I want to begin today with a voice that most Americans have never heard or a name that most of you wouldn't know about, but probably should.

In January of 2001, a man named George Henry White rose to address the United States Congress for the last

time. He was a lawyer and a Republican from North Carolina. He was the son of a formerly enslaved man

and he had served two terms in the House of Representatives. He was also at that moment the only

black member of Congress and he knew he was about to

become the last one for a long time. Not because he had lost an election fairly, but because

the full machinery of disenfranchisement, poll taxes, literacy tests, grandfather clauses,

violence, and the complicity of federal courts had made it

impossible for black Americans to elect representatives who looked like them.

An era was ending, and George Henry White knew it.

Recounting all the progress black Americans had made since the end of the Civil War,

36 years earlier, before white Confederates successfully

clawed back the political gains made by black Americans, Congressman White declared in part,

quote, we have done it in the face of lynching, burning at the stake, with the humiliation of

Jim Crow laws, the disenfranchisement of our male citizens, slander, and the degradation of our women,

with the factories closed against us, with all these odds against us, we are forging our way

ahead, slowly, perhaps, but surely. This, Mr. Chairman, is perhaps the Negro's temporary farewell

to the American Congress, but Phoenix-like, he will rise up someday and come again.

He was right. Black Americans would rise again, but not before decades of terror, disenfranchisement,

and the systematic erasure of black political power, enabled just as before, by the courts, by the states,

and by those who understood that democracy actualized threatened their monopoly on power.

This week I'm thinking about George Henry White because what happened at the Supreme Court

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