Saturday marks one year since a groundbreaking Supreme Court ruling forced Alabama to redraw congressional maps to allow voters a better chance of electing a second Black member of Congress from the state.
Since then, the Allen v. Milligan case has resulted in a race for the newly redrawn Second District in central and southern Alabama, where a black Democrat has a competitive chance of winning in a race against a white Republican.
Democratic incumbents Shomari and Republican Caroleene Dobson will face off in the November general election in the newly configured district that was previously solidly white and Republican.
The high-profile race is the result of a surprise Supreme Court ruling that Alabama’s congressional district map likely violated the Voting Rights Act.
Supporters of the decision celebrated its political outcome on Saturday’s anniversary.
“This incredible progress is worthy of celebration, all the more so because it was not easy,” former US Attorney General Eric Holder said in a statement. Holder is chairman of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, which was part of the efforts to change voting maps.
The justices upheld a lower court’s ruling that Alabama’s 2021 congressional voting maps diluted the power of Black voters, in violation of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Allen v. Milligan brought more representative electoral maps to states previously thought to be closed to black voters, including Alabama, Georgia and Louisiana, Holder said.
Holder compared state leaders’ fight against the ruling and the new maps to battles decades earlier, in the Civil Rights era.
“From challenging federal court orders to attempting to use litigation as a vehicle to roll back voting protections for citizens, resistance to the implementation of Allen v. Milligan over the past year reflected the sordid history of the Jim Crow era,” Holder said. “Such continued, concerted effort to achieve illegitimate and unearned power at the expense of communities of color demonstrates that our country remains too far from the Promised Land envisioned by those who sacrificed their lives for civil and voting rights.”
Alabama, which is about 27 percent black, currently has one black in its congressional delegation: Rep. Terri Sewell, D-Birmingham, whose district covers most of the Black Belt.
The Supreme Court ruling forced the Republican-controlled Legislature to draw a new map. They proposed an alternative map that still featured a majority-black district, which was also discarded, resulting in the creation of a final map under the supervision of a federal court.
At the time of the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling a year ago, UW Clemon, a retired U.S. District Court judge and longtime civil rights attorney, predicted a showdown.
Clemon, in a June 2023 panel discussion at Miles College, said even the order would not be enough for the state Legislature to give Black residents greater representation in Washington. Clemon, who was also one of the first two blacks elected to the state Senate since the Reconstruction era, correctly predicted that the federal court would have to intervene to enforce the ruling.
“I have absolutely no faith that the Alabama Legislature is going to do the right thing. It never has been,” he said at the time. “The Legislature, of course, will do what it usually does.”
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