On Thursday evening, Clark Historic Site Co-Curator, Wilkie Sherard Frieson returned with another installment of the weekly Facebook Live Voter Education and Empowerment Workshop, facilitated by the Clark Historic Landmark Site in East Roanoke, Randolph County, Alabama.
These workshop-style presentations are being offered in loving memory of the late Mr. and Mrs. Wilkie and Hattie Lee Peters Clark, whose lives and work remain deeply rooted in the struggle for Black civil rights, community education, entrepreneurship, and public service in Randolph County and beyond. As explained at the beginning of the broadcast, the purpose of these sessions is not merely to share information, but to move people from awareness into action — not later, not someday, but now.
This week’s presentation carried a striking theme:
“The Death of the Voting Rights Act.”
But Sherard did not approach the topic like a dry civics lecture. He approached it like an investigator.
There was a crime scene.
There was a body.
There were shell casings.
There was a motive.
And there were victims.
The first victim, in Sherard’s framing, was the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
The second victim was us.
Voting Is Part of the American Social Contract
Sherard began by grounding the discussion in the Constitution and the long, unfinished expansion of the right to vote.
He reminded viewers that voting rights did not arrive all at once. They were built through struggle, amendment, protest, legislation, litigation, and sacrifice. He walked through the constitutional foundations of voting and highlighted the amendments that expanded the franchise over time: the 14th and 15th Amendments after slavery, the 17th Amendment providing for the direct election of senators, the 19th Amendment recognizing women’s right to vote, the 23rd Amendment extending presidential voting participation to the District of Columbia, the 24th Amendment outlawing poll taxes, and the 26th Amendment lowering the voting age to 18.
His point was simple but profound:
We follow the laws of this country.
We participate in the democratic process.
We elect leaders who govern in our name.
That is supposed to be the bargain.
Voting is not a decorative feature of democracy. It is the mechanism by which the people hold power accountable.
When voting rights are weakened, the people themselves are weakened.
The Voting Rights Act Was Protection
The heart of Sherard’s presentation was his explanation of what the Voting Rights Act actually did.
He reminded viewers that the Voting Rights Act did not protect only Black voters. It protected everybody’s voting rights — Black voters, white voters, Hispanic voters, women voters, language-minority voters, and every citizen whose access to the ballot could be threatened by discriminatory state or local practices.
That point matters.
Too often, voting rights are discussed as though they are a “Black issue,” when in truth they are a democracy issue. Black people were often the first and most brutally targeted, but a government powerful enough to silence one group of voters is powerful enough to silence any group of voters.
Sherard revisited the Jim Crow tactics once used to block Black citizens from registering: absurd “tests,” poll taxes, grandfather clauses, and other devices designed to humiliate, discourage, and exclude. In his words, people were once asked ridiculous questions such as how many bubbles were in a bar of soap or how many marbles were in a jar — not because those questions measured civic knowledge, but because they were tools of intimidation.
The Voting Rights Act was designed to stop that.
It gave the federal government tools to intervene where states and local jurisdictions had a documented history of voter discrimination. It empowered enforcement. It created accountability. It placed guardrails around the ballot box.
And for that reason, Sherard argued, it became a target.
A Law Can Still Exist on Paper and Be Dead in Practice
One of the strongest ideas in Sherard’s workshop was this: a law does not have to be formally repealed in order to be weakened.
It can be hollowed out.
It can be narrowed.
It can be stripped of enforcement.
It can remain in the law books while losing the strength that once made it effective.
That is why Sherard described the Voting Rights Act as a body at a crime scene.
The Department of Justice still describes Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act as a permanent, nationwide protection against voting practices or procedures that discriminate based on race, color, or membership in a protected language minority group. But Section 5 preclearance — one of the Act’s most powerful preventive tools — was effectively disabled after the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder, because the Court struck down the Section 4(b) coverage formula used to determine which jurisdictions had to seek federal approval before changing voting laws or procedures. The Department of Justice explains that after Shelby County, jurisdictions previously identified by that coverage formula no longer needed to seek preclearance unless covered by a separate court order under Section 3(c).
That is the legal architecture behind Sherard’s warning.
Without the formula, it becomes harder to identify covered jurisdictions.
Without preclearance, discriminatory changes can go into effect first and be challenged later.
Without strong enforcement, the burden shifts back onto the very communities harmed by suppression.
That is not simply a technical legal problem.
That is a civic emergency.
The Second Victim: The Voter
Sherard’s most powerful turn came when he identified the second victim.
The Voting Rights Act was the first victim, he said. But because the Voting Rights Act existed to protect the voter, the second victim is the public itself.
“This is me. This is you. This is your brother. This is your sister. This is your children. This is your grandchildren.”
That was the emotional center of the workshop.
Voting rights are not abstract. They determine who draws district lines. They determine who sits on school boards. They determine who becomes sheriff, mayor, probate judge, legislator, governor, district attorney, member of Congress, and president. They determine whether communities are represented or erased.
When voters are weakened, communities are weakened.
When communities are weakened, democracy becomes easier to manipulate.
Sherard’s phrase for that danger was unforgettable:
Politicians can “fire” their voters.
In other words, instead of voters choosing their representatives, representatives can manipulate the rules and maps until they choose their voters.
That is not democracy.
That is control.
The Shell Casings: Court Decisions, Policy Shifts, and the Long Attack on Voting Rights
In Sherard’s visual presentation, the “shell casings” represented attacks on the Voting Rights Act over time.
He pointed to Shelby County v. Holder as a major wound because it removed the practical operation of the preclearance system. He also discussed Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, a 2021 Supreme Court case involving challenges under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act to Arizona rules governing precinct-based Election Day voting and early mail ballot collection. In that case, the Court held that the lower court had misunderstood and misapplied Section 2.
Sherard also brought the discussion into 2026 with Louisiana v. Callais, where the Supreme Court considered whether Louisiana’s new congressional map was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. The Court held that because the Voting Rights Act did not require Louisiana to create an additional majority-minority district, no compelling interest justified the state’s use of race in creating that map.
For Sherard, these cases form part of a larger pattern: the law may remain, but its ability to protect voters has been reduced.
He then connected those court decisions to broader policy shifts, including Executive Order 14281, issued in 2025, which declared it the policy of the United States to eliminate the use of disparate-impact liability “to the maximum degree possible.” The order also directed agencies to deprioritize enforcement of statutes and regulations to the extent they include disparate-impact liability.
That matters because disparate impact is often how communities prove harm when a policy looks neutral on paper but falls hardest on particular racial, ethnic, or protected groups in practice.
Sherard’s warning was clear: when the law refuses to see unequal outcomes, it becomes harder for injured communities to prove that injury in court.
The Danger of “Colorblind” Justice in an Unequal Society
One of Sherard’s most forceful points was his criticism of so-called “colorblind” legal thinking.
In theory, “colorblindness” sounds fair. In practice, Sherard argued, it can become a way to ignore the real conditions people are living under. He challenged the idea that America can pretend race no longer matters while racialized patterns of violence, exclusion, prosecution, economic hardship, and political suppression continue to shape real lives.
That is the difference between equality as a slogan and equality as a lived reality.
A society cannot simply announce that it no longer sees race while refusing to repair the damage caused by generations of racial discrimination.
A court cannot demand evidence while stripping away the tools that help communities produce that evidence.
A government cannot claim to protect voting rights while making it easier for those rights to be diluted, divided, delayed, or denied.
That was the deep moral argument beneath Sherard’s workshop.
Why This Workshop Matters
The genius of this presentation was that Sherard took a complicated legal history and made it plain.
He did not ask viewers to become constitutional scholars.
He asked them to understand the stakes.
He showed that voting rights are not only about Election Day. They are about power. They are about representation. They are about whose communities count and whose communities can be carved up, packed together, pushed aside, or ignored.
And he made clear that outrage, by itself, is not enough.
At the close of the workshop, Sherard acknowledged that some people may view his “crime scene” framing as symbolic rather than literal. But he stood by the deeper truth of the metaphor: something has been killed. Something has been taken. Something has been weakened that once protected the people.
His final message was not despair.
It was urgency.
If voting rights have been weakened, then voter education becomes even more necessary. If protections have been reduced, then participation becomes even more critical. If politicians are trying to choose their voters, then voters must become more determined to choose their leaders.
That is why these workshops matter.
They are not entertainment.
They are not background noise.
They are not simply Facebook Live videos.
They are civic education in real time.
They are a continuation of the work Wilkie and Hattie Lee Peters Clark believed in.
They are a reminder that the struggle for voting rights did not end in 1965, did not end in 2013, did not end in 2021, and has not ended now.
The ballot is still a battlefield.
And the people must still be prepared.
Editor’s Note: This article accompanies the 9th Live Voter Education Workshop presented by Clark Historic Site Co-Curator Wilkie Sherard Frieson and facilitated by the Clark Historic Landmark Site in loving memory of the late Mr. and Mrs. Wilkie and Hattie Lee Peters Clark. Due to a microphone issue during the first portion of the original Facebook Live broadcast, viewers may wish to advance to the point where the audio begins clearly. The message, however, remains urgent from beginning to end: voting rights must be studied, defended, and exercised.
The Southern Justice Archive
Presented By: Charlotte A. Clark-Frieson aka
“Wilkie Clark’s Daughter”
Documenting what happened, Preserving what matters, Protecting what must endure!
