From a Rastafarian’s shaved dreadlocks to gutted voting maps, the high court’s conservative majority issued a series of devastating decisions this week with far-reaching consequences for Black communities.

In a single week, the U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative majority issued three rulings that legal advocates say collectively threaten the religious freedom, civil rights, and political power of Black Americans. The decisions — one stripping a Rastafarian inmate of his right to sue over forcibly shaved dreadlocks, one letting stand a landmark ruling on race and police encounters, and one amplifying the reach of an already devastating blow to the Voting Rights Act — paint a troubling picture of where the Court is heading as its current term draws to a close.

A Man’s Faith, His Hair, and a Law That Left Him Without Recourse

The most visceral of the three rulings involves Damon Landor, a devout Rastafarian from New Orleans who was serving a five-month sentence on a drug-related charge in 2020.
Four months into his sentence, Landor was transferred to the Raymond LaBorde Correctional Institution in Avoyelles Parish. A devout Rastafarian, he had followed the dictates of his religion and, as part of a Nazarite vow, had grown his hair for 20 years without cutting it.

When he entered the prison system, he carried a copy of an appeals court ruling holding that cutting religious prisoners’ dreadlocks violated federal law. At his first two stops, officials respected his beliefs. But when he got to the Raymond Laborde Correctional Center for the final three weeks of his term, a prison guard took the copy of the ruling Landor carried and tossed it in the trash. Then the warden ordered guards to cut his dreadlocks. While two guards restrained him, a third shaved his head to the scalp.

Everyone agreed it was wrong. Even the state of Louisiana said so.
The state did not contest that Landor was mistreated and said in court papers that the prison system has changed its grooming policy to ensure that other Rastafarian prisoners do not face similar situations.
But Landor didn’t just want a policy change — he wanted accountability. He sued the prison warden and guards under the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, known as RLUIPA, the federal law designed to protect the religious rights of incarcerated people.

The 6-3 Decision: Sympathy Without Consequence

The Court ruled 6-3 that Landor cannot seek damages under RLUIPA. The court was divided along ideological lines, with conservatives in the majority and liberals dissenting.
Writing for the majority,
Justice Neil Gorsuch said that RLUIPA, which applies to any local prison that accepts any federal funding, does not allow for claims against individual officials. The only way the suit could go forward would be if the officials had consented to face liability under the federal law, and they had not.

The logic, stripped down: RLUIPA was passed under Congress’s spending power, making it more like a contract between the federal government and state institutions than a direct mandate.
The individual guards, the warden, and the other officers who shaved Landor’s head never signed anything. They never personally agreed to face lawsuits under RLUIPA.
Therefore, the majority said, they cannot be held personally liable.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was having none of it.
In dissent, the three liberal justices called it a “peculiar position,” with Jackson writing: “Today’s decision magically transforms a federal statute into an invitation to be accepted or declined, deemed binding only if each particular defendant has explicitly agreed to be penalized.”

Jackson also warned that “prisoners like Landor who suffer violations of their religious freedom in state prisons — no matter how blatant — will often be left remediless.”

Landor’s attorney, Zack Tripp, put it plainly:
“It means that inmates whose religious rights are violated by state prison officials will have no damages remedy, no matter how egregious the wrong.”
Landor himself said in a statement:
“I am disappointed but not defeated. What happened to me violated my faith and my dignity. I will continue pursuing accountability. What happened to me should not happen to anyone else.”

Notably,
the Trump administration had backed Landor in the dispute, warning in court papers that if inmates could not obtain money damages in actions against government officials sued in their individual capacities, it would undermine RLUIPA’s enforcement.
Even
Republican Senators Ted Cruz of Texas and Ted Budd of North Carolina filed briefs supporting him, as did the conservative Becket Fund for Religious Liberty and various religious groups.
None of it was enough.

Race, Police, and the Meaning of “Reasonable”

The second ruling arrived a day earlier, on June 22, when the Court declined to hear the case of United States v. Donte J. Carter.
The case involved a 2020 stop in Washington, D.C., where police searched a Black man named Donte Carter and recovered a stolen firearm. The D.C. Court of Appeals ruled that the stop was unlawful and threw out Carter’s conviction.

The central legal question was whether a person’s race can factor into the Fourth Amendment analysis of whether they were “seized” by police.
The appeals court accepted the argument that, as a Black man, Carter might reasonably feel — based on his experiences — that he was not free to walk away from police, whereas a different person might perceive the encounter differently. This ruling thus allows for a race-conscious determination of what is reasonable concerning a person’s interactions with police.

By declining to intervene, the Supreme Court is allowing this race-conscious standard, which could lead to legal protections being granted more strictly for Black people in circumstances like those Carter faced. This is a surprising outcome for a conservative-dominated Supreme Court that has been skeptical of other race-based legal protections.

The Dissent From Alito and Thomas

Not everyone on the right was satisfied.
Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissented from the refusal to take up the case. The two conservative justices warned that the lower-court ruling could force officers and courts to create different legal rules based on race.
Alito wrote:
“It is dangerous to allow an individual to be treated differently based on statistics, studies, or expert testimony that purports to show that members of the racial or ethnic group to which he belongs are more likely to act in a certain way than are members of other groups.”

Civil rights advocates see it differently. The D.C. court’s ruling acknowledges what decades of data, lived experience, and documented policing history have made clear: Black Americans do not always experience police encounters the same way as white Americans, and the law should reflect that reality. By letting the D.C. ruling stand, the Court has at least allowed that principle to remain in place for now.

Voting Rights: A Blow That Keeps Spreading

The third ruling is less about a new decision and more about the cascading consequences of one already made. On April 29, 2026, the Court issued its landmark 6-3 decision in Louisiana v. Callais, which
struck down a Black-majority district in Louisiana’s congressional map as an unconstitutional gerrymander and altered the court’s interpretation of the Voting Rights Act.

A 6-3 Supreme Court decision in Louisiana v. Callais eviscerated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and opened the door for states to enact discriminatory voting maps and laws. The decision — which contradicts the text of the Voting Rights Act, the will of Congress, and the Constitution — is one of the most consequential setbacks for our multiracial democracy in a generation.
Justice Elena Kagan wrote in dissent, joined by Justices Sotomayor and Jackson, that the majority opinion by Justice Alito had rendered Section 2 of the VRA
“all but a dead letter.”

The ripple effects arrived fast.
Several southern states initiated redistricting in the weeks after the decision, claiming their existing maps with majority-minority districts were unconstitutional under the Court’s new standard. Tennessee Republicans quickly drew and passed a new map that eliminated the sole majority-minority House district in their state. Florida legislators passed a redistricting bill the very day Callais was decided.
Mississippi and North Dakota cases were also sent back to lower courts for review under the new standard.

This week, the Court compounded the damage by
allowing Alabama to hold its 2026 elections using a map with redrawn voting districts that had been found by a lower court to be racially discriminatory. The order marks the first test of the Callais ruling, and the Alabama map eliminates a majority-Black voting district, scattering its residents over three districts that will likely lead to Republicans gaining an additional seat in Congress.

“The Supreme Court’s decision gives cover to Alabama and others to deliberately and openly discriminate against Black voters without fear of any consequence,” said Deuel Ross, director of litigation at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.

What Is at Stake for 2026 and Beyond

Harvard Kennedy School Professor of Public Policy Maya Sen put the consequences bluntly.
This decision paints a bleak picture for the future of Black representation in elected offices, particularly in the South. Across the region, race is a very strong predictor of how people vote — Southern whites tend to be among the most conservative and Republican-leaning in the country, while Southern Blacks are among the most reliably Democratic. As a result, Republican state legislators throughout the South will have a strong incentive to eliminate congressional districts that currently elect Black representatives.

Prompted by the ruling, some state legislatures are already considering or have enacted modifications to their redistricting maps that eliminate majority-minority districts for the upcoming 2026 congressional elections.
The path forward for challenging those maps just got significantly harder. Under the new Callais standard, challengers must now prove not just that a map dilutes minority voting power, but that it reflects intentional racial discrimination — a much higher bar that experts say will be difficult to clear.

What Can Be Done: The Road Forward

These rulings are not the final word — they are a call to action. Here’s what advocates and legal experts say needs to happen:

• Congress must act on RLUIPA.
  One of Landor’s lawyers noted some encouragement in the awareness the case raised. But he added: “Congress could also take action to amend the law to ensure that prisoners whose religious rights are violated are able to obtain damages.”
• Pass new federal voting rights protections.
  The NAACP Legal Defense Fund is calling on states to enact State Voting Rights Acts and on Congress to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and the Freedom to Vote Act.
• States can act independently.
  Nine states already have their own Voting Rights Acts: Colorado, Minnesota, Connecticut, New York, Virginia, Oregon, Washington, Illinois, and California.
  More should follow.
• Vote in 2026.
  Today’s ruling should be a wake-up call that we can’t take a free and fair 2026 election for granted.
  The composition of Congress after the midterms will determine whether any of these legislative fixes are possible.

The Bigger Picture

Taken together, these three decisions reveal a troubling pattern.
Several 6-3 splits in a single week provide a telling snapshot of the high court as its latest term comes to a close. Rulings authored by the GOP-appointed supermajority show a narrow view of people’s rights, while the Democratic-appointed justices are confined to sounding alarms in dissent.

The Rastafarian ruling tells incarcerated people that a federal law meant to protect them has no teeth when enforced against the individual guards who violate it. The police encounter ruling leaves in place one small protection for Black Americans navigating stops — but only because the Court chose not to act, not because it agreed. And the voting rights damage is still unfolding, state by state, district by district, with the 2026 midterms bearing down.

This is the moment for communities, advocates, and lawmakers to respond — loudly, persistently, and at the ballot box. The Court has spoken. Now it’s our turn.

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