Alabama Is Ordered to Use Map With Two Districts That Empower Black Voters

The order, the culmination of a nearly two-year fight over the Republican-dominated state’s illegal dilution of Black voting power, could also see Democrats pick up a seat in the state, at a moment when Republicans control the House of Representatives by a thin margin.

A three-judge panel of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Alabama approved a map that increases the percentage of Black voters in one of the state’s six majority-white congressional districts to 48.7 percent, up from about 30 percent, while preserving the state’s one existing majority-Black district.

“This is an unequivocal win that will translate to increased opportunities for those who have too long been denied the fair representation they deserve,” the group of Black voters who brought the case said in a joint statement released by the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which has helped the voters sue the state. “Though a long, hard-fought battle, we are grateful to have achieved this key measure and look forward to building a better future for Alabama voters,” the statement said.

Alabama, a state with a fraught history of bucking federal voting rights and civil rights laws until the courts intervene, resisted creating a second district with enough Black voters to allow them to elect a representative of their choice. The state’s only such district, held by Representative Terri Sewell, a Democrat, was created in 1992 after a lawsuit.

More than one in four residents of Alabama are Black, but six of the state’s seven seats in the House of Representatives have been held for more than a decade by white Republicans. Because of how racially polarized voting is in the state, Black voters tend to support Democratic candidates.

The state’s defiance of calls for fairer district maps led the Supreme Court to weigh in twice this year, both times siding with a lower court’s ruling that Alabama had violated a landmark voting rights law by undercutting the power of Black voters in the state.

Wes Allen, Alabama’s secretary of state, said his office would use the new map that the court had “forced upon Alabama” for the 2024 election cycle, though he signaled that the state would continue its appeals in the case.

Steve Marshall, the Alabama attorney general, charged that the map “violates the Constitution’s guarantee of equality for all” and vowed to “defend the state’s law in court for future elections.”

After the Republican-controlled Alabama Legislature redrew the state’s district map following the 2020 census, several Black voters sued in federal court to challenge the legislature’s map. Though the trial court agreed with the plaintiffs that the map violated the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Supreme Court allowed it to be used for the 2022 elections, saying there was not enough time to change the district boundaries for that election.