Alabama’s Black voters seek chance to be heard after years of being silenced
Montgomery, Alabama is the birthplace of the Confederacy and of the civil rights movement. Its history speaks volumes about the state of American democracy. It is perhaps ironic, then, how the last generation of its voters have largely been silenced.
For decades, Alabama’s capital city has been split between two or three different congressional districts – a deliberate effort by state leaders to prevent power from accreting to Black voters. Recently the region has been represented by a white Freedom Caucus Republican. But last year a bruising court battle forced Alabama to redraw its district lines, finally placing the entire city and a wide swath of Alabama’s Black Belt of African American residents in the same congressional district.
The runoff for the newly drawn congressional district is Tuesday. Now Montgomery – and Alabama’s Black voters – have to be heard by anyone who wants to serve them in Congress.
“We want somebody who is philosophically aligned with the city,” said Steven Reed, the mayor of Montgomery. “On issues around voting rights, on issues around healthcare, Medicaid expansion and access to healthcare, we would like to have an advocate.”
“From our standpoint, there’s a tremendous need for the congressman to be able to leverage their position in the United States House of Representatives to bring resources back.”
Dexter Avenue in Montgomery is a living monument to civil rights leaders. Stand at the bottom of the hill next to a bronze statue of Rosa Parks and look up, past the first church Martin Luther King led – a church founded on the site of a slave trader’s pen – and you will see the marble of Alabama’s capitol building a half mile away.
The city vibrates with history. But the old paint has cracks.
Hip coffee shops and startup incubator space have sprung up. But nearby empty buildings are more reminiscent of the half-abandoned small town main streets in the parts of the south that are losing population.
Alabama is relatively poor, and a net recipient of federal spending. The Bureau of Economic Analysis rated Alabama’s $50,637 per capita income in 2022 as third from the bottom among the states. The disparities between white Alabama and Black Alabama are among the widest in America.
Alabama is accustomed to getting more from the federal government than it gives. Just not necessarily here, in the state’s redrawn second congressional district.
“Sometimes I feel like the capital city sometimes gets … I’m not going to say neglected. But we don’t get our fair share,” said Doug Singleton, chairman of the Montgomery county commission. “A lot of the time, a lot of the support and the money goes up north. I realize the population in north Alabama is greater than it is in south Alabama. But the main thing with me is I want to make sure that they’re representing this district.”
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In June last year, the US supreme court ordered Alabama lawmakers to redraw its seven congressional districts, noting that more than a quarter of Alabama’s residents are Black but only one of its districts might be expected to elect a Black representative. Alabama’s voters are starkly polarized by race.
With Republican control of Congress on a knife’s edge, Alabama legislators responded in shades of defiance reminiscent of civil rights-era battles. They returned a map that only increased the portion of Black voters in the second district from 30% to 40%, then played for time in court. Federal judges had none of it. The court ordered a special master to redraw it for them.
Alabama’s newly drawn second congressional district now stretches 200 miles across the state from the Columbus suburbs and Montgomery to the north-western suburbs of Mobile, through farmland where the legacy of enslavement echoes in its demography. Just under half the district’s registered voters are African American.
“The vestiges of that history persist to this day,” said Shomari Figures, one of two Democratic candidates vying for the seat in the runoff. “There are a lot of Black parts of this state that lack intentional economic investment.”
Figures, a Black attorney from Mobile, is an Obama White House veteran who served as a personnel director and in the US justice department. His family is prominent in Alabama politics; his father Michael Figures memorably bankrupted the Alabama Ku Klux Klan with a lawsuit in the 80s, while his mother Vivian Figures serves in the Alabama state senate.
He rattles off rural Black counties in and out of the district as he talks about disinvestment. “Perry county, parts of Clark county, Monroe county; these are areas where you have significantly high Black populations, or fairly high Black populations, where you don’t see the factories, where you have seen the factories that were there dry up and have not been replaced,” Figures said.
“I think, you know, as a member of Congress, one of your jobs is to make sure that you’re actually taking your role as the lobbyist in chief and advocate and chief for your district front and center. And that has to be one of your primary responsibilities.”
Figures faces state representative Anthony Daniels, the youngest Black man to be named minority leader of the Democratic party in Alabama’s house of representatives. An educator, Daniels represents Huntsville at the capitol, but he grew up in Bullock county, in a rural Black town that’s now part of the district. “I grew up in poverty. So, I know all about poverty. During my 10 years here serving in the legislature, I’ve focused my attention squarely on reducing or trying to create pathways out of poverty for people.”
Even in the waning days before the runoff, Daniels bustles between committee meetings and the campaign trail, contemplating the problems of poverty in the district.
“In Bullock county, the small county that I’m from, the hospital is basically