ST. LANDRY PARISH, Louisiana — When Patrick Guillory passes the St. Landry Parish courthouse, he looks at the sprawling oaks draped in Spanish moss and pictures the white men who threatened to hang his grandfather, Thomas Guillory, from one of them.
Thomas Guillory, now 95, descends from Indigenous, French, and African ancestors. He speaks Louisiana Creole and has never fully learned English. But to the white men threatening him, he was a Black man — and Black people were not meant to vote.
In the 1940s and ’50s, white mobs attacked Black people in Opelousas for attempting to register to vote. Amid that violence, no Black person voted in the city for more than a decade.
Now Thomas Guillory’s 41-year-old grandson is an organizer for the Louisiana Democratic Party, knocking on doors to persuade his neighbors in this 75% Black city to vote. Increasingly, they ask what’s in it for them.
That question has taken on new urgency since the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais. The ruling invalidated the majority-Black congressional district that included St. Landry Parish, weakened the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and threatened protections against racial discrimination in political representation nationwide.
Since the spring ruling, at least three majority-Black congressional districts have been dismantled across the South. Analysts predict that a half-dozen or more Black elected officials could lose their seats in November as a result.
In Opelousas, the court case has sharpened disagreements not only about how to protect Black political power, but if that power has ever been delivered enough and how Blackness should be wielded in a place where the Black identity has never been singular.
Patrick Guillory represents just one perspective of Black Creoles. From a Republican mayoral candidate to a middle-age, God-fearing Democrat who thinks America focuses too much on race, Black politics here expand beyond how they’re viewed at the national level.
Across Louisiana, 40,000 fewer Black residents are registered as Democrats than in 2016. A Capital B analysis of voter registration data found the steepest decline of Black Democrats in the Acadiana region where St. Landry is located. The drop was 32% sharper than the rest of the state.
Those losses alone do not establish a shift toward Republicans. But conversations with dozens of residents since 2024 revealed competing ideas about what their history requires of them now in the face of what advocates are calling the biggest attack on Black voting rights since the threats Thomas Guillory’s generation faced.
Their diverging beliefs are, as Rod Sias, a mayoral candidate and president of the local NAACP chapter, said, the product of a community struggling to decide what its members owe one another in a city where 40% of residents live in poverty. For him, the question facing the area after the Supreme Court case is more than a question of representation. It is one focused on how Black people should “respond to the violence of economic and social terrorism,” and how Black political solidarity is bound together, and toward what end.
A shared inheritance, unevenly held
Elbert Guillory shares Patrick Guillory’s surname, Black Creole roots, and determination to change the city, but not his party.
In the 1960s, he was removed from his student newspaper editor position at Southern University along with famed Black Panther Party activist Imam Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, formerly known as H. Rap Brown, for disparaging Louisiana Sen. Allen Ellender, a staunch segregationist who had voted against the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and opposed anti-lynching legislation.
Today, the 82-year-old is running for mayor as a Republican and is staunchly anti-immigrant, against the “welfare state,” and is “not disappointed” that the Voting Rights Act is being weakened. Living on land where his grandfather was enslaved in the 1850s, he blames Democrats and what he calls their “anti-traditional” policies for the poverty, broken streets, and contaminated tap water that shape Black life in Louisiana.
When he switched parties in 2013, he framed the decision as a question of freedom.
“It is the right decision — not only for me — but for all my brothers and sisters in the Black community,” he said at the time.
The conversation about what is best for the “Black community,” or even what it consists of, has been a contested one for generations in the Bayou State.
Across South Louisiana, the Creole and Cajun identity has distinguished people by language and culture, but also by complexion, property, and whether their ancestors were enslaved or free.
Historian and genealogist Alex Lee has spent two decades tracing Black Creole and Cajun families in St. Landry Parish. He sees some of today’s political differences as a result of those divisions: who owned land, had access to influential families, and built relationships while others remained enslaved.
Some families descend from both enslaved Africans, whose relatives were forcibly separated, and poorer French colonists known as Acadians who were expelled from Canada in the 1700s. Family networks offered a path to wealth and protection, but those advantages were unevenly shared.
Some Black and mixed Creole and Cajuns enslaved people themselves. For generations, Lee said, lighter-skinned Black Creoles married people with similar complexions to protect their social standing.
“When you have a people that actually have assets, I think party politics are very important because they want to be able to keep that and control that,” he said.
Creole describes people whose ancestors were born in colonial Louisiana, whether of African, European, or mixed ancestry. Cajuns are a subset of this identity, who have ancestors that were the poorer French colonists exiled from Canada. All people who identify as Cajun are considered Creole, but not all Creoles are Cajun.
Today, the roughly half a million Cajuns and Creoles in Louisiana, make up about 20% of the state. Over 250,000 identify as Black or mixed-race.
Once Democratic-leaning in presidential elections, St. Landry Parish began narrowly backing Republicans in 2004 and has grown more Republican in each presidential election since. Some of that shift rests on the Republican Party’s success in courting Creoles and Cajun voters.
Lee, whose family descends from St. Landry, argues that protecting property and family status helps explain the conservatism he encounters. “Some people want to maintain the power of ownership at all costs,” he said, noting that his grandfather, born and raised in Louisiana, never identified as Black or African American.
The “brown paper bag test,” a measure of whether someone’s complexion was light enough to belong, still exists in St. Landry, Sias said.
Patrick Guillory sees that differently. Asked whether colorism remains an issue, the Democratic organizer said, “I don’t see any effects of it.”
Both of them, however, said there are traditions that make unity clear.
They credit dark-skinned musicians such as Clifton Chenier with helping bring Creoles together through music. Generations learned to appreciate zydeco, the music defined by a mashup of accordion and the scraping of metal rubboards that draws on Black Creole traditions, blues, and R&B. At dance halls such as Slim’s Y-Ki-Ki, generations of dancers exemplify the expansiveness of Blackness in the area.
History offers another model of solidarity, too. During the Civil War and Reconstruction, activists among free Creoles of color pushed beyond defending their own status to demand voting rights and equality for formerly enslaved people.
Sias wants room for differences without abandoning that broader obligation.
“We need unity and not unification,” he said. He sees it in his parents who could oppose abortion while supporting universal access to medical care.
The challenge, as he sees it, is deciding which disagreements a community can accommodate — and which leave its most vulnerable members without help.
What a vote should deliver
When Cassandra Douresseaux worked in the school system, she saw children who needed more than an education. Some needed somewhere to feel safe.
“For some kids, it’s like the only place that they could go and have a little bit of peace,” she said.
She worries about children left alone while families are stretched thin and the parents feeding the digital slot machines found in bars and gas stations in order to turn their $7.25 per hour paychecks into enough money to actually purchase food.
Her response is partly a longing for the obligations she remembers from childhood, when grandparents, aunts, and neighbors shared responsibility for raising a child. But she also sees how rising costs make caring for one another harder.
In Opelousas, where the median household income is about $33,000, that burden falls on families with little room to absorb another crisis. (That is just half the median household income in Louisiana, where a greater share of people live in poverty than any other U.S. state.)
Downtown storefronts sit empty, with closure notices dating to 2017, 2018, and 2021. Some roads and water lines have gone as long as 75 years without upgrades. And more people in the town die by gun violence than virtually anywhere else in Louisiana, which has led the nation in gun violence since the 1980s.
Those conditions give residents reason to demand more from their votes. They also expose the distance between winning representation and having the resources to change daily life.
For Sias, political power means investing in what he calls “protective institutions”: help repairing roofs, replacing inefficient appliances, and keeping people in their homes.
Elbert Guillory sees the same problems but draws a different lesson: Black voters need Republican leadership rather than continued loyalty to Democrats.
“Our self-initiative and our self-reliance have been sacrificed in exchange for allegiance to our overseers who control us by making us dependent on them,” he said, referring to the Democratic Party.
That argument shapes his response to the district’s dismantling.
He does not argue that racial inequality nor racism has disappeared. In 2019, the white son of a St. Landry sheriff burned down three Black churches in St. Landry Parish, once again bringing reminders of civil rights-era violence back to the community.
“We’re not anywhere near close to the finish line,” Elbert Guillory said.
“We have to make partnerships across the fence now with people who have like-minded interests,” Elbert Guillory added.
His proposed alliances center on opposition to abortion and immigration and support for gun rights — positions he describes as shared interests of “all country boys.” Those positions do not explain how Republican leadership would repair the city’s infrastructure or expand its capacity to secure funding. Nor do they account for residents such as Douresseaux, whose religious conservatism has not displaced her Democratic loyalty.
Elbert Guillory welcomes the prospect of fewer lawmakers whose positions conflict with his own. Losing the majority-Black district, he argued, could make Black voters important in more elections.
“The fact that Mr. Fields will not be in Congress does not concern me greatly,” he said, referring to Cleo Fields, who represents the dismantled district.
But Lee, the historian, argues this line of thinking is part of a long lineage of Black Creole politics, where individual interests have been protected.
“When you look at it on a socioeconomic level, a family level, [Black Creoles and Cajuns] were more conservative than anything,” he said.
Distributing Black voters among more districts does not give them more power. When redistricting divides Black communities among majority-white districts, those voters can remain consistently outnumbered and unable to elect their preferred candidates — the kind of vote dilution the Voting Rights Act was designed to prevent.
Turnout and influence are not the same. In Louisiana’s first election after the Callais ruling, Black voters accounted for nearly 36% of ballots cast, up from 25% in 2023. But that larger share does not establish that more Black people voted, or that they gained a greater ability to elect their preferred representatives.
Douresseaux did not vote in that May election, but said she plans to vote in November.
The 54-year-old did not realize she was Black until elementary school and raised her children not to know “color,” either. Her oldest child cried when his grandmother first told him he was Black. Still, her discomfort with “race wars” and desire for religion to guide American life does not translate into support for every policy promoted as a defense of traditional values. She cannot understand support for President Donald Trump.
She has watched other Black residents become more politically conservative as costs rise and people struggle to find help. Her own instinct is to turn toward family rather than political conflict. But even as she described that retreat, she stopped herself.
“But then you still have to pay attention to it because you got all these people that actually need help,” she said.
The question is how to meet the political moment.
To her, the entire battle over voting rights makes little sense because race shouldn’t shape American politics in the first place. It is why the argument over the lost district cannot end with whether its representative is Black, residents said. It must reach the question Patrick Guillory hears at the door: What does that representation make possible?
Keeping people together
For the past decade, Patrick Guillory has coordinated the Southwest Louisiana Zydeco Music Festival, following a great-uncle who once served as its executive director. Like teaching his daughter about their culture and helping revitalize his grandparents’ language, the work keeps these inheritances alive.
The gathering cannot belong only to people who vote as he does. He invited every local candidate to purchase space for campaign signs, regardless of party or his feelings about them.
“We have to welcome all the people,” he said.
That openness is harder to reconcile with what he sees happening to Black political power. Electing Fields gave him a sense that someone in Congress spoke for them. Now, with the parish divided between districts, he worries its needs will become easier to overlook.
His neighbors’ doubts about voting remain. He is organizing a candidate forum so they can put their questions directly to the people seeking to represent them.
Campaign work has also taken him into neighborhoods he once knew only through other people’s warnings. It has taught him to listen before deciding he knows who lives there.
“They’re people just like me and you,” he said.
He knows that sharing a place, a language, or a family name does not mean people will agree about what keeps a community free. He keeps knocking anyway.
“Now I will go anywhere and talk to anyone about voting,” he said.
He tells them about his grandfather and about the more than 200 Black people murdered in Opelousas in 1868 for organizing to vote and educate themselves.
The memories behind those courthouse oaks, standing tall while his neighbors struggle to access basic services, make him want to work harder, not leave. National attention to the district’s loss has already begun to fade, he said. The work of making St. Landry Parish a home where Black people can enact their political will, even if disjointedly, has not.
“From the outside, it happened and then they moved on,” he said. “But here on the inside, we still have people that are fighting.”
