Their Loved Ones Died to Give Us the Voting Rights Act. They Have a Message for the Supreme Court.
Slate · L · trust 47/100
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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…
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