THe morning after Louisiana’s House primaries were scheduled to take place, worshipers at Mount Zion First Baptist Church in Baton Rouge were on their feet, swaying to the gospel music that vibrated through the wooden pews. Just days earlier, the vote had been abruptly postponed as Republicans scrambled to redraw congressional boundaries in a way that would erase one of the state’s two majority-Black congressional districts and dilute the political influence that many in the congregation had fought for. From the pulpit, Reverend Renè Brown said that all of this was on his mind. “The pastor,” he declared after reading a passage from the Book of Numbers about the allotment of land, “wants to talk about biblical redistricting.”

Two giant television screens had just displayed the U.S., Confederate, and Christian flags and the words BIBLICAL REDISTRICTING. Churchgoers gasped and glanced at their neighbors; some burst out laughing. “Oh Lordy,” one man said under his breath, his eyebrows arching nearly up to his hairline as he braced for an intense sermon. Some might wonder why the debate over representation is being framed in racial terms, Brown told his congregants. “The reason many people ask that question is because it doesn’t affect their race,” he said. “It is about race. People make race-based decisions regardless of what they are and what they know.”

In the weeks since the Supreme Court hollowed out the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the past has felt especially present to many at Mount Zion. Over the arc of their lives, the elders gathered inside the sanctuary had experienced the promise of the law, its reality, and, now, its narrowing. The Court’s 6–3 ruling in Louisiana v. Callais could return the country to an earlier era of weakened Black voting power, and comes amid a partisan gerrymandering battle mounted by President Trump. The Court’s ruling has supercharged Republican efforts across the South—in states including Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia—to redraw congressional districts in a way that benefits white citizens at the expense of nonwhite voters who primarily cast ballots for Democrats. In Louisiana, where about one-third of the state’s residents are Black, the state legislature on Friday redrew a majority-Black district held by Representative Cleo Fields, a Democrat, making it far more Republican-rich. The map with the redrawn district, which includes Mount Zion, is expected to be signed into law by Governor Jeff Landry, a Republican. The GOP would then be favored to claim five of six congressional seats in a state that Trump won in 2024 by 22 points.

Read: The GOP’s stunningly swift gerrymandering drive 

Louisiana Republicans have said that race was not a factor as they quickly redrew the maps. But Democrats told me they regard the swift attempt to consolidate power ahead of the November midterm elections as a betrayal of Black Americans and the democratic process. Before stepping into a Legislative Black Caucus meeting in the basement of the state capital, State Representative Edmond Jordan, who chairs the caucus, detailed his concern that the ruling could shrink minority representation nationwide. “We’re in a bad spot right now,” he told me.

Many at Mount Zion agreed. Brown closed the service by asking congregants to support a petition to recall Landry. The idea is far-fetched in a state where Republicans are so dominant, but when church ended, the lines for signatures crept up the aisles and jammed the floral-scented foyer.

Mount Zion was once led by T. J. Jemison, who in 1953 led a boycott of segregated buses in Baton Rouge, which became a model for the Montgomery bus boycott two years later. Church members told me that the America they remembered as children—one that legally enforced segregation at schools and swimming pools, and imposed literacy tests to vote—had come rushing back. They described despair and disappointment and pain, along with an overwhelming sense that the diminishment of their influence was both un-American—and precisely what they have always known their country to be.

Laura Bradley remembers being forced as a child to enter a malt shop through the back door because the front was reserved for white people. “It feels like we’re in James Crow Jr.,” the 72-year-old told me after signing her name to the recall petition. “All these feelings that you thought you had allayed and set aside, now they are back in the forefront again.” The gains from decades of struggle for equal representation had been wiped out. “It’s almost starting again from ground zero,” she said. She was angry, but also had hope that aggressive gerrymandering could backfire against Republicans by galvanizing minority voters to turn out, both in 2026 and in 2028.

Read: Out of the gerrymandering darkness, a new hope for reform

Across the South, Black pastors, civil-rights organizations, and lawmakers are working to make that happen. They are registering new voters, and urging Black athletes and fans to boycott public universities in states that are weakening the influence of Black voters. “If you’ve got somebody in your house and they ain’t registered to vote,” Brown told his congregation, “put them out.” At nearby Mount Pilgrim Baptist Church, guest pastor Melvin Ivan Britten IV had the congregation on its feet as he asked them to hold on to their faith during a moment of darkness. “The same God that helped us through Jim Crow,” Britten said, “is the same God that will help us right now!” From a pew in the back, a tired-looking Fields nodded his head and clapped his hands in praise.

Sitting in his pastor’s office later, a heaviness seemed to hang over the congressman as he spoke of the history of the Supreme Court’s ruling. “It pushes us back to 60 years ago,” he said. “We thought we had fought these battles.” He described the gutting of the Voting Rights Act as the culmination of a yearslong erosion of Black political power, first by conservative court decisions and, more recently, by the Trump administration’s war against diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. “You know, I can play football on a Saturday and have a whole stadium cheering for me,” he said quietly, his hands clasped together. “But I can’t go govern on Monday?” Fields told me shortly after the map won legislative approval on Friday that he will not run against Troy Carter, the Democrat who represents the state’s other majority-Black district. When I asked what the new map means for his future, he told me he was figuring it out. “Within the next week or two, everybody’s going to know what I’m doing.”

Earlier, Fields recalled for me a conversation he had with Jesse Jackson during his 1988 presidential campaign, during which Fields bemoaned political disengagement. “There are no apathetic people,” Jackson told him. “There are only uninspired people.” Perhaps, Fields told me, this moment will inspire the uninspired. But across the Mississippi River, in West Baton Rouge Parish, Black and white residents said there was little to be inspired about. The area voted for Trump in 2024. But over the past year, residents told me, the price of gas has nearly doubled, their credit-card debt is piling up, their rents are rising, and they feel like they are sliding backwards.

“I stopped paying attention,” Joseph Hopkins, a 42-year-old manager at a local fast-food restaurant who used to vote as a Democrat, told me while he watched the price tick up as he fueled his SUV. “There’s a lot of things they say but never follow through on. I don’t trust no man.” Outside a nearby auto-parts shop, a man in camouflage pants and Crocs peered at his truck’s engine. “These people swing the vote however they want,” he told me when I asked about the legislature’s gerrymandering push. Whether he votes or not, he said, “ain’t gonna make much of a difference.” In rural Ascension Parish, 25 miles southeast of Baton Rouge, a half dozen people told me they don’t pay any attention to their government. “I don’t know nothing about it,” one woman shopping for Sunday dinner told me. “And I’d be lying if I said I did.”

More than 42,000 voters had already cast ballots for the May 16 primary when Landry postponed the House elections. (ANY VOTES CAST WILL NOT BE COUNTED in the congressional race, read a sign at the West Baton Rouge Parish Registrar of Voters office.) Many people thought the election had been canceled, and even election officials admitted they were confused. With other votes going ahead, all five proposed amendments to the state constitution—four of which were backed by Landry—went down to defeat. Some voters said they were trying to send a message to Republicans. “If you have to go in and redraw lines to get the upper hand,” Michael, a 39-year-old Democrat who spoke on the condition that his full name not be used, told me an hour after polls closed, “that’s a person that’s afraid.” He likened the state’s redistricting push to the 1997 WBA Heavyweight Championship fight, when Mike Tyson bit off part of Evander Holyfield’s ear. “He was getting beat,” he said of Tyson. “He had to do something drastic—they’re biting our ear off!”

Most Americans oppose drawing congressional boundaries in ways that deliberately favor one party over another, according to an Economist/YouGov poll from late April. (Just 7 percent said partisan gerrymandering should be allowed, whereas 22 percent were unsure.) A separate survey from earlier this month, after the Callais decision, found that just a quarter of Americans think states should be allowed to draw congressional maps in a way that helps minority candidates get elected; half of Democrats said yes, whereas only 9 percent of Republicans agreed.

Republicans I spoke with said it was only fair that House boundaries reflect the GOP’s dominance in their state. Several cited Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion, which argued that the nation had made “great strides in ending entrenched racial discrimination.” Cindy Norwood told me that the country’s “whole mentality has been trying to do more and bring up the minorities, which is a good thing to do.” But, the 72-year-old said, it’s not right to consider race when drawing congressional lines. Norwood said she didn’t understand why so many minority voters were complaining that a new map would likely lead to the election of someone who does not best represent their interests. “They will have representation, but we can’t make it happen—we can’t force it to happen because they want more,” she said.

At a restaurant in West Baton Rouge Parish, a trio of Trump supporters in their 70s—all of them white—celebrated the new maps. “They created a majority-Black district just for the sake of political reasons—I’m totally against that,” said Billy Bourgeois, who lives in Fields’s district. Bourgeois told me he hopes the new boundaries will yield a Republican lawmaker who better represents his interests—lower taxes and stricter policies against illegal immigration.

To the Democrats I spoke with, the situation looks inverted: Republicans are drawing district lines to keep Black voters from having a meaningful say. “It feels like they’re just trying to put you at the bottom of the totem pole,” Terry Jackson, a 55-year-old truck driver, said while picking up plates of BBQ at a popular Port Allen Cajun diner. Jackson, who is Black, told me he’s not ready to accept that. If anything, the GOP’s push to redraw the maps has reminded him how much power he really has. “They’re showing that, actually, your vote matters,” he said. “If it didn’t matter, they wouldn’t be trying so hard to keep you from being able to vote.”