In March 1965, Martin Luther King, Jr. led a civil rights march in support of voting rights in the Jim Crow South across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, to the state capitol in Montgomery. That march, immortalized by the bloody repression committed by Alabama state troopers on the bridge, led directly to the passage of the historic Voting Rights Act that put an end to Jim Crow voting restrictions. Fifty-seven years later, on Oct. 4, the Supreme Court will hear arguments from the state of Alabama that what remains of that Voting Rights Act should be gutted.

After the 2020 Census, Alabama designed new Congressional maps that swept up Black voters across the state and packed them into just one majority-Black district, dispersing the rest in majority-white districts that tilt heavily Republican. The state was left with six such districts and only one majority-Black district in a state where over a quarter (26.8%) of voters are Black.

A group of Black voters and the Alabama chapter of the NAACP and Greater Birmingham Ministries sued, arguing this was a violation of the Voting Rights Act. But Alabama Secretary of State John Merrill has an aggressive legal theory. He argues in Merrill v. Milligan that legislative district maps challenged under the Voting Rights Acts Section 2 for failing to provide equal representation to racial minorities through racial vote dilution should be judged solely by a race-blind standard.

The race-blind standard Alabama wants the court to accept is based on the average result of numerous algorithmically generated district maps that do not take race into account. While the use of computer-generated maps is common in partisan gerrymandering cases, it would be a new development in Voting Rights Act cases. Perhaps that is because applying a computer-generated race-blind test to a race-conscious law goes against the purpose of the law.

If the court doesnt accept this new race-blind standard, Alabama wants the court to rule that the Voting Rights Act no longer applies to the redistricting of single-member districts, which would produce a similar result.

Its a frontal attack on the body of precedent thats existed for the last 40 years with respect to Section 2, Nicholas Stephanopoulos, a Harvard Law School professor, told HuffPost.

The arguments put forward by Alabama, and backed by the Republican Party , would overturn at least 40 years of Supreme Court precedent on how courts should judge Section 2 redistricting complaints. They fly against the history and meaning of the Voting Rights Act, which was enacted to prevent states from restricting access to the ballot for racial minorities and provide for their equal representation.