Alabama again the battleground over Black voting rights
MONTGOMERY, Ala. — Driving through downtown one misty, humid morning, Evan Milligan pointed out landmarks historic and personal.
There once stood the Black barbershop where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. got his hair cut. There was the street corner where Rosa Parks boarded a city bus and, later, refused to give up her seat to a white passenger.
There was the church where King organized a bus boycott after Parks’ arrest.
And there was the house where Mr. Milligan’s mother grew up, blocks from a whites-only park that had a petting zoo and an ice-skating rink. His mother lived so close she could hear the animals at night, but she was not allowed in to see them.
He drove past neighborhood streets where vacant plots of grass replaced abandoned and blighted houses. Many homes still stood in disrepair, their lawns overgrown. At a corner rose a two-story brick building with boarded-up windows and graffiti: “John Lewis was here.”
Mr. Milligan is a descendant of enslaved Blacks, only six generations removed.
Once freed, his ancestors moved from the rural Black Belt — so named for its rich topsoil — to neighborhoods in eastern Montgomery. Decades later, they would be foot soldiers of the civil rights movement, thrust into the nation’s most historic battles over segregation and voting rights in the Jim Crow South. Now Mr. Milligan, 40, is on the front lines of the latest discrimination fight, lending his family name to what will be the marquee Supreme Court case over racial gerrymandering, centered on the invisible district line that divides the Black neighborhoods of eastern Montgomery.
In Milligan v. Merrill — that’s Alabama Republican Secretary of State John Merrill — the nation’s highest court will determine whether federal law requires states such as Alabama with large minority populations and racially polarized voting to take race into account in redistricting or whether they have free rein to squeeze minority voters into as few districts as possible — one, in Alabama’s case — giving white politicians dominance in all the others.
The decision could have sweeping implications across a huge swath of the South where the Black population and those of other minorities are growing at a faster rate than the white population but the power is disproportionality held by white politicians.
“These are Black people that come from the Black Belt communities. They move to Montgomery, have endured all of this, and then today aren’t able to elect a person they choose,” Mr. Milligan said. “They’re not able to have any influence on the outcome of the elections.”
At a recent town hall in Birmingham, Democratic Rep. Terri Sewell, the first Black woman elected to Congress in Alabama, stood before about three dozen constituents, nearly all of them Black, and took questions about sewage in their yards and affordable housing. But first, she spoke about voting rights and her work to preserve them.
Ms. Sewell is the lead sponsor on stalled votingrights legislation named after Lewis, the civil rights icon and congressman who was bludgeoned by police in his youth while helping lead a march from Selma to Montgomery for voting rights.
“Nothing is more sacrosanct to our district than the progress that was made on the backs of people from our district,” Ms. Sewell told them.
Alabama’s population is 27% Black, and many of those voters are packed into Ms. Sewell’s 7th District, which stretches along the western border of Alabama, grabbing parts of the Black Belt in its fist and extending two fingers into heavily Black Montgomery and Birmingham. The remaining Black communities are dispersed among the state’s six overwhelmingly white districts. The result, voting rights advocates argue, is a dilution of Black voting power.
Near the end of President Barack Obama’s second term, former attorney general Eric Holder approached Ms. Sewell and Lewis, who died in 2020, about his plans for a national Democratic redistricting organization to blunt Republican gerrymanders.
He wanted their buy-in on an effort in Black Belt states to stop legislatures from concentrating Black voters into one district. Agreeing meant backing a legal quest to create additional Black districts even if it meant their own would be less Black; in Ms. Sewell’s case it probably would have meant giving up Selma and Montgomery.
“‘It will mean redrawing your districts. The numbers [of Black voters] will go down. But it’s the fair thing to do,’ ” Mr. Holder said he told Ms. Sewell and other Black Democrats. “What struck me was Sewell signed up right away. It’s not tactical — this is just about fairness, allowing a people who for too long have been marginalized and giving them a chance to be heard.”
Ms. Sewell’s current district is more than 50% Black — stacked so much in her favor that she has run unopposed in her past four elections. Now, Democrats are calling for the state to break up her district to create two seats that probably would each be over 40% Black.
“The reality is that when you pack all of the African Americans into my district, you’re allowing my Republican colleagues to not have to address the conditions and the voices, the concerns of the folks, the minorities that are in their districts,” Ms. Sewell said. It would be “heartbreaking” to lose a chunk of her current constituents, she said, but “what a small sacrifice for me to have to make in order for us to truly progress in our state.”
The overwhelmingly white, Republican state legislature did not agree, drawing its new map along the same lines as the one from the previous decade, with one Black district.
A panel of three federal judges struck down those lines in January, agreeing with plaintiffs in the Milligan case that, given the state’s Black population, a section of the Voting Rights Act required a second district with enough Black voters to have the opportunity to elect a candidate of their choice.
The Supreme Court, on appeal, stayed the lowercourt ruling, saying that it was too close to the May 24 primary election and that the court needed more time to assess the question.
Advocates understand the high court taking this case may backfire — justices could water down the act or determine it does not apply to redistricting, erasing another layer of protection for Black voters. They worry about another decision like Shelby County v. Holder, which in 2013 gutted a section of the 1965 law that put a check on states with a history of racial discrimination.
“I have this feeling in the gut of my belly that we may have, you know, won a battle but we may end up ultimately losing the war. ... It is a risk,” Ms. Sewell said.