While making the film SELMA on location in Alabama in late Spring 2014, I recall standing at the crest of the bridge where, decades before, state troopers on horseback charged into a group of 600 peaceful Black marchers and beat them with clubs and bullwhips. It is an eerie, unshakeable feeling. You can feel the courage as you stand in that place, like it’s seeping through the cement, forever there. Forever resisting. The bravery that occurred there happened back in 1965. This is where John Lewis’s skull was fractured. And where the elder Amelia Boynton Robinson was left unconscious on the asphalt. A photograph of her would land on front pages around the world and change the course of American history.

As we worked on the bridge filming the Bloody Sunday scene to attempt to memorialize the events of that day, in preparation for it, we had read everything. Had interviewed eyewitnesses who were still living. Sat with people in Selma and other parts of Alabama. Reviewed the original footage and watched it until we could barely see straight. And still, standing on that bridge with our mighty crew, I was undone by the simplest thought: They just wanted to vote.

That’s it. That is the entire reason that horses charged and the clubs came down. Six hundred people wanted the basic right of citizenship for all people in the country of their birth. And the state of Alabama, with the tacit approval of the federal government, attempted to beat that desire out of them and stop them. The power in the very concrete of that place, however, rises up to tell the story.

They had tried, desperately and repeatedly to vote in all the mandated ways. But the system was designed to fail them with literacy tests that were applied selectively, registration offices open only two days a month during the work day, registrars who simply turned people away or threatened their jobs, and physical intimidation tactics, including rape and lynching. The evil intent of these tactics were never written down anywhere. But the outcome was undeniable.

By now, you have heard that the Supreme Court has declared undeniable outcomes are no longer sufficient grounds for legal remedy. That unless you can prove someone meant to discriminate — not just that they did — the law will not protect you. This is how the Supreme Court disemboweled Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act last week by removing the essential organs that gave it life.

The ruling destroys protections for voters of color, particularly Black voters, across the country and has set the nation back more than sixty years – before 1965. That is exactly the year that Trump and Vance and Hegseth and McConnell and Johnson and Musk and their ilk who support the actions of this administration want this country to be. Before 1965. Before legislation to ensure that our multiracial democracy was equipped with the tools to fully engage with its promise. Stacey Abrams, who has given her political life to this fight and knows its terrain better than almost anyone, wrote that we are “returning to the before-times when voters of color were silenced before a single vote was cast.”

The before-times.

This Supreme Court — case by case – has deliberately narrowed the Voting Rights Act’s enforcement power and built a road back to the before-times. Shelby County v. Holder removed the preclearance requirement. Brnovich v. DNC narrowed what could even constitute a violation. Now, Louisiana v. Callais finishes the gutting. Three cases. One trajectory. Back to how it was before. They sent the horses back onto the bridge. The billy clubs too. They just made sure the cameras don’t matter this time.

As we are told there is no money for healthcare, education, our crumbling infrastructure or SNAP benefits for hungry families because it is simply not “financially possible,” a billion dollars a day is siphoned off in a war of Trump’s choice in the Middle East. When Trump was asked about a timeline for resolution, he said: “We were in Vietnam for 18 years. We were in Iraq for many, many years… I don’t want to rush myself.”

I ask us to hold both of these things at once: the gutting of the Voting Rights Act and an administration who will spend without limit on war and ballrooms, but cannot find the money for the basic needs of its own citizens. These are not separate stories. They are the same story – told in different registers – about who this government believes deserves its resources and its regard.

And if you still need a symbol to clarify whose country this is being redecorated as: for America’s 250th birthday, the government will issue passports bearing Donald Trump’s image this year. The iconography of someone who does not intend for his ideas and institutional violence to be temporary.

Did you know that all four Black Republican members of the House are stepping down or retiring? The party that briefly performed inclusion and made a show of recruiting Black candidates to Congress has, under this administration, dropped even the pretense. This is an administration that has dismantled inclusion and equity programs, fired Black officials across multiple government agencies and our armed forces, assembled an overwhelmingly white senior team and routinely circulates white-supremacist references and rhetoric. Including a racist meme posted by the man who claimed the presidency himself.

And now its judicial appointees have completed the legal architecture to make sure that the growing political power of Black and Brown America can be structurally contained through gerrymandering and being redistricted into irrelevance.

This is not all happening by accident. This is a coordinated project by people who understand that the country’s actual demographics are not in their favor. So the strategy is suppression. Make it harder to vote. Make it harder to challenge the maps when voting happens. Remove the legal protections that allow those challenges to succeed. Do all of this through institutions that are insulated from accountability.

My writing partner on WHEN THEY SEE US Attica Locke posted something that I keep returning to. She wrote: “They cheat because they don’t have the numbers. There are more of us than there are of them. That’s a numerical fact that favors revolution. Hold steady. And know that they’re terrified.” Indeed. They are not winning because they are strong. They are rigging the game because they know they can’t win it fairly.

What brings me out of that despair is to think about precedent. There is precedent for our refusal and our courage. Ordinary people who did extraordinary things stood on this ground before. They knew they were outnumbered by force. They knew the law, as written and applied at that moment, was not on their side. They knew the president had not yet moved, that Congress had not yet acted, that the courts had not yet intervened. They knew all of that. And they walked onto the bridge anyway.

Because they understood that showing up and refusing to accept white supremacy dressed in the language of law was itself a form of power. They knew that visibility and witness and refusal are weapons that have moved this country toward its stated ideals.

Last week’s Supreme Court decision is the latest provocation in a very long war that was already old when those marchers stepped onto that Selma bridge in 1965. Sixty years later, the bridge is still there. And so are we.

It will take all of us to rebuild what they have undone. It will take all of us to overcome it again. But we shall. We shall.

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