By John Kruzel
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – If Democratic candidate Shomari Figures wins a congressional race in Alabama in the Nov. 5 U.S. election, the conservative-leaning Southern state would be poised for the first time to have two Black members of the House of Representatives.
And a 5-4 U.S. Supreme Court decision last year authored by its conservative Chief Justice John Roberts helped make such an outcome a distinct possibility.
The court in June 2023 blocked an electoral map enacted by Alabama’s Republican-controlled state legislature that had included just a single U.S. House district with a Black-majority population among the state’s seven. Black people make up around 27% of Alabama’s population.
The ruling, Figures said, has opened a “window of possibility” for his campaign.
“This wasn’t a liberal Supreme Court,” Figures said of the nation’s top judicial body, which has a 6-3 conservative majority.
“Even they found that the state of Alabama was up to its old tricks,” Figures added, alluding to the state’s past history of erecting barriers to voting by Black people.
Legislative districts across the country are redrawn to reflect population changes each decade in a process called redistricting. In most states, maps are devised by the party in power, as Republicans are in Alabama.
The Supreme Court in its June 2023 decision upheld a judicial panel’s finding that Alabama’s Republican-crafted map had diluted the voting power of Black voters in violation of a provision called Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, a landmark 1965 U.S. law barring discrimination in voting.
The case was called Allen v. Milligan. Roberts, joined by fellow conservative Brett Kavanaugh and the court’s three liberal justices, ordered the creation of a second House district in Alabama in which Black voters comprised a majority, or close to it. Black voters tend to back Democratic candidates.
Under the redrawn boundaries of the state’s 2nd congressional district – spanning a wide swathe of southern Alabama – its Black voting-age population rose to nearly 49%, up from about 30% before. The nonpartisan Cook Political Report has rated the seat as “likely Democrat.”
With Republicans holding only a razor thin House majority, this race could figure in deciding which party controls the chamber.
Figures, a lawyer who has held jobs in Washington in the administrations of Democratic Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden, faces Republican candidate Caroleene Dobson, a real estate attorney who is white. Barry Moore, the Republican who currently represents the 2nd district, opted to run this year in a different district after this one was reconfigured.
The Supreme Court’s Milligan ruling underscored the consequential and complicated role the justices have played in the ongoing fight over voting rights. For instance, in another case arising from Alabama, the court in 2013 gutted a key part of the Voting Rights Act, an example of how its conservative justices typically have taken a narrow view of the statute.
Harvard Law School professor Nicholas Stephanopoulos said the Milligan ruling marked “the first time the court ever required the creation of an additional minority opportunity district,” referring to electoral districts where racial minorities have “a reasonable opportunity to elect their preferred candidate.”
Democratic Representative Terri Sewell, the only Black member of Alabama’s current House delegation, is expected to win reelection on Nov. 5 in the state’s 7th congressional district.
Dobson and her campaign did not respond to requests for comment. Dobson was quoted by local media in May saying that polling showed that “this race is very winnable” for her. Delanie Bomar, a spokesperson for the National Republican Congressional Committee, which works to elect Republicans to the House, said Dobson “has run a furious race to put this seat on the map.”
‘BLOODY SUNDAY’
A violent moment in the U.S. civil rights movement that unfolded in the Alabama city of Selma helped inspire congressional passage of the Voting Rights Act. It was there in 1965 where hundreds of Black people marching in a voting rights demonstration crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge and were met by state troopers who waded into the crowd swinging billy clubs.
“Alabama, more than any other state in the union, is the birthplace of the Voting Rights Act, with the Selma protests being the proximate cause,” said Illinois Institute of Technology law professor Christopher Schmidt, who called it “the most important voting rights bill of modern history.”
Days after the incident now called “Bloody Sunday,” President Lyndon Johnson demanded that Congress approve voting rights legislation. Lawmakers passed the Voting Rights Act to broadly prohibit poll taxes, literacy tests and other racially motivated policies that had been implemented by white leaders in certain states to prevent Black voters from casting ballots.
The Voting Rights Act required states and locales with a history of racial discrimination to get federal approval to change voting laws, and provided a formula for determining which jurisdictions were subject to this “preclearance” provision.
In 2013, the Supreme Court upended these legal protections in a 5-4 ruling authored by Roberts and powered by its conservative justices in favor of officials from Alabama’s Shelby County. The court held that Congress had used outdated facts in continuing to force Alabama and eight other states, mainly in the South, to get federal approval for rule changes affecting Black and other minority voters.
The late liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in a dissent wrote: “Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.”
The ruling left open the possibility of Congress devising a replacement formula for deciding which jurisdictions should be subjected to the preclearance requirement, though that never happened. It also preserved the Voting Rights Act’s Section 2.
Critics have said the court’s Shelby County decision has allowed states with a history of racial discrimination in voting to enact new restrictions that might not have survived the preclearance requirement, including such steps as photo identification requirements, the elimination of certain polling places and tighter limits on early voting.
Proponents of the measures say they are necessary to combat voting fraud. Republican Donald Trump, who is seeking to win back the presidency on Nov. 5, has made false claims of widespread voting fraud in his 2020 election loss to Biden.
The preclearance requirement also had given the federal government a role in overseeing redistricting in covered states.
“Had Shelby County (the ruling) not come down, it’s quite likely that the state of Alabama would have never been in a situation of having to go through the litigation that we’ve been through to create this district,” Figures said.
The district includes part of Mobile County, from which Figures and his politically active family hail.
Michael Figures, the candidate’s late father, was among the first three Black graduates of the University of Alabama’s law school. The elder Figures sued two members of the Ku Klux Klan white supremacist group for the 1981 lynching of a Black Alabama teenager, winning a $7 million wrongful death judgment that bankrupted the United Klans of America, before becoming a state senator. After he died in 1996, his wife Vivian Davis Figures – Shomari’s mother – succeeded him as a state senator, a position she still holds.
“This is where my family is from, going back to slavery, literally,” Figures said. “Right here, in the counties in this district.”
“When you grow up Black in Alabama,” Figures added, “you learn pretty early the role that the federal government has played in making this state do right by the people here.”
(Reporting by John Kruzel; Editing by Will Dunham)