In the high-stakes fight over Black voting rights, the only two Black members of the U.S. Supreme Court are split in the decision concerning “Allen vs. Milligan.” The court ruled that Alabama violated the Voting Rights Act by failing to draw a second majority-Black congressional district.

Chief Justice John Roberts, said the high court declined to accept arguments from Republican officials in Alabama that would have made it more difficult to challenge congressional and state legislative maps that dilute the power of minority voters under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. 

Justices Brett Kavanaugh, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson joined Roberts in the majority, while Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Amy Coney Barrett dissented.

In his dissenting nearly 50-page opinion, Thomas wrote that the court’s decision has turned Section 2 — the part of the Voting Rights Act that bans gerrymandering based on race — into “nothing more than a racial entitlement to roughly proportional control of elective offices — limited only by feasibility — wherever different racial groups consistently prefer different candidates.”

Thomas said the Voting Rights Act doesn’t require Alabama “intentionally redraw its longstanding congressional districts so that black voters can control a number of seats roughly proportional to the black share of the State’s population.” Alabama’s population is 27% Black. 

At arguments in October, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson scoffed at the idea that race could not be part of the equation.

Jackson, the court’s first Black woman justice, said that constitutional amendments passed after the Civil War and the Voting Rights Act a century later were intended to do the same thing, make Black Americans “equal to White citizens.”