America is turning 250, so politicians, pundits, and historians will spend the next year celebrating the nation’s democratic traditions. They will tell stories about the founding fathers, constitutional principles, and the expansion of freedom over generations.
However, there is a harder truth that belongs at the center of this anniversary: America cannot celebrate 250 years of democracy while dismantling the very voting rights Black people, especially Black women, spent generations fighting to secure.
Black men and Black women have always stood together in this struggle: partners in survival, in resistance, in building something lasting from very little. There is a particular kind of leadership that Black women have carried, though: in our homes, in our houses of worship, in our communities, and in the halls of power. We have raised the next generation of voters and organizers. We have held families together through economic terror and political violence. We have led, not despite those roles, but through them. The kitchen table has always been a seat of power. Black women knew it, even when the world refused to.
The story of American democracy is often told as one of gradual progress, a steady march toward a just, more perfect union. For Black women, the story looks different. It is a story of exclusion followed by struggle, progress followed by backlash, and rights won only after extraordinary sacrifice. More importantly, it is a story of people who refused to abandon democracy even when democracy abandoned them.
Black women have always understood that voting rights are not simply about casting a ballot. They are about power, representation, and belonging. Long before the passage of the Voting Rights Act, Black women were organizing based on these ideas. Activists such as Sojourner Truth, Mary Ann Shadd Cary, and Ida B. Wells recognized that political power was essential to freedom. When white suffrage organizations marginalized Black women to appease segregationists, these women built their own institutions, understanding that movements that excluded Black women could never fully deliver democracy.
It is taught in American history classes that the ratification of the 19th Amendment celebrated the moment women won the right to vote. For many Black women, however, it marked the beginning of another chapter in a much longer struggle. Across the South, literacy tests, poll taxes, intimidation, and racial violence continued to keep Black people from the ballot box. While the law changed, reality did not. We understand now what we understood then; that rights secured on paper mean little when they cannot be exercised in practice.
That understanding has shaped generations of activism over the last 250 years. Black women organized through churches, civic organizations, mutual aid societies, and political clubs. They taught citizenship classes, led voter registration drives, challenged discriminatory policies, and built community power. Leaders such as Septima Clark, Ella Baker, Shirley Chisholm, and Rosa Parks became symbols of that work, but they represented thousands of women whose names rarely appear in textbooks. Together, they transformed the fight for voting rights from a legal debate into a moral movement.
When Fannie Lou Hamer told the nation she was “sick and tired of being sick and tired,” she was speaking to a reality Black Americans knew well. The constant burden of proving one’s worthiness for rights that should already belong to every citizen is a problem. Yet, Hamer’s words were never about surrender. They were a demand for accountability. Like John Lewis, who later called on Americans to make “good trouble, necessary trouble,” Hamer understood that democracy advances only when ordinary people are willing to challenge injustice.
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was the result of that challenge. It was not a gift from Washington. It was won through organizing, sacrifice, and courage. It transformed American politics by removing barriers that had denied Black citizens meaningful participation for generations. The law helped produce dramatic increases in voter registration, representation, and political engagement. It brought America closer to its democratic ideals than at any point in its history.
Which makes this moment all the more troubling.
As we turn 250 years old, the protections secured through the Voting Rights Act have been steadily weakened. The Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby County v. Holder eliminated federal oversight of jurisdictions with histories of racial discrimination. States quickly moved to implement new restrictions on voting access. More recently, in Louisiana v. Callais, the court weakened Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, threatening one of the last major safeguards against racial vote dilution.
At the very moment America is celebrating 250 years of democracy, it is retreating from one of the most effective tools ever created to protect democratic participation. Black women recognize this pattern because we have lived it before. Every major advance in voting rights has been met by efforts to restrict them. Every expansion of democracy has been followed by attempts to narrow it. The lesson of our history is that progress is never permanent.
Leaders such as Stacey Abrams rebuilt Georgia’s political landscape from the ground up. LaTosha Brown and Black Voters Matter have activated communities that were written off. Melanie Campbell and the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation have anchored Black civic power for decades. Shavon Arline-Bradley carries forward the legacy of Dr. Dorothy Height, who led the National Council of Negro Women for four decades, and never stopped demanding that Black women be counted at every table.
Behind every one of these names are thousands of organizers whose names will never trend. They stuff envelopes and knock on doors, hold vigils, drive elders to the polls, file lawsuits, train poll workers, and stay up late running the math on turnout models. They do it because they understand what Ida Wells understood a century ago: Someone must do the work. They continue this work today to protect our rights.
At 250 years, America’s story cannot be told without Black women. Not because we were always welcomed into it, but because we refused to be erased from it.
Our democracy has never advanced on its own. It has only ever moved when someone made good trouble. When someone stood in the way of injustice and refused to move. When someone organized, testified, marched, registered, ran, and came back the next day to do it again.
Black women have been making that trouble for 250 years.
We are not done.
This is not a remembrance. It is a call.
The good trouble is not finished, and neither are we.
Glynda C. Carr is president and CEO of Higher Heights for America, the leading national organization dedicated to building Black women’s political power and leadership. www.higherheightsforamerica.org.
