Rolling Back the Clock

A Family Story from 1868 to the Present

Elaine Harvey, now 97, as an 18-year-old, rode her bicycle to register to vote.

Before I speak about the Supreme Court’s recent ruling, I must begin where my family’s voting story truly begins with my third grandfather, Joseph Harvey, who registered to vote in 1868 during Reconstruction. He stepped forward in that brief window when America seemed willing to imagine Black citizenship as real and enforceable. But after Reconstruction collapsed, no one in my family voted again until my mother, an 18‑year‑old Black girl in rural Georgia studying history at Fort Valley State College, cast her ballot in the 1948 Presidential election, culminating eighty years of silence, eighty years of fear, and eighty years of democracy denied.

The Supreme Court’s recent ruling prohibiting the use of race in drawing congressional districts is not an isolated legal decision. It is part of a much longer American story, one that stretches from Reconstruction to Jim Crow, from the 1965 Voting Rights Act to the present moment. And if you know that story, you recognize the pattern immediately.

Every time Black Americans have gained political power, the system has found new ways to take it back. I know this not just from books or archives. I know it because my own family lived it.

In the late 1940s, my mother was an 18‑year‑old Black girl in rural Georgia who wanted to register to vote. Her father refused to take her to town. Not because he didn’t believe in voting, but because he feared the Klan would burn his house down or slaughter the family if they saw him escorting a young Black woman to the voter registrar in the courthouse.

So, she rode her bicycle, alone, unprotected, determined, and teased by her siblings and cousins who did not yet understand the importance of voting.

When she arrived, the white registrar handed her a copy of the U.S. Constitution and said, “Read this.” He expected her to stumble. She didn’t. She recited it verbatim, without looking down.

“I said read it,” he barked.

She read it with perfect diction. He snatched the book from her hands before she could finish the first paragraph. Then he shoved a sheet of paper toward her and said, “Sign this.” She did, becoming the first member of the family to register to vote since President Hayes removed the federal troops from Georgia.

That was the price of Black citizenship in the American South: humiliation, danger, and the constant threat of violence. And yet she persisted.

Fast forward to 1970. I was an 18‑year‑old student at Tuskegee Institute. Between classes one noonday, my brother and I walked down to the Macon County Courthouse to register. I grew up hearing my mom recount those harrowing moments in the Crawford County, Georgia, Courthouse. I expected a fight. I expected a test. I expected the same hostility my mother faced.

But the registrar handed us an application. Five years had passed since President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act. Five years, and the world had changed.

That fall, I cast my first vote for Johnny Ford, the city’s first Black mayor. That moment was not an accident. It was not a gift. It was the direct result of federal protection, the Voting Rights Act doing exactly what it was designed to do.

Without the 1965 Voting Rights Act, neither my mother nor her progenies would have been able to participate fully in American democracy. We were denied all the rights and privileges of being Americans. For generations, Black voters were packed, cracked, diluted, and erased through district lines drawn with surgical precision. Racial gerrymandering, when used to remedy discrimination, was not a distortion of democracy. It was a correction.

It was the only way to counteract a century of maps designed to ensure Black people could not elect candidates of their choice. The Supreme Court understood this in 1965. It was understood in 1982. It was understood in 1986. It was understood in 2023.

But in 2026, the Court declared that race cannot be used in drawing districts, even when race was the very tool used to deny Black political power in the first place.

At the same time, the Court continues to allow partisan gerrymandering, even though in the South, race and party are deeply intertwined. A map drawn to disadvantage Democrats will almost always disadvantage Black voters. The Court knows this. Everyone knows this. This reality is unlikely to change until the Republican Party changes its public policy initiatives towards Black and Brown people.

The result is a legal paradox with devastating real‑world consequences: You may not use race to remedy discrimination, but you may use the party to entrench it. This is not neutrality. This is not colorblindness. This is a rollback. The kind of rollback that Rev. Dr. Joseph Lowery, then President of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, railed against when President Ronald Regan nominated Judge Robert Bork to the Supreme Court in 1987. Thirty-nine years later, the Supreme Court now has the numbers to turn back the clock and make America the exclusive domain of White men.

The Supreme Court’s ruling does not simply reinterpret the law. It reopens the door to the very practices the Voting Rights Act was designed to eliminate. It rolls back the clock on gains Black Americans have fought for since the end of enslavement.

My mother’s bicycle ride. My walk to the courthouse in 1970. The election of Black mayors, councilmembers, legislators, senators, and representatives across the South. All of it was made possible by federal protections that the Court is now dismantling piece by piece.

We have seen this pattern before: Reconstruction, Redemption, Jim Crow, The Civil Rights Movement, Shelby County v. Holder, and now Louisiana v. Callais.

The arc of voting rights in America is not a straight line. It is a struggle, a push-and-pull between progress and retrenchment.

The Court’s ruling does not erase the courage of those who fought for the vote. It does not erase the memory of my mother standing in that courthouse, or the registrar who tried to break her spirit, so she would not teach children she would later have the importance of voting. It does not erase the pride I felt voting for Tuskegee’s first Black mayor.

But it does remind us that rights won can be rights lost, and that the work of democracy is never finished.

If the Court will not protect the franchise, then the people must. If the law retreats, memory must advance. If the arc bends backward, we must bend forward.

Because the story of Black voting rights in America is not just a legal story. It is a family story. It is a community story. It is a story written in courage, danger, persistence, and hope. It is a story we must continue to tell, especially now.

May the courage of those who came before us, from Joseph Harvey in 1868, to my mother on her bicycle in 1948, to every Black voter who stood in a courthouse line with danger at their back, guide us in this moment. May their steadiness become our strategy, their endurance our inheritance, and their faith in democracy our mandate. The struggle did not begin with us, and it must not end with us. May we walk forward carrying their light.