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Otis Wilson had enough with talking and decided to go to court.

His Louisiana town of St. Francisville, north of Baton Rouge, had long elected alderpersons as at-large representatives for a single, town-wide district. In places where elections are racially polarized, that kind of voting system can result in a white majority's votes drowning out the ballots of voters of color, 

“I filed a lawsuit because we had no Blacks at all on the council. And I tried to talk to the council and the mayor to work something out, and it didn’t,” says Wilson, a now-retired school bus driver, who led a group of other Black voters to sue St. Francisville officials in 1992.

 that private individuals and groups have brought to enforce protections against racial discrimination under the federal Voting Rights Act, which then-President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law 60 years ago this week.

, St. Francisville ultimately agreed that the town had violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and switched to alderperson elections with multiple districts.

“It wouldn't have happened” without the pressure of his lawsuit, says Wilson, a onetime candidate for alderperson who was later elected as a Democratic member of his Louisiana parish's police jury, a local governing board. “If you didn’t go further, it just wouldn’t happen.”

The legal path that allowed Wilson to fight against the dilution of his and other Black voters' collective power at the ballot box, however, may be ending soon, as a novel legal argument makes its way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Republican state officials in at least 15 states

 contend that private individuals and groups do not have the right to sue to enforce Section 2 because they are not explicitly named in 

. Only the head of the Justice Department, they argue, can bring this kind of lawsuit.

North Dakota legislative redistricting case

 that was brought by two tribal nations. A federal appeals court ruled against the Native American voters, and the case may be up for a full review soon at the Supreme Court. The justices may also be preparing to take up a broader question about the constitutionality of Section 2 protections, based on

Louisiana congressional redistricting case

At a time when the Justice Department under the Trump administration has 

 the department had brought when former President Joe Biden was in office, the prospect of voters of color no longer being allowed to bring their own cases has supporters of the Voting Rights Act concerned about the law's survival.

“I think it’s going to be real terrible,” Wilson says about the possibility of losing a private right of action under the law. “It’s just going to be disastrous because if we can't do that, well, we just have no chance of fairness.”

An estimated 92 percent of Section 2 lawsuits have been brought by private individuals and groups since 1965

While the Voting Rights Act is widely considered one of the most effective civil rights laws in U.S. history, the exact scope of Section 2 lawsuits is difficult to quantify, largely because many historical court records have yet to be digitized and fully catalogued.

Still, estimates back up what has long been known in the legal world: Private individuals and groups, not the Justice Department, have brought the overwhelming majority of Section 2 cases.

"Private plaintiffs have been party to 96.4 percent of Section 2 claims that produced published opinions since 1982, and the sole litigants in 86.7 percent of these decisions," 

 in a 2024 Michigan Law Review Online article summing up estimates by the 

Voting Rights Initiative at the University of Michigan Law School

, which focused on cases filed after Congress last amended Section 2.

Separately, going back to 1965, Morgan Kousser, a professor emeritus at the California Institute of Technology and historian of the Voting Rights Act, has tallied more than 1,800 Section 2 lawsuits, including those that ended with settlements. Kousser estimates private individuals and groups, on their own, have brought around 92 percent of Section 2 cases in total.

"This could be an underestimate. It's hard to find earlier cases, settlements and consent decrees," Kousser explains. "Certainly counting the settlements as well and looking at how many of them are the result of private lawsuits makes clearer what the stakes are in destroying the private right of action."

How a Supreme Court ruling against a private right of action under Section 2 can have a "domino effect"

So far, the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, whose rulings apply to 

, is the country's only federal appeals circuit that has found no private right of action under Section 2.

 in the North Dakota redistricting case, 

 have expressed openness to ending a private right of action for Section 2. If a majority rules that way, presidential administrations could effectively decide when the Voting Rights Act is enforced. Franita Tolson, an election law expert and dean of the University of Southern California Gould School of Law, sees that as "basically subjecting the protections of the act to political whim."

"This case is a cloud over this anniversary because essentially what it means is that it depends on who wins the election in order to make sure voters are protected," Tolson says. "And that is certainly not what Congress intended in passing the Voting Rights Act in 1965 or subsequently amending it so many times."

a report released before the law was amended

 with bipartisan support in 1982, the Senate Judiciary Committee echoed 

 by underscoring "the existence of the private right of action under Section 2, as has been clearly intended by Congress since 1965."

The 8th Circuit panel for the North Dakota case 

, however, that because this kind of explicit language did not end up in the text of the Voting Rights Act, Section 2 "does not unambiguously confer an individual right" that private individuals and groups can enforce by suing.

It all may be setting up what Tolson fears will be a "domino effect" on the sections of the law that survived the Supreme Court's 

, which effectively dismantled key Section 5 protections for minority voters in places with a history of racial discrimination.

"If there is no private right of action under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act is basically dead," Tolson says. "I would consider it the final nail in the coffin. Given 

 and what this decision could potentially do, there won't be much left for the Voting Rights Act — words on a page."

 that private individuals and groups in its circuit's seven states also have no right to sue to enforce the law's Section 208 protections for voters with a disability or limited language proficiency. The decision is 

 by the immigrant advocacy group Arkansas United.

 have reintroduced the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act in part to ensure that an "aggrieved person" has the right to bring a lawsuit under the law. But with Republicans in control of both Congress and the White House, the bills are not expected to become law.

Native American voters in North Dakota and Black voters in Alabama are waiting for clarity from the courts

Amid the court rulings and legal discussions, Jamie Azure, chair of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, is trying to stay focused on what drove his tribal nation to partner with the Spirit Lake Tribe to sue North Dakota's secretary of state.

"We just want that proper representation. We want to be able to choose who represents us," Azure says.

In court, the two tribal nations had successfully fought for a new state legislative map to replace one drawn by Republican lawmakers. The previous map, a federal judge found, violated Section 2 by diluting the collective power of Native American voters in the state.

Now having to appeal to the Supreme Court to ensure their right to bring this lawsuit in the first place, Azure says he remains undeterred and mindful of how the Civil Rights Movement helped pave this legal path for tribal nations today to fight for their voting rights.

"Without those sacrifices made and those trails being blazed, nothing we're doing today would be possible," Azure says. "Who would have ever thought that as a rez kid growing up that I would be one of the figureheads leading a charge going to the Supreme Court? It's very surreal."

Evan Milligan has been in that position before.

As the lead plaintiff in a Section 2 congressional redistricting lawsuit that Black voters brought against Alabama, Milligan's name has become shorthand for the 2023 Supreme Court decision in which a majority of justices, in an unexpected move, 

upheld the court's past rulings on Section 2

But Republican officials in Alabama are preparing to once again appeal the case to the high court. And in a 

 for the North Dakota case last month, the state's attorney general, Steve Marshall, argued against a private right of action under Section 2.

Milligan tells NPR that while he disagrees "wholeheartedly," he thinks it's a "smart strategy" that he compares to football.

"We look at the numbers of Section 2 voting rights lawsuits, and if I'm on the football team that's opposing that and I say, 'Wow, this play here is killing us,' well, then, of course, I would attack the play," explains Milligan, now a senior fellow with the Western States Center, a civil rights organization that advocates for inclusive democracy.

But the problem facing Republican state officials arguing against a private right of action under Section 2, Milligan notes, is that they're "asking federal judges to discount and ignore congressional legislation and years of legal decisions that these same courts have made."

Spokespeople for the offices of the Alabama and North Dakota state attorneys general did not respond to NPR's requests for comment.

With so many fronts in the battle over the Voting Rights Act, Azure of the Turtle Mountain tribe says he hopes that their lawsuit at least sends a message to his nation — that their vote matters.

"Sometimes that's hard to tell people because we've had so many generations of distrust with the federal government, with the state government, now even with the tribal governments. But we're trying to be transparent. We're trying to show people what we can do," Azure says. "And I really hope that at the end of the day, that message also gets put out to everybody — the people elected into power should not be able to rig the systems to exclude certain types of voters from having an impact."

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Sixty years after the Voting Rights Act became a landmark law against racial discrimination, legal challenges heading to the Supreme Court could curtail its remaining protections for minority voters.

60 years later, Voting Rights Act protections for minority voters face new threats

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