OKLAHOMA CITY — Oklahoma City-based Civil Rights activist Marilyn Luper Hildreth and other community leaders statewide on Thursday responded to the U.S. Supreme Court ruling striking down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act.
Hildreth and others invited all Oklahomans to join in a demonstration against the ruling scheduled to take place from 4:00 p.m. until 6:00 p.m. on Friday, May 1st at the federal courthouse in Oklahoma City located at 200 NW 4th Street.
“I haven’t picketed in so long, my feet are so tired,” Hildreth said at a press conference held at the Freedom Center, 2609 N. Martin Luther King Ave. in Oklahoma City. “So if I have to get back out there, I don’t mind, but I want you to join me.”
Hildreth told those who think there’s nothing we can do in Oklahoma to effect what’s happening on the national level to think again – Oklahoma has brought more cases before the U.S. Supreme Court than any other state in the Union, she said.
Hildreth, daughter of Oklahoma City Civil Rights icon Clara Luper, noted that Sunday, May 3, would have been her mother’s 103rd birthday.
“She’s turning over and over and over in her grave,” Hildreth said, “and she says what is wrong, you can’t sit back and let them do that to us. Open your mouth and speak up, stand up, and talk up.”
Oklahoma County District 1 Commissioner Jason Lowe said that as a first generation lawyer and former state representative, he stands “on the shoulders” of those who fought with “blood, tears” for the right for Black people to vote.
In a 6-3 ruling Wednesday, the U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative majority struck down one of Louisiana’s majority-Black congressional districts, ruling that states cannot create voting districts based on a race – a key provision created by the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Wednesday’s decision could open the door to broader legal challenges over majority-Black and Latino districts nationwide.
From Louisiana and eastward to North Carolina, there are at least 15 House districts now at risk of elimination, according to an NPR analysis conducted earlier this year. Losing even a handful of those districts could lead to the largest-ever decline in the number of Black representatives on Capitol Hill — breaking a record set around the end of the post-Civil War Reconstruction era by the Congress that began in 1877 with four fewer House districts represented by Black lawmakers than the previous session.
“It means that you have entire communities that can go without having representation,” said Cliff Albright, a co-founder of the group Black Voters Matter, said in a statement. “It is literally throwing us back to the Jim Crow era unapologetically, and that’s not exaggeration.”
ACLU of Oklahoma Executive Director Tamya Cox-Touré, speaking at Thursday’s press conference, noted that “almost 190 seats led by black legislators and state representatives will be eliminated due to this action.”
“I had to go home and cry a while ago,” Hildreth said during Thursday’s press conference. “I thought that this day was over. I thought that we as a race of people had the right and the dignity to go in and vote without someone taking it away from us…I don’t know in my lifetime if I ever will know that freedom, but I tell you, I’ma die trying.”
