Abbie Van Sickle for the NYT:

One woman made national news when she protested the Covid-19 vaccine at her local City Council. Another is a member of the Trumpettes, a group of women united in their ardent support for the president. A third is a retired grocery salesman who said he didn’t remember signing up to be involved in a lawsuit.

The three are among the 12 Louisiana voters at the center of a case set to be heard by the Supreme Court on Wednesday that could gut what remains of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the landmark civil-rights-era legislation.

In January 2024, the group filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of Louisiana’s congressional district map, arguing state lawmakers had discriminated against them as white voters by impermissibly taking race into account when they drafted the map after the 2020 census.

Since then, they’ve been referred to in court filings merely as the “non-African-American” voters.

Plaintiffs in such weighty Supreme Court cases often become the public faces of major issues in American life, their names forever tied to the 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.

Not so in the Louisiana case. The landmark case, on whether the Constitution permits race to be used as a factor in carving congressional districts, has had no public face.

None of the plaintiffs testified at a three-day trial in federal court, according to transcripts. The legal briefs list their names but say nothing about their lives or the reasons each chose to participate in the case, aside from assertions that each “suffered unlawful, intentional discrimination based on race.”…