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 last 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. 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.…