A landmark Supreme Court decision last month has triggered an emergency for Black political representation in Alabama, the state where the voting rights movement was born in blood and sacrifice.
The ruling in Louisiana v Callais weakened the legal protections that have undergirded Black electoral power for six decades. Within days, Alabama Republicans moved to redraw congressional maps that would eliminate one majority-Black district entirely and threaten another. A federal court blocked that map on Tuesday, but the GOP plans to appeal to the Supreme Court again, leaving the outcome uncertain.
The stakes are immense. In a state nearly 30% Black, the Callais decision could erase two of the only three Black members of Congress Alabama has elected in its modern history. Beyond Capitol Hill, it threatens representation on state senates, county commissions, and school boards across the state.
Representative Shomari Figures, one of two Black members of Alabama's congressional delegation, refused to concede defeat. "Republicans are doing everything they can to try to rush this," he said. "But it's not over."
The irony cuts deep. Selma, Montgomery, the Edmund Pettus Bridge, Bloody Sunday in 1965, when state troopers on horseback brutalized 600 peaceful marchers demanding the right to vote. That televised horror moved President Lyndon Johnson to sign the Voting Rights Act five months later. Sheyann Webb-Christburg, who was eight years old when she was beaten on that bridge, called the new ruling "an assault on the civil rights movement."
Slow, contested legal battles over six decades transformed that landmark act into concrete power. A 1985 federal ruling forced Alabama counties to replace at-large elections with single-member districts, opening pathways for Black candidates. Representative Terri Sewell won her seat in 2010, representing Alabama's Black Belt, the poorest region in one of the poorest states. Figures won his seat in 2024, the direct result of a Supreme Court order just a year earlier that forced Alabama to draw a second majority-Black district. It was the first time since Reconstruction that two Black members served in Congress from Alabama simultaneously.
The work they accomplished in their districts reveals what is now at risk of being erased. Sewell brought over $334 million to historically Black colleges and universities. She was the only Alabama representative to vote for infrastructure legislation that directed $6 billion to rebuild roads, fix wastewater systems, and modernize transportation. Through the child tax credit expansion, she temporarily cut child poverty in the state in half.
In his first term, Figures secured nearly $19 million in community project funding for rural counties that had never received direct federal appropriations before. He has brought attention to a looming medical catastrophe: 22 of 26 rural hospitals in his district face immediate closure, and residents in some counties wait 45 minutes for an ambulance.
Letitia Jackson, a community organizer in rural Dothan, recently defeated a 20-year incumbent in a county commissioner race. Before Figures arrived, she said, Sewell was effectively representing all Black people in Alabama because they had no one else. "My representative did not even engage with us," Jackson said of her previous representative. "Did not meet with us. Did not talk to us."
The threatened districts face concrete crises that require sustained federal representation. In Sewell's district, thousands of residents lack proper sewage systems. Raw sewage runs out of homes into backyards. Sanitation crisis extends to basic infrastructure across the Black Belt. Sewell's team had begun planning projects including a National Park Service welcome center in Selma to preserve the 1965 voting rights marches and a new health and science school. Byron Evans, Sewell's Black Belt outreach coordinator, said the redistricting threat has cast a shadow over years of development work. "I'm really worried about these plans because of lines being redrawn," he said. "It's scary."
The congressional seats tell only part of the story. In the same legislative session where Republicans moved to eliminate Figures' district, they also tried to revert state senate maps to older configurations, threatening two majority-minority districts in Montgomery. State senator Bobby Singleton, who has been a plaintiff in redistricting cases before the Supreme Court three times, said the state's Black caucus would lose critical power. "We've seen bills like DEI, critical race theory. We've seen attempts to wipe out books in our libraries, wipe out history at our archives. And thus far, because we've been at the table, we've been able to kill some of those bills."
The impact at county and local levels may ultimately prove most consequential. Nearly half of all Section 2 voting rights cases since 1982 have resulted in local government bodies adopting fairer electoral systems with measurable positive impact on representation. All of that machinery is now in jeopardy. County commissioners and school board members run in drawn districts. Where Black officials have won those seats, it has been because the Voting Rights Act required district lines to give Black voters a meaningful opportunity to elect candidates of their choice.
Selma's mayor, Johnny "Skip" Moss III, who served on the city's school board for nine years, pointed out the stakes at the local level. Selma is a majority-Black city in a deep-red state. Recent local elections have been decided by margins of three and 11 votes. "All politics start locally," Moss said. "If it didn't matter, people wouldn't be trying to change the laws."
The response has been mobilization. Thousands of demonstrators from more than a dozen states gathered at the Alabama state capitol to protest redistricting. The day began with a silent march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, echoing the 1965 marches. Senators Cory Booker and Raphael Warnock, and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez appeared at the Montgomery rally. LaTosha Brown, co-founder of Black Voters Matter, said the Supreme Court is undermining those who fought and died in the voting rights movement.
Grassroots organizers have returned to fundamentals: door-to-door canvassing, voter registration, sustained community engagement in places national campaigns ignore. Sewell said the rally energized her. "Instead of bemoaning the decision, people have become energized," she said. "I expect more people to go to the polls."
Figures and Sewell are not accepting defeat. "We have a term to represent," Figures said. "We go to work, continue to do everything we can to squeeze every bit of good and every bit of progress out of the time we have left."
Author James Rodriguez: "Sixty years after Bloody Sunday, Alabama Republicans are running a play that looks disturbingly familiar: use the courts to erase Black political power, one district at a time."
Comments