PJI Statement on SCOTUS’ Ruling in Callais v. Louisiana & State Legislature’s Redrawing of Congressional District Maps

“Shut up, Boy” yelled Jay Morris, a white Louisiana state senator, to mostly Black community members in a hearing on redistricting last week.

With the destruction of voting rights under Callais v Louisiana and aggressive state-level assault on Black political power, Louisiana sits as the center of the country’s neo-Confederate political project. Louisiana’s legislature, governor, and attorney general are using redistricting and legislation across the board to breathe life into Jim Crow and continuously harm Black communities. This ecosystem of disenfranchisement, de-citizenship, and ultimately, dehumanization has generated and created a justification for the removal and control of hundreds of thousands of Black people into Louisiana’s criminal legal system – an apparatus that is among the greatest threats to everyday Black people and Black communities. From our work at the Promise of Justice Initiative, we know how easily a police officer and District Attorney can snatch someone out of their community and send them to prison to die – we also know from our work that people live out the rest of their lives in prison based on very little evidence or none at all, and for more than a hundred years, without the agreement of a unanimous jury. Whether the 1850s, the 1950s, or today, in Louisiana, white supremacists abuse power and law to block Black self-determination, remind Black people that we are not safe, and to mainstream the idea that we do not belong. The attack on voting rights is just another avenue to manipulate and erode the limits of State power against its people.

I’m getting up tomorrow with the members of my team at PJI, and with so many others across Louisiana, and across the South to do the slow and hard work for the right to full citizenship, for the right to exist, for the right to be free – we do this always, but especially now in the face of the rise of the neo-Confederacy. My team will continue to claw back the State’s project of humiliating and endangering, mostly, Black men who are forced to work as captive laborers in the fields of Angola prison. We will stand up for families and incarcerated people against the State’s routine disregard for their right to go home after they have served their sentence. We will fight against the excessive power of district attorneys at the legislature and against the most extreme act of state violence – the State’s practice of executing human beings.

We invite you to this fight, the fight of our era, the fight for freedom.

In solidarity,

Samantha Kennedy

Executive Director

Promise of Justice Initiative