The New Jim Crow

What happened in Alabama on Thursday

By Joyce Vance, Civil Discourse with Joyce Vance

In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision effectively endorsing gerrymanders that disenfranchise Black voters, an outbreak of racism has spread through Southern state legislatures. Tennessee Republicans are pretending Black voters in Memphis don’t exist. Florida Republicans seem to have forgotten that Floridians voted to adopt a constitutional amendment banning both political and racial gerrymanders. And then, there’s Alabama.

Alabama has been at the center of the gerrymandering wars for years. In a surprise victory for Black voters, the Supreme Court ruled in their favor in a case known as Milligan. That case reached the Court after a three-judge panel in Birmingham unanimously concluded that it was not a “close” call whether the maps drawn by the legislature violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, and barred the maps from being used.

The initial decision striking down the maps was authored by District Judge Anna Manasco, a Trump appointee. She was joined by another Trump appointee from Alabama, District Judge Terry Moorer, as well as Judge Stanley Marcus, a Reagan appointee to the Eleventh Circuit. You get the point: the maps were bad. They went beyond politics. They were about race.

You can see it in the map itself: a little starfish with skinny arms reaching out to pull Black voters from Birmingham, Montgomery, and just north of Mobile into a single “packed” district, while the rest of Alabama’s Black population was “cracked” across the remaining six districts, leaving them with no meaningful opportunity to elect candidates of their choice. It was classic illegal gerrymandering. The Supreme Court agreed in an opinion authored by Chief Justice Roberts, who was joined by Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson, and, on the key portion of the ruling that secured the victory for Black voters, by Justice Kavanaugh. The discriminatory map was struck down.

As you know from our discussion earlier this week, the Court previously delayed implementation of the new maps under Purcell, concluding that it was “too close” to the next election by the time it considered Alabama’s arguments. Alabama has seen the ups and the downs.

When the legislature finally began drawing new maps, it disregarded the Supreme Court’s order. Lawmakers produced a map that largely preserved the status quo, maintaining only a single Black opportunity district. The three-judge panel in Birmingham was not amused. “We are deeply troubled that the State enacted a map that the State readily admits does not provide the remedy we said federal law requires,” they wrote. The court removed the legislature from the mapmaking process and, after appointing a special master, assumed responsibility for drawing new maps that complied with the Voting Rights Act.

That is the history here. That is how Alabama finally ended up with maps containing a second Black opportunity district out of seven in a state where, according to the 2024 census, 26.5% of adults are Black. Another 4.7% percent of the population is multiracial or composed of other people of color, and 6% is Hispanic or Latino. The legislature refused to comply with the Supreme Court’s order, forcing the courts to do the job themselves.

What happened next, following the Callais decision, which effectively gave a green light to even the most racially discriminatory “political gerrymanders,” was entirely unsurprising: Alabama asked a federal court to allow it to return to the illegal racial gerrymander of its 2023 congressional maps. It took the state only a few days to get back into court.