Essence Festival speakers decry Supreme Court rulings on abortion, guns, pollution | National Politics

On the heels of several big U.S. Supreme Court decisions affecting abortion, guns and industrial pollution, civil rights activists gathered Saturday at the Essence Festival of Culture in New Orleans to encourage voting amid what one panelist called “a civil war.”

Rev. Al Sharpton said he feared the high court’s rulings foreshadow a return to the “states’ rights model” which he deemed “an assault on civil rights, which is an assault on Black people at a disproportionate level,” Sharpton said. “We are fighting for our very existence.”

Marc Morial, president of the National Urban League and former mayor of New Orleans, moderated the panel discussion. He said the court’s decisions marked a steep loss of progress.

“They are rolling back progress and steps that were won due to the hard work of generations of those that went before us fighting in the courts, fighting in the streets, fighting in the legislature, fighting in the Congress,” Morial said.

50 years of precedent

Janai Nelson, president and director-counsel of NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, said the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, which overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling that established a constitutional right to abortion, reversed 50 years of precedent and illustrates the dominating views of “white property-owning men and their conception of freedom and life and liberty and privacy.”

“This particular group of justices [who] are the six-person majority in all of these heinous decisions are hellbent on advancing an agenda that is anti-democratic and frankly anti-Black, and I think we just need to name it and say it,” Nelson said.

Melanie Campbell, president and CEO of National Coalition on Black Civic Participation, urged young people to commence a “summer of organizing.”

“If you don’t realize, we’re in a civil war right now,” she said. “It wasn’t states’ rights” that expanded civil liberties, she said. “It was federal intervention.”

‘Righteous fight’

Damon Hewitt, president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, said there were likely Black women in the audience who were affected by the Dobbs ruling, as well as recent rulings on gun laws and environmental protections.

“I don’t advocate violence, but I know what a righteous fight is all about,” he said. “In our community, when faced with a chance to have a righteous fight, we don’t shrink, we don’t turn around, we don’t turn away. We went right into it.”

Derek Johnson, president of the NAACP, said that the court decisions could be traced to the 2000 election of George Bush as p president and the 2016 election of Donald Trump, as both appointed Supreme Court justices who undid civil rights advances. He urged the audience to rally for voter turnout.

Eye on the Senate

“We have to make sure that we increase the number [of members] in the Senate – regardless of parties – who are aligned with the Black agenda of protecting our rights, our access to voting, the rights of women, [who] ensure that our communities are not polluted,” Johnson said.

Had Black voter turnout increased just 1% in 2016, Johnson said, Trump would not have won the election. He added that one third of the Senate could flip in the fall 2022 elections, and said there has of late been high voter turnout among Black women but not among Black men.

“Black folks, we are the conscious of this nation and must show up to polls in ways we have never before,” he said.