 1982 to pass a twenty-five-year extension of the VRA that was revised to effectively overturn the Mobile decision. Conservative senators like Orrin Hatch and Robert Dole voted for the extension, and Ronald Reagan signed it into law. It established a “results” test: plaintiffs needed to show only that a state’s action produced discriminatory outcomes in order to win their cases.
Again, Thompson owed the next step in his career to the VRA. After the 1982 changes to the act, Black plaintiffs challenged the 1966 gerrymander of the state’s congressional districts. Now they had to prove only that the creation of the districts led to discriminatory results, which they did. The courts compelled the state at last to establish a majority-Black congressional district, and Mike Espy won the seat in 1986. In 1993 President Bill Clinton appointed him secretary of agriculture. In the special election to fill the vacancy that year, Thompson won.
By this point, even though the makeup of the Supreme Court was almost the same, the justices had changed course on voting rights. In Thornburg v. Gingles (1986), they ratified—and strengthened—the results test established in the revision of the VRA by holding that states had to acknowledge when they had a history of “racially polarized voting.” In establishing district lines, they had to consider “whether whites vote sufficiently as a bloc usually to defeat the minority’s preferred candidate.” If white residents did vote that way, the states had to include enough Black voters to give a Black candidate a chance to win election. In other words, the Court recognized what Thompson told me about voters in Mississippi, and it thus ensured that districts like his would remain intact.
It’s now clear that the crucial event in the eventual demise of the VRA was President George W. Bush’s appointment in 2005 of John G. Roberts Jr. as chief justice. In the early 1980s, after Roberts had completed his clerkship with then associate justice William H. Rehnquist, he took a number of junior positions in President Reagan’s White House and Justice Department. There, in a series of memos, Roberts expressed his opposition to what became the 1982 reauthorization of the VRA. In strong language for a young staffer, Roberts endorsed the Court’s decision in the Mobile case and voiced his passionate belief that the law should protect Black voters only from intentional discrimination, not from unfair results. For example, in a January 26, 1982, memo to Attorney General William French Smith, he wrote that adding a results test to the law would lead to a “quota system in electoral politics.”
Roberts lost that battle, but his appointment to the Supreme Court put him in a position to win the war, especially once he was joined by other conservative justices. To Roberts and the other conservatives, the VRA was another way the government sought to privilege Black citizens over others, much like affirmative action, which they also eventually outlawed. Combining a narrow reading of the rights of Black voters under the VRA with an expansive understanding of the rights of whites under the Constitution, the conservatives began chipping away at the act.
The first great blow came in 2013 in Shelby County v. Holder, in which Roberts’s opinion for the Court effectively overruled Sections 4 and 5. In both the original version of the VRA and in every subsequent reauthorization, Congress held investigatory hearings and, based on the results, established a formula for determining which states and localities had histories of discrimination and thus were subject to the act’s provisions. The theme of Roberts’s opinion, however, was that the nation had changed. He wrote that after the passage of the VRA, “voting tests were abolished, disparities in voter registration and turnout due to race were erased, and African-Americans attained political office in record numbers.” The statutory formula did not, in his view, take these changes sufficiently into account, even though Congress had looked at the same facts and concluded otherwise. According to Roberts, the law violated “the tradition of equal sovereignty” among the states and was thus unconstitutional. Unless Congress changed the formula (which it was unlikely to do and never has), there would be no more jurisdictions subject to Section 5, which was now a dead letter.
Immediately after the Shelby County decision, several states formerly covered by Section 5, now freed from Justice Department oversight, changed their election laws to make it harder for Black people (and others) to vote. On the very day that the decision was announced, the Texas legislature announced that it would tighten the photo ID requirements for voting, which a court had earlier said burdened minorities. Mississippi and Alabama passed similar laws. North Carolina enacted a series of voter restriction measures, including a requirement of a government-issued ID, and a limitation on early voting. As a result of the Supreme Court’s decision, none of these changes had to be submitted to the Justice Department for preclearance. The southern states immediately showed that they had changed less than Roberts claimed they had.
In theory, Shelby County left open the kind of VRA lawsuits that made Thompson’s career possible. Under Section 2 of the law, individual plaintiffs, not just the federal government, could sue localities for violating the rights of Black voters. It was private Section 2 lawsuits during the Sixties and Seventies that forced Mississippi to reverse the gerrymandering that had ruled out Black candidates like Thompson for the Hinds County seats and his congressional district. But in the past few years the Supreme Court has shut down Section 2 lawsuits, too. And crucially the Court in 2019 allowed state legislatures to design districts that gave an advantage to a ruling party, holding in Rucho v. Common Cause that partisan gerrymandering is a “political question” beyond the remit of federal courts. The decision gave Republican map drawers in the South the perfect way to avoid being accused of racial discrimination. They could eliminate the seats of Black officeholders on the grounds that they were targeting only Democrats.
The coup de grâce came earlier this year, when the Court decided Callais, which made Roberts’s memos from the early 1980s the law of the land.2 Samuel Alito’s opinion for the Court said that its purpose was to “update the Gingles framework and realign it with the text of §2 and constitutional principles,” but the effect of the ruling was to overrule Gingles and invalidate the results test entirely. Citing Rucho, Alito said that henceforth “litigants cannot circumvent that rule by dressing their political-gerrymandering claims in racial garb.” But the truth was that he was inviting Republican state legislators to dress their racial gerrymandering in political garb, with likely fatal political consequences for Black officeholders like Thompson. As Justice Elena Kagan put it in her dissent, Callais was the “latest chapter in the majority’s now-completed demolition of the Voting Rights Act.”
In taking up the Supreme Court’s invitation in Callais, Governor Reeves and the Republican-dominated state legislature in Mississippi are proceeding in an orderly fashion. State legislative elections take place there in 2027, and the Republicans are moving first to gerrymander those seats to the advantage of Republican, and thus mostly white, candidates. According to an analysis of prospective maps by Fair Fight Action/Black Voters Matter, a liberal advocacy group, an aggressive post-Callais map by Republicans could eliminate twenty-nine—nearly half—of Mississippi’s Black-majority legislative districts. When that task is complete, Reeves and his colleagues will turn to congressional maps and the fate of Thompson’s district in 2028. Other longtime African American members of Congress, including Emanuel Cleaver in Missouri, James Clyburn in South Carolina, and Sanford Bishop in Georgia, are similarly at risk of losing their seats in 2028. In all, in the next two years, the Congressional Black Caucus, which began the current Congress with sixty-two members, could lose as many as nineteen because of the kind of redistricting now permitted by the Supreme Court.
In addition to his security responsibilities in Congress, Thompson also serves as a custodian of institutional memory of the civil rights movement. For the past twenty-seven years, he has hosted an annual Mississippi Policy Conference, sponsored by the Congressional Black Caucus, at which he introduces colleagues of all races and backgrounds to a part of the world they may not know and a history they may not remember. “I take folks and show them what cotton looks like growing in the field,” he told me. “I mean, some folks think cotton comes from Walmart.” The conference takes place in Tunica, which Robert Kennedy toured in 1967 when it was known as perhaps the poorest city in America. (The town’s fortunes have improved since the opening of a nearby casino.)
“I had never been to Mississippi before Bennie invited me to the conference,” Joe Neguse, a four-term congressman from Colorado, told me. Neguse, who is forty-two, belongs to a generation of Black politicians whose experiences differ greatly from Thompson’s. “It was one thing to read about what happened in Mississippi,” he said, “but it was another to go there and learn from Bennie and others who had to grapple with such obstacles.”
For now Thompson will campaign as usual in his so-far-unchanged district. He is cautiously optimistic about the future, too, pointing out to me that breaking up his district, which is roughly 64 percent Black, might involve some peril for the Republicans: “The $64,000 question for the Republican leadership in this state is, what are you going to do with the Black people? You gonna push them in the Mississippi River?”
To change Thompson’s district, the mapmakers would have to move its Black voters into the three other districts, which are all currently represented by white Republicans. That might give Democrats chances to win those seats: “So ultimately, you could create two purple districts and end up with two Democrats rather than one.” Republicans might not want to take that chance and thus might leave Thompson’s district more or less intact. (There’s also a chance that Thompson might not run again in 2028.)
Given the number of Black voters in Mississippi, it will not be easy for Republican state legislators to gerrymander every one of their districts into oblivion, but the party is clearly going to try. The tools to fight back are very different today from what they were in the first decades after the passage of the VRA. Even if the Justice Department were inclined to protect the gains of Black voters and officeholders (which it clearly is not under the Trump administration), the Supreme Court’s invalidation of Section 5 has made such an effort impossible. And the Court itself, which was at least sometimes an ally of the VRA, has turned into an implacable foe. As a result, there will soon be fewer Black elected officials, perhaps a lot fewer, than there have been in the recent past. Representative democracy will look, and be, less representative, which is the problem that gave rise to the VRA.
“The issue is not whether Bennie Thompson represents this district or not,” Thompson said. “It’s whether or not the people who live in this district have a shot at representing and electing the candidates of their choice.”