Their Loved Ones Died to Give Us the Voting Rights Act. They Have a Message for the Supreme Court.

This is part of Amicus and Slate’s “ By the People ” series, which explores how the American people can reclaim the Constitution, and the law, from this monarchical Supreme Court.

Viola Liuzzo, a nurse and mother of five, was not even 40 years old when she was gunned down on the way home from Selma, Alabama, by the Ku Klux Klan after marching across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Vernon Dahmer had been active in the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi for years when he was murdered by the klan in a firebombing that nearly killed his entire family. Andrew Goodman was barely 20 when he, James Chaney, and Michael Schwerner were murdered by the KKK as they volunteered to help with voter-registration efforts in rural Mississippi.

They are just a few of the most famous martyrs of the movement that gave birth to the 1965 Voting Rights Act. For decades, their families could look back at their sacrifices in sorrow but also in pride at how their lives had forged a true American democracy. This past April, though, something changed. In a 6, 3 ruling in Louisiana v. Callais , the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority killed the last remaining prong of the VRA, the cause for which these heroes had given their last full measure of devotion. “Many paid the ultimate price for Black people to gain the right to vote,” Dennis Dahmer, one of Vernon Dahmer’s sons, told me. “And to see what has systematically been done over the years to that Voting Rights Act, dismantled brick by brick, and finally get this Callais ruling, it’s deeply disappointing.” Liuzzo’s son Anthony was more blunt, saying we have lost the “protections” for our democracy “that my mother’s blood gave us.”

Slate spoke with a number of surviving family members of some of the martyrs of the Civil Rights Movement, all of whom were devastated by the court’s Callais ruling. Their stories underscore the travesty of what this Supreme Court has stolen from “we the people” with its yearslong decimation of the VRA. However, they also offer a blueprint for how to restore our democracy and get our country back to a place where the U.S. Constitution can work as it was intended, to offer tangible protections for each and every one of us. The journey will require an impenetrable will and a fearlessness to sacrifice everything for the sake of democracy for all. According to these survivors, though, it will also require something far more basic: going to the ballot box.

Start with Viola Liuzzo’s story. In her youth, Liuzzo moved around a lot, but no matter where she lived, whether Pennsylvania or Georgia, Tennessee or Michigan, she couldn’t help but notice that Black Americans were treated differently from how she was, as a white woman. She grew up during segregation, witnessed integration, and came of age when klansmen were part of the fabric of daily life , active in everything from police forces to local governments. She watched Black Americans struggle to exercise their right to vote and knew that there was something deeply wrong with the system. Soon, she became one of the first few white people to join the NAACP. On March 24, 1965, Liuzzo was among the hundreds of protesters who marched across Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge to demand equal voting rights. “Bloody Sunday” was also the last time she would speak to her family and friends, or lend her activism to the Civil Rights Movement.

“She wasn’t one to stand on the sidelines,” Anthony Liuzzo told me. “She stood there and got involved in the fight.” As activists began their journeys home after the violence inflicted on protesters that day, Viola Liuzzo was individually targeted. A crew of Ku Klux Klan members followed her car as she made the trek back to Michigan, her husband and five children anxiously awaiting her arrival. Eventually, the group pulled up next to her and shot her to death. She was 39 years old.

Anthony Liuzzo, who was 10 when his mother died and 71 when SCOTUS ended the last protections of the VRA this April, remembers his mother as someone who was always volunteering herself for the cause of human rights, a nurse by trade who would often bring home sex workers and people with addiction issues to help rehab them and get them off the streets. She would emphasize to her children that all humans were created equal, no matter the color of their skin, Anthony Liuzzo told me, recalling a time she had grabbed his arm and said, “Well, nothing comes off. We’re all the same, just the pigment is different in our skin.”

The Liuzzo family learned of Viola Liuzzo’s death in the middle of the night, after the local sheriff’s office called them with the news. “It was madness after she was assassinated. I saw things that no 10-year-old should have to see,” Anthony Liuzzo said. “We had bullets shot through our windows, crosses burned in our yard, garbage dumped in our yard.” The Liuzzo family was harassed for their mother’s activism even after her death, but the event galvanized activists all over the country, becoming one impetus for Congress to finally pass the landmark 1965 legislation. About four months after Viola Liuzzo’s death, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law.

Sixty-one years later, on April 29, 2026, Anthony Liuzzo and Americans across the country witnessed six individuals, in one fell swoop, issue a binding opinion in Louisiana v. Callais , dismantling the work that thousands of activists had spilled blood, sweat, and tears over. The court’s far-right majority declared that racism was no longer a problem and that, therefore, Section 2 of the act, which forced states to create majority-minority districts so Black and brown voters had a fair chance to elect their ideal candidates to Congress, was unnecessary. This was the last standing major plank of the VRA after the court’s elimination of Section 5 in 2013’s Shelby County v. Holder . Like Chief Justice John Roberts’ majority opinion in Shelby , Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion in Callais was premised on the false narrative that racism is no longer a significant problem in America. “The Voting Rights Act led to ‘great strides’ in the ensuing decades: ‘voting tests were abolished, disparities in voter registration and turnout due to race was erased, and African Americans attained political office in record numbers,’ ” Alito wrote, justifying the nail in the coffin for the VRA.

This is a willfully ignorant reading of the current reality of the country’s electoral politics, but Anthony Liuzzo was unsurprised by it. “Nobody should be surprised that the Supreme Court did this,” he said. “It was initiated a long time ago to try to get rid of the Voting Rights Act, and they’ve accomplished it, temporarily.” If his mother were still alive today, he says, she would be out on the streets, encouraging every eligible American to exercise their right to vote, in spite of Callais . This is how, he believes, this setback can be overcome. “They need to get off their behinds and get in the voting booth and vote. It’s the only way we’re going to turn this around now,” he said. “It’s going to be harder because we don’t have the guidelines or protections that the Voting Rights Act had given us, or that my mother’s blood gave us.”

Dennis Dahmer, who is 73, similarly understands the stakes of what the court has done by rolling back key protections the VRA established. His father, Vernon Dahmer, was “a card-toting member of the NAACP,” he said. “As a result of that, there were a lot of whites who didn’t like that, at all.” Living in Mississippi, Vernon Dahmer watched his Black neighbors struggle to vote, impeded by poll taxes designed to target them. He decided to put his money where his mouth was and released a radio ad announcing that he would pay the poll tax for any Black American who wanted to register to vote but didn’t have the means to do so.

The move angered local KKK members, who began plotting against Dahmer. One night around 2 a.m., two cars filled with armed KKK members rolled up to the Dahmers’ home. “They’re shooting in the house, shooting the windows out, throwing gallons of gas through the windows and torches behind it,” Dennis Dahmer said. “My dad is running through the house, from different doors and windows, shooting back at these carloads of klansmen.”

Though Vernon Dahmer managed to survive the night, he died the next day from smoke inhalation that caused fatal lung damage. He was survived by his wife and seven children. His death energized Mississippi residents and prompted Johnson to wire his condolences to the family.

The Callais opinion was the final act of the Roberts court’s decadeslong effort to roll back critical protections in the VRA that gave minority voters a discernible voice in Congress through representatives they hand-selected. In Shelby County , the justices had eliminated the guidance that jurisdictions with a history of voter suppression get Justice Department approval for new district maps and other electoral changes. Then, in 2021, through Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee , the court found that state laws that restricted ballots in a way that disproportionately affected minority voters were perfectly lawful.

Finally, with Callais , the court’s conservative majority eviscerated Section 2, considered the heart of the act, which had forced states to create majority-minority districts in their congressional maps. “And in that way it greenlights redistricting plans that will disable minority communities, in Louisiana and across the Nation, from electing, as many majority communities can, ‘representatives of their choice,’ ” Justice Elena Kagan argued in her dissent.

Dennis Dahmer believes that his father would be “highly pissed off at Americans who are not voting, because that is the problem.” He said, “We are in the situation we are today in America because of voter apathy.” Although state legislatures and the Trump administration actively push for measures that further suppress voter turnout, from race-based redistricting to the SAVE Act, the biggest tool we have left to fight back is our vote, he says. The failure to use that power is what is costing us our constitutional protections. “That is how they win elections, by keeping people away from the polls who will not vote for their agenda,” Dahmer said.

Some 60 years ago, Andrew Goodman understood how a complicit government could actively suppress Black voters. “The Senators could not persist in this polite debate over the future dignity of a human race if the white Northerners were not so shockingly apathetic,” he wrote in a school paper, criticizing the North’s total accommodation of the segregationist South of the 1960s.

Within days of penning those words, Goodman received an invitation to join a voter-registration project in Mississippi by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a powerful civil rights group built up by young people pushing for racial equality. “He wanted to do something about it rather than just talk about it,” David Goodman, his younger brother, told me. Soon enough, Andrew Goodman was on his way to Mississippi to help register Black Americans to vote. His efforts were tragically cut short. On June 21, 1964, his first day in Mississippi, alongside Chaney and Schwerner, Goodman was murdered by the KKK in a brutal ambush that resulted in a 44-day-long search for their bodies.

David Goodman believes that the U.S. is currently facing a struggle similar to the one his brother fought six decades ago, with the people in power attempting to take away Americans’ constitutional rights in order to expand their control. “They’re going to chip away at it in many, many, many different ways,” he said. “One way is to say that the Voting Rights Act is not valid and, furthermore, talk about methods and ways to gerrymander states so that Black people are outvoted by white people.”

One of the simplest and most immediate steps Americans can take regain control of their rights is to simply vote and for