One made national news when she protested the Covid-19 vaccine in front of her local city council. Another is a member of the Trumpettes, a group of women united in their ardent support of the president. A third is a retired grocery store clerk who said he doesn’t remember signing up to be involved in a lawsuit.
The three are among 12 Louisiana voters at the center of a case the Supreme Court will hear Wednesday that could gut what remains of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the landmark legislation of the civil rights era.
In January 2024, the group filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of Louisiana’s congressional district map, arguing that state lawmakers discriminated against them as white voters by unacceptable consideration of race when they drew the map after the 2020 census.
Since then, they have been referred to in court filings simply as “non-African American” voters.
Plaintiffs in such important Supreme Court cases often become the public faces of major issues in American life, their names forever linked to historic legal challenges: Fred Korematsu became a civil rights icon for resisting an executive order that forced Japanese Americans into internment camps during World War II. Mildred and Richard Loving successfully challenged Virginia’s ban on interracial marriage in a landmark case.
This is not the case in the Louisiana case. The landmark case, over whether the Constitution allows the use of race as a factor in drawing congressional districts, has had no public face.
None of the plaintiffs testified during a three-day trial in federal court, transcripts show. The legal briefs list their names but say nothing about their lives or why each chose to participate in the case, other than claims that each “suffered unlawful and intentional discrimination based on race.”
“I really don’t know who these people are,” said Stuart C. Naifeh, director of the redistricting project at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which was involved in the litigation and will defend the map before the Supreme Court.
Plaintiffs in a lawsuit must be able to demonstrate that they were directly harmed by the party they are suing and that there is a possibility that a court could remedy that harm. When a case reaches the Supreme Court, the justices deal with questions of law, not factual disputes. Although some plaintiffs attend Supreme Court proceedings, they do not testify or participate in the proceedings.
The New York Times used public records, social media and court records to locate and contact several of the voters at the heart of the case. They come from big cities like Baton Rouge, Shreveport and Lafayette and small towns like Gonzales, population 13,000, known as the Jambalaya capital of the world. A man is 38 years old. Two plaintiffs, a man and a woman, are 81 years old.
It’s unclear exactly how they came together, but they are represented by a local Louisiana attorney who has challenged the use of race in electoral map drawing for decades.
Their relative anonymity demonstrates the reality of how modern, landmark Supreme Court cases often come together. Some of the most consequential cases are crafted from the start by lawyers and advocacy groups in hopes of achieving a particular legal outcome rather than arising organically from plaintiffs who claim they will be most affected by the outcome.
Of course, this strategy is not new. Cases challenging school segregation, anti-sodomy laws and abortion rights rely largely on lawyers’ ability to find the right plaintiffs. But the human stories at the heart of these cases have often taken center stage.
The Voting Rights Act case will be known in court and in history as Callais, the last name of the lead plaintiff, 60-year-old Phillip Callais.
Reached by telephone, Mr. Callais, who calls himself Bert, asked questions of the lawyers in the case, as did several other plaintiffs. These lawyers declined to comment.
A veteran living near Baton Rouge, Mr. Callais testified before a committee of Louisiana lawmakers tasked with creating the new electoral map in January 2024.
At the time, lawmakers were working on a tight schedule to arrive at a map they could all agree on. They had tried once before, passing a map in 2022 containing just one majority-Black district, even though the 2020 census showed Black people making up a growing share of the state’s eligible voters. A group of Black voters sued, and after a weeklong hearing in June 2022, a federal judge determined that these plaintiffs would likely succeed in proving that the state’s map violated the Voting Rights Act.
Under that law, courts said states were prohibited from drawing electoral maps that would illegally dilute the voting power of minorities.
If they couldn’t agree on a new version, state lawmakers risked facing the possibility of a judge drawing the map for them.
Wearing a blue and white shirt and glasses, Mr. Callais sat at a wooden table during the Louisiana House committee meeting, video shows. He told lawmakers he had been a member of an elections oversight board.
He acknowledged the state’s troubled history of racial segregation, telling lawmakers that he had “supported desegregation when my grandparents and my parents didn’t exactly do so, given the times in the ’60s and early ’70s.”
But he questioned whether lawmakers would have the courage “to stand up to a federal judge” in the voting map case. He said he views the state’s attempt to create two majority-black districts as another type of race-based segregation.
When Mr. Callais finished speaking, a man in a dark gray suit and tie took his place. He introduced himself as Paul Hurd, a lawyer who has led voting-related challenges for 30 years across the country.
“I’ve never represented anyone other than the voters,” Mr. Hurd said. “I believe in compact, contiguous districts for white, black and Asian voters who live together, work together and go to school together.”
He called the map under consideration — including a second majority-black district that snaked diagonally across the state from southeast to northwest — a “racial gerrymander,” urging them to “defend the Constitution” and reject it.
Instead, lawmakers passed the new map the next day and sent it to Jeff Landry, the state’s Republican governor. He had repeatedly lobbied the state legislature to pass it, rather than allowing “an authoritarian federal judge” to do it for him.
The lawmaker who introduced the bill, Glen Womack, a Republican state representative, asserted that “politics determined this map,” as opposed to race. Republican lawmakers argued they designed it to protect three valuable incumbent Republicans: House Speaker Mike Johnson; Steve Scalise, the majority leader; and Rep. Julia Letlow.
Within two weeks, Mr. Hurd filed a lawsuit, listing Mr. Callais and 11 other Louisianans, each described in the document as a voter who had been discriminated against by the new map. Mr. Hurd declined to speak about his plaintiffs.
One of them, Albert “Skip” Caissie Jr., 78, said in a telephone interview that he did not know he was involved in a Supreme Court case.
Mr. Caissie, who is retired from grocery sales and the Coast Guard reserve, speculated that he may have received “direct mail” regarding the voter map challenge. He said he supported the goals of the lawsuit and hoped the need for majority-minority districts was “something of the past.”
“We’re supposed to respect everyone for who they are, regardless of color,” he said, pointing to growing support for President Trump among black voters as a sign that race was not determining political leanings.
The husband of another complainant said in a phone call that he was unaware of the affair and did not believe his wife was involved. The plaintiff and her husband did not respond to subsequent messages.
One plaintiff, Candy Carroll Peavy of Shreveport, said at a 2021 city council meeting that the Biden administration was going door to door to “document unvaccinated Americans,” a popular conspiracy theory at the time. Ms. Peavy, 75, who also received local recognition for founding a chimpanzee sanctuary, did not respond to telephone messages seeking comment.
Another Shreveport resident, Elizabeth Ersoff, 60, was a Louisiana delegate to the Republican National Convention in 2024 and described herself on the Trumpettes’ website as “a die-hard Trumplican.” A man who identified himself as her husband told a reporter that he had been told not to talk about the affair.
Another plaintiff, also listed as living in Shreveport, has a familiar name: Mike Johnson. Mr. Johnson, the plaintiff, could not be located. A spokeswoman for House Speaker Mike Johnson said it wasn’t him.
The case went to the Supreme Court in June 2024, after a divided panel of three federal judges struck down the new map as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.
The justices stayed the lower court’s ruling, allowing the map to remain in place for the 2024 election, when voters in the newly created district elected Cleo Fields, a longtime Democratic figure in Baton Rouge.
The Supreme Court heard arguments in that case in March on whether Louisiana focused too much on race when drawing the map. The justices declined to issue an opinion and, in a rare move, presented the case for further argument.
The justices said they wanted to explore a broad question: Did Louisiana’s creation of the new majority-minority district violate the 14th and 15th Amendments? That made the case a critical test for the future of the Voting Rights Act.
In an email, Mr. Hurd said the current case was his fifth Supreme Court challenge to what he called “unconstitutional racial gerrymanders.” Among them, two cases in Louisiana, one in Virginia and one in Texas.
Mr. Hurd worked on the Bush v. Vera case in Texas in the 1990s with Edward Blum, a former stockbroker turned legal activist who became known for his work to remove consideration of race from certain aspects of American life and law.
In an interview, Mr. Blum said the case helped launch his own legal fight. In 2023, Mr. Blum won his race-conscious admissions challenge to Harvard and the University of North Carolina.
Mr. Blum, who is not involved in the Callais case, said he did not know the history of the plaintiffs in Wednesday’s case.
He described Mr. Hurd as “a one-man band.”
Julie Tate reports contributed.
