WASHINGTON—When President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, he called it “one of the most monumental laws in the entire history of American freedom.” For once, Johnson was not exaggerating..

A few pieces of legislation have changed American society, government and politics more dramatically—and positively—than that law. In the first six years it was in effect, as many blacks registered to vote in the seven Southern states it covered as had done so in the previous 65 years. Three-fourths of the gap between black and white registration rates was eliminated. The number of black elected officials had increased from fewer than 300 in 1965 to more than 8,000 today—including a record high of 40 members of Congress sworn in last January.

By and large, the Supreme Court has given broad leeway to efforts by the Justice Department and state legislatures to fulfill the Voting Rights Act’s intent of bringing minorities into the mainstream channels of political influence. But last week, it signaled that it was having second thoughts about some of the law’s side effects.

The court was asked to rule on a challenge from five white voters to the creation last year of the black-majority district in North Carolina. The district runs more than 160 miles and is often no wider than the right-of-way for Interstate 85. Five of the nine justices said the legislature may have gone too far in its effort to create a district that would send a black to Congress.

Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote, in the majority opinion, that “redistricting legislation that is so extremely irregular on its face that it rationally can be viewed only as an effort to segregate the races for the purpose of voting” may be subject to constitutional challenge under the “equal protection clause” unless the state has “sufficiently compelling justification” to offer for such a gerrymander.

The Supreme Court did not invalidate the North Carolina districting plan; instead, it sent the case back to the lower courts, amid a chorus of complaints from legal scholars that the majority opinion offered precious few guidelines for resolving the case__and the others which are likely to follow.

The dissenters were caustic in their criticism. On his final day before retiring, Justice Byron White wrote that “the notion that North Carolina’s plan, under which whites remain a voting majority in a disproportionate number of congressional districts, and pursuant to which the state has sent its first black representatives since Reconstruction to the United States Congress, might have violated appellants’ constitutional rights is both a fiction and a departure from settled equal protection principles.”

Having watched the oral arguments on the case last April, I was not surprised at the bitter division in the court. Justices who wound up in the majority were virtually coaching the white appellants’ lawyer; those who ended up in dissent were asking questions which were thinly disguised potshots at their colleagues on the bench. Tourists who came in expecting to see the law displayed in all its majesty must have left with a very clear understanding of how deeply politics pervades the sanctum of the Supreme Court.

The division in the court mirrors the division in American society on issues of race. It is the same contentious debate which President Clinton sought to sidestep—I thought wisely—by withdrawing the nomination of Lani Guinier to be the Justice Department’s chief enforcer of the Voting Rights Act. Thanks in part to the North Carolina decision, the debate will recur when he chooses another person to fill that slot.

The issues are difficult, but one reality is clear. Even if the high court had not stepped in to question such “bizarre” districts as North Carolina’s 12th, there were few more gains to be made by “packing” minority voters into oddly shaped districts under the protection of the Voting Rights Act. As Carol M. Swain writes in her new book, “Black Faces, Black Interests”: “After the 1992 elections, relatively few areas remain where blacks are sufficiently concentrated for courts and state legislatures to create new districts. Future significant growth in the number of blacks in Congress cannot come from creating newly black districts.”

Instead, she argues, those gains will come as more black candidates join the relative handful who have been elected in white-majority or mixed districts. And that in turn, she rightly says, “will depend on coalition building” across racial and ethnic lines.

It is true, as Jesse L. Jackson argues, that in 1993, those who assert that districting decisions should be “race-blind or color-blind are themselves historically blind.” Racial bloc voting by whites and outright gerrymandering kept the state of North Carolina, with 22 percent black population, from electing even one black representative from the end of Reconstruction until last year.

The courts should not casually invalidate even strange-looking districts that have just begun to break the color barrier in their states’ congressional delegation. But we should recognize such struggle to attain representation that might truly be called color-blind.