Two Supreme Court rulings on elections last month brought on a wave of cheers from voting organizers and democracy experts, who believe the cases will uphold key democratic norms going into the 2024 presidential election — but they still worry about an ongoing erosion of access to the ballot box.

Although they never fail to take us aback, French riots have followed the same distinct pattern ever since protests broke out in the Eastern suburbs of Lyon in 1981, an episode known as the “summer of Minguettes”: a young person is killed or seriously injured by the police, triggering an outpouring of violence in the affected neighborhood and nearby. Sometimes, as in the case of the 2005 riots and of today’s, it is every rough neighborhood that flares up.

The 2018 midterms were known as “The Year of the Black Woman,” as a record-setting five of them were elected to Congress.

It was also the year I met Glynda Carr. Seven years earlier, she and Kimberly Peeler-Allen started Higher Heights for America, proclaiming their mission as “a national movement to grow Black women’s political power from the voting booth to elected office.”