The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. cautiously praised the hard-won Voting Rights Act of 1965 as a “great step forward” toward removing obstacles that kept Black Americans from voting.

It was. But this week, in striking down a voter redistricting map in Louisiana, the U.S. Supreme Court has taken that embattled law and the movement that marched and campaigned for it on a disastrous step backward.

Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker expressed the sentiments of many Americans, particularly Democrats, saying of the high court ruling, “It is an attack on a crown jewel of our democracy.”

As an old-timer, I fondly recall how the passage of the Voting Rights Act intensified the landmark desegregation reforms in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by prohibiting discrimination at the polling place.

Now, the Supreme Court’s rollback of voting rights strikes me like another backlash similar to the one that ended Reconstruction, the era of reform in the tumultuous post-Civil War period that focused on rebuilding the South and defining the rights of some 4 million newly freed African Americans, including some of my ancestors.

The white political elite of the former Confederacy assiduously fought the reforms that liberated African Americans, particularly the right to vote, introducing poll taxes and literacy tests, as well as resorting to terrorism by the likes of the Ku Klux Klan to turn back the clock.

After a decade-long struggle between pro-Reconstruction Radical Republicans against recidivist “Redeemers,” who sought to re-establish white supremacy in the South, the era ended in the Compromise of 1877, aka the Corrupt Bargain, which settled the closely contended presidential election of 1876. Republican Rutherford B. Hayes was given the presidency in exchange for the end of Reconstruction.

The cost was paid by Southern Blacks, who lost whatever claim they had in the South to civil rights, especially voting rights, and would not return another African American to Congress until almost a century later.

The central issue of Louisiana v. Callais, the case the Supreme Court ruled on last week, was whether Louisiana was justified in drawing a second congressional district where a majority of voters are racial minorities. The state of Louisiana has six congressional districts, and one-third of its population identifies as Black. Courts had found that, under established Voting Rights Act tests, the state should include a second majority-minority district.

But Louisiana drew only one, so minority plaintiffs sued. Lower courts found that the VRA required Louisiana to draw a second majority-minority district. But after the state complied, white plaintiffs sued, saying the second district drawn with racial goals in mind violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.

States under the law are not supposed to enact rules that make it harder for racial minorities to elect their candidates of choice. In 1982, Congress passed an amendment, signed by President Ronald Reagan, stipulating that the Voting Rights Act could be invoked to ensure adequate minority representation. The amendment seemed to work, leading to a steady rise in Black representatives in Congress.

Until now.

The court’s conservative majority maintained that it has upheld the landmark law, as liberal justices accused the court of gutting it. Either way, in striking down the Louisiana voting map as a racial gerrymander, this outcome could influence how other states defend or challenge maps, too.

The high court’s 6-3 decision was celebrated as a “BIG WIN” by President Donald Trump, who has been pushing Republicans to alter electoral maps in a desperate effort to maintain a hold on the House in the upcoming midterm elections.

While Trump may find the court’s ruling convenient, many Americans see it as partisan and bad jurisprudence.

I’m not ready to declare a new Corrupt Bargain has been foisted upon us, but without squinting too hard, you could have seen this coming from a mile away. A certain kind of conservative has been trying to repeal or gut the Voting Rights and Civil Rights acts ever since they were passed, and that kind of conservative now runs the Republican Party.

Callais likely will make it harder to bring successful claims without stronger evidence of intent — which, legal experts point out, is almost impossible to prove without extraordinary mind-reading abilities.

That’s an old, contentious and questionable standard for a discrimination complaint. And its revival is an old and unfortunately effective way, as critics like Justice Elena Kagan argued in her dissent, to engage in “racial vote dilution” and “cracking” of minority voting districts, threatening minority electoral influence and racial fairness.

Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion on behalf of the conservative majority, as CNN’s court analyst Joan Biskupic pointed out, “leaned heavily on the view Roberts expressed in his 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder that voting safeguards enshrined in 1965 were no longer essential to America.”

In other words, the civil rights reforms have had too many successes for us to require much policing by civil rights laws.

It’s hard not to be reminded of the ignominious death of the Reconstruction Era. Except this time the point is not to deny Black citizens the vote; it is, quite transparently, to make their votes count for nothing.

(E-mail Clarence Page at clarence47page@gmail.com.)