Thank you for watching! In the face of unrelenting disinformation and authoritarian actions, clear truth-telling and independent media are a necessity. If you value pro-democracy journalism, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber to my newsletter. Paid subscribers empower this work and gain access to exclusive benefits. Your support makes a difference.
Some conversations leave you smarter. Some leave you inspired. This one did both. I was joined by two of the most brilliant and passionate historians working today, and I left the live feeling exactly what I always hope our audience feels when they tune in: that understanding history does not make the current moment more hopeless. It makes progress seem more possible.
I re-immerse myself in this history whenever I need to be reminded that we have overcome seismic challenges before. Every time I talk to Dr. Scott and Dr. Williams, I leave revitalized. I hope this conversation does the same for you.
Dr. Terry Anne Scott is an award-winning historian, author, and speaker, the Director of the Institute for Common Power, and former Professor and Chair of the Department of History at Hood College. Dr. Yohuru Williams is Distinguished University Chair and Professor of History and founding director of the Racial Justice Initiative at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota. They are both going to be live on the ground in Selma and Montgomery, Alabama, this Sunday, June 7th at noon Eastern Time for a national Zoom teach-in with Mr. Charles Mauldin, who was sixth in line on the Edmund Pettus Bridge on Bloody Sunday. Ahead of that, I was happy to have this conversation to glean their insights and get a glimpse of what they’ll be covering in the teach-in.
We covered an enormous amount of ground. We started with the Callais ruling and what gutting Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act actually means in practical terms. We traced the through line from the Confederacy to MAGA, the progress-backlash cycle that has defined American history, and the coded language that has been used across generations to erode Black political power.
We dug into the legal architecture behind what Dr. Williams called a new “Roberts Crow” era and what the Supreme Court has been doing quietly for decades. We talked about what previous generations of civil rights activists understood about power that the modern movement sometimes forgets. And we ended with concrete tools, from a story about Diane Nash, a new way to view “WOKE,” the Ella Baker model of leadership, and why cynicism is the one thing that will absolutely guarantee failure.
This was genuinely one of my favorite Substack Lives. It’s exactly the kind of content I want to contribute to the media landscape. Informative, deep, and contextualized in a way that leaves you feeling empowered.
You can watch our full conversation above and read key takeaways below.
The Callais Ruling At America’s 250th: What Just Happened And Why It Matters
Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 has now been gutted by the Supreme Court. On the eve of America’s 250th birthday, the conversation about what this country actually stands for has never been more urgent.
Section 2 ensured fair and non-discriminatory political representation, and it is now gone. Dr. Scott explained it plainly: Section 2 made sure political representation was proportional and non-discriminatory. The Callais case came out of Louisiana, where 30% of the population is African American, and their representation was 30%. With Callais, that representation now threatens to be zero. That is a direct reversion to a political landscape this country fought and bled to move beyond.
In Montgomery, the first Black representative since 1871 could now be the last. Dr. Scott pointed to Shomari Figures, who represents Montgomery through Mobile and is the first Black representative in Montgomery since 1871, 150 years. With the Callais ruling, he could be the last for however many more years. That is the concrete human consequence of what the Supreme Court just did, and it lands with full weight when you situate it against America approaching its 250th anniversary.
The ruling sits on a continuum of cementing white supremacy, and that context is the source of optimism, not despair. Dr. Scott offered two paths for how to receive this history: deep distress because it is so pernicious, or optimism because we know people fought against it and won. She chose optimism. People like Mr. Charles Mauldin, who will be with them in Selma this weekend, are the reason. We owe it to them to continue the fight because a just and inclusive democracy is winnable.
Dr. Williams grounded this moment in the Lewis doctrine. Dr. Williams wrote about this concept in 2021 following John Lewis’s death. Lewis said that together we can redeem the soul of America by getting into good trouble, necessary trouble. Everyone quotes that line, Dr. Williams noted, but they miss the part where Lewis talked about the need to study history honestly and engage it in a way that creates meaningful change. Lewis also talked about the right to vote as an instrument of empowerment in communities of color specifically. That framework is what the teach-in this Sunday is designed to activate.
The Backlash Cycle: From Reconstruction To MAGA
American history is defined by cycles of progress and backlash. Understanding that cycle is not a reason to despair. It is the map. And the map also shows that every backlash has been followed by more progress, because of what people chose to do next.
Every period of Black progress in American history has been met with a systematic backlash designed to roll it back. The Civil War was a backlash to the expansion of non-slave states and the growing threat to the slave economy. After Reconstruction produced nearly 2,000 Black elected officials, there was a violent backlash that gave us Jim Crow, the KKK, and the systematic erasure of Black political power. After the civil rights movement of the 1960s, there was a backlash: assassinations, the war on drugs, the Southern strategy. After Barack Obama became president and it became undeniable how fundamentally Black culture is American culture, there was a backlash, and that backlash is MAGA. We are still in that cycle. The erosion of voting rights is not a new story. It is the same story, repackaged.
The erosion of voting rights is not just part of the backlash. It is the hallmark of it. Dr. Scott made this distinction precisely. During Reconstruction, nearly 2,000 Black elected officials served, from sheriffs to aldermen to representatives, so many that white Southerners called it an era of Negro domination or Negro rule in deeply pejorative terms. When Reconstruction ended and federal troops protecting Black voting rights were removed, the first thing they chanted was no more Negro domination. What followed was literacy tests, poll taxes, lynching, and people being murdered on the courthouse lawn for attempting to register. Undermining Black political power was the hallmark of restoring a white power structure. We are seeing that again.
Tennessee right now is a direct historical parallel to Southern Redemption. Dr. Scott drew this line explicitly: the Tennessee legislature recently removed all African American and Democratic lawmakers from any position of power within the legislature. That is precisely what happened in the moments of Southern Redemption following the Civil War, when Black people were stripped of representation systematically and violently. In Georgia alone, 25% of Black elected officials were killed after Reconstruction. The parallel is chilling.
Dr. Williams on the South losing the war but winning the peace. Dr. Williams cited David Blight’s Race and Reunion: even going into the 1960s and beyond, there was fertile ground where someone like Donald Trump could create a narrative about a mythical America, making America great again, hearkening back to a “Lost Cause” period that gave rise to Jim Crow segregation and was completely hostile to women’s rights, immigration, and racial minorities of all stripes. The Confederate monuments went up between 1890 and 1910, Dr. Williams noted, when those same sentiments were being institutionalized. They came down in 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020, and that removal became the opportunity to operationalize a playbook that had been in existence for decades. John Roberts and others had been working toward this quietly. Trump simply became their vocal champion, willing to say the quiet parts out loud.
Coded Language & The Southern Strategy: How The Con Works
The language changes across generations. The con does not. Understanding the coded language that has been used to pit working-class white Americans against Black and brown Americans is essential to dismantling it.
The Southern strategy is the Republican Party’s operating manual for decades. I laid this out directly: LBJ pushed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the party switch happened, Southern Democrats disaffected to the Republicans, and Richard Nixon accelerated it. Lee Atwater and Reagan deployed welfare queens and other code words, language designed to appeal to the economic anxiety of Southern whites while governing for the rich. The message was: Black people are to blame for your problems. Not the people giving tax cuts to the rich and robbing you blind. The brown people. That has been the Republican Party’s model for decades.
Trump ripped the mask off. What was new about Trump was not the ideology. It was the willingness to dispense with the coded language entirely. He came down the escalator and said Mexicans are rapists. He called for a Muslim ban. He stopped pretending to be a business party in a suit and just played directly to bigotries without the euphemisms. Dr. Scott made the point that “Make America Great Again” was also Reagan’s slogan. This is nothing but a continuation of the same ideological effort to ensure white supremacy governs and to suppress progress among Black and BIPOC people, she argued.
The opportunity now is to show white working-class voters they have been lied to the entire time. I made this argument directly: Trump is the perfect embodiment of the con becoming visible. He is literally enriching himself while actively raising prices on the people who voted for him. The through line of history, the Southern strategy, the coded language, the Lost Cause, it all points to the same conclusion. The modern Republican Party has never been legislating for white working-class voters. It has been using their racial grievances as a distraction while governing for the top. Now that Trump has stripped the mask off entirely, the teaching of this history can wake people up to that truth in a way that coded language made much harder.
“Roberts Crow” & The Legal Architecture Of Suppression
The Supreme Court has been the instrument of voting rights suppression for over 150 years. Dr. Williams and Dr. Scott gave the legal and historical receipts that everybody should have ready.
A hostile Supreme Court was the original instrument of undermining Reconstruction. Dr. Williams laid this out with precision: the Supreme Court rendered most civil rights legislation from the Reconstruction era nugatory, eviscerating key sections of the Enforcement Act of 1870 and the Civil Rights Act of 1875. In one case, U.S. v. Reese, the justices literally employed the language of magic words, ruling that because an election examiner did not use the explicit language of race, there was no way to determine if discrimination had occurred. That reasoning is the ancestor of the intent requirement Alito used in the Callais decision. The genealogy is unbroken.
“Roberts Crow” is not a metaphor. It is a documented project. Dr. Williams explained that in 2013, after Shelby County v. Holder, he and other historians wrote a piece naming what they called “Roberts Crow.” John Roberts’s history is known. His path to gutting the Voting Rights Act was a career-long project. Callais is its fruition. The face of the laws do not say Black people cannot vote, Dr. Williams noted, but the outcomes will be racist by design. That is “Roberts Crow.”
Facially neutral laws are still discriminatory laws. Dr. Scott gave the receipts. In Georgia, it is now criminalized to give water or food to people standing in line to vote. The law does not mention race. But in the 2020 election, when Georgia went blue, it was Black people standing in the long lines in Black districts. If you criminalize giving people food and water, you are trying to cause people to go home. That is facially neutral and functionally discriminatory. Dr. Scott said they are going to walk through a slew of these laws at the teach-in this weekend.
The Alito intent requirement guts the 1982 amendment Congress specifically passed to fix this. I made this point directly: the 1982 amendment to the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed explicitly to shift the standard from intent to outcomes, because Congress recognized that proving intent was nearly impossible by design. Alito’s ruling reverses that. Effectively, to prove racism now, you would need a Signal chat of people saying “I am being racist so right now,” even though we know precisely what the targeted outcomes are. Dr. Williams connected this to the same pattern going back to Reconstruction, and called for people to memorize the 14th and 15th Amendments and to be able to cite the case law, not to become junior attorneys, but to recognize the signs and fight back effectively.
What Previous Generations Understood About Power That We Sometimes Forget
The civil rights movement was not just a moral movement. It was a strategic one. The lessons about power, economic leverage, organizing versus mobilizing, and the Ella Baker model of leadership are as applicable today as they were in 1965. I asked Dr. Scott and Dr. Williams what we can learn from the movements of the past.
Economic boycotts are one of the most powerful tools in the arsenal. Dr. Scott made this point with historical precision: the Montgomery bus boycott, the Nashville sit-ins, and the 1953 Baton Rouge bus boycott were all economic boycotts. Black people withheld their money to put pressure on a white power business structure to create change. That same power exists today. When Black people say we are not going to Target because of how they dropped their DEI commitments, when people support Costco and other organizations that held the line, that is the same mechanism. Voices raised in unison work too. Alex Haley’s Roots being removed from a banned book list after vocal outrage. The $1.776 billion slush fund being blocked because of public and court pressure. Never underestimate the power you have as an individual.
Ella Baker taught us that the best leaders empower others to lead. Dr. Scott brought up Ella Baker as the model she tries to adopt. Baker was a youth organizer in the NAACP, a key figure in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the person who organized voter registration across Atlanta. When the students from the sit-ins were ready to organize, she helped them create the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. What Baker understood is that leadership is not about demanding deference. It is about making sure others around you understand their own power as leaders. That is the Ella Baker model, and it is the model the Institute for Common Power runs on.
Stokely Carmichael had a moment of doubt too. Dr. Williams told this story with care: when Carmichael first encountered young people sitting in, he thought they were just trying to get on television. Then he went and witnessed the courage in person, and it transformed him. He went on to become one of the fiercest voices of the movement. Dr. Williams’s point is that it is okay to feel disconnected or doubtful in this moment. What matters is that the people we lionize always found a way to respond. Find your Stokely Carmichael moment. Walk in, witness the courage, and let it change you.
The difference between mass mobilizing and mass organizing matters enormously. Dr. Williams raised this distinction, and I built on it. Mobilizing is powerful, getting 3,000 people in a square is meaningful, and the No Kings protests function as a funnel to get people into activism. But the real work is organizing, figuring out the levers of power and targeting them with precision. The Selma tactic was about imagery and moral force. The economic boycotts targeted financial pressure points. Minneapolis and what happened with George Floyd was about sustained attention forcing federal involvement. You need to understand which tool applies to which moment.
Cynicism will get you absolutely nowhere. I said this directly, and I mean it. A solid portion of the far left operates from a place of nihilism, a belief that nothing can change, that all paths are closed. That is not what John Lewis modeled. It is not what Charles Mauldin modeled. The “I Have a Dream” speech was not a “There Is No Point” speech. It was an audacious act of optimism delivered in the middle of a moment where what King was describing seemed genuinely unimaginable. He was painting the future into existence. People with far less power, far fewer rights, and far fewer tools than we have today made changes many could not have foreseen. If they could do it, we can absolutely do this.
Education To Action: How We Fight From Here
Dr. Scott’s phrase is education to action. Learning without acting is a privilege. The teach-in this Sunday is built around exactly that principle, and this section is for everyone reading this who wants to know what to do next.
Diane Nash showed up alone, and from that came an entire movement. Dr. Scott told this story, and it is the one I want everyone to carry with them. Diane Nash was a young student from Chicago who came to Fisk University in Nashville and started attending James Lawson’s nonviolent resistance workshops. Do you know how many people showed up with her? Zero. It was her and James Lawson, sitting in the basement of a church. She kept coming back. She brought more people. More people came. From that small beginning came John Lewis, Bernard Lafayette, and the entire Nashville movement that shaped the modern civil rights era. What if she had not kept showing up? Never let anyone tell you that you do not have the power to create a movement.
Dr. Williams’s WOKE acronym is an interesting framework. Dr. Williams reclaimed the word deliberately, clarifying that he does not mean what Pete Hegseth loses sleep over. He means it as a concrete framework. W is the Willingness to confront difficult truths about ourselves, our institutions, and our history. O is Ownership of our role in creating and sustaining the conditions that shape outcomes. K is Keep, maintenance, what do you grow, what do you protect, how do you cover crop so that when headlines fade and the work becomes difficult, the fire stays lit. E is Extension, figuring out how to extend the work, extend the season, extend the streak, winning hearts and minds in spaces where metrics do not capture what is actually happening. Stay woke. That is the whole program.
Dr. Scott’s historical empowerment framework is history as a self-help book. She named it precisely: historical empowerment. History is not just context. It is fuel. Every time you feel discouraged, you think about Diane Nash, Ella Baker, John Lewis, Charles Mauldin, and Joanne Bland, who was eleven years old and still walked the Edmund Pettus Bridge. If they could do that, if Charles Mauldin could get beaten on that bridge and get back up, surely we can do this from the relative comfort of our phones and computers. People in the chat during the live were saying their grandfathers and fathers faced much worse. Let that be guidance, not guilt.
They cannot gerrymander the maps fast enough to win the midterms. I said this, and I believe it. The Supreme Court ruling is a serious setback. But if all demographics are increasingly rejecting Trump, you can move districts around all you want, you can’t save the GOP majority. Trump is approaching 30% approval. The work has worked. The American people are mobilizing. There have been real damages, the federal workforce erosion, the attack on Black unemployment, the ongoing assault on civil rights. But there is a backlash growing that is bigger than any map can contain. Donald Trump is not stronger than the American people. He never has been. And he is not going to be the thing that ends the American experiment. We should be embarrassed if he were.
This Sunday, the teach-in goes live from Selma and Montgomery. Dr. Scott closed with the line that stayed with me: evil will always falter under the weight of good and righteousness. The teach-in this Sunday, June 7th at noon Eastern Time, will be live from Selma and Montgomery with Dr. Scott, Dr. Williams, and Mr. Charles Mauldin, the man who was sixth in line on the Edmund Pettus Bridge on Bloody Sunday. Four hours of learning, inspiration, and determination from the sacred sites that drove the most important piece of small-d democratic legislation in American history. Sign up here.
Bottom Line
The Voting Rights Act is under assault, the backlash cycle is real, and Roberts Crow is the Supreme Court’s long game finally realized. But every generation that faced something comparable found a way forward because they understood power, used economic leverage, organized rather than just mobilized, and refused to let cynicism win. Diane Nash showed up alone. Charles Mauldin stood sixth in line on a bridge knowing what was coming. Ella Baker built a movement by empowering others to lead. History is not just context. It is the map out of this.
Join the teach-in this Sunday, June 7th, at noon Eastern Time, live from Selma and Montgomery.
If you’re not already, consider supporting my independent journalism with a paid subscription. And if you’re already a paid subscriber, thank you! It truly means a lot. Independent media runs on the people who back it.
