‘We’re going backwards’: Black political power under threat in Alabama after Voting Rights Act gutting

Alabama has long been considered the birthplace of the voting rights movement in America.

During a peaceful voting rights demonstration in 1965, an Alabama state trooper shot and killed church deacon Jimmie Lee Jackson. In response, about 600 marchers set out from Selma, across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, toward the state capitol building in Montgomery to demand the right to vote. What met them on the other side – state troopers on horseback, billy clubs, teargas and a sheriff’s posse – was broadcast that evening on national television.

The images from Bloody Sunday produced a moral crisis that President Lyndon B Johnson translated into federal law five months later: the Voting Rights Act.

Now, in a state where nearly 30% of the population is Black, the legal framework that has supported Black political representation for six decades could be dismantled.

Last month, the supreme court decision in Louisiana v Callais weakened section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, enabling states to redraw congressional maps that protected majority Black districts. Sheyann Webb-Christburg, a Selma foot soldier who was eight years old on Bloody Sunday, called it “an assault on the civil rights movement”.

Within days, Alabama’s Republicans voted to revert to an older map that would essentially erase a majority-Black district ahead of the November midterms. On Tuesday, a federal court blocked the state from using the Republican-friendly map.

While Alabama Republicans plan to appeal the latest decision to the supreme court, the representative who represents the district – Shomari Figures, one of the only two Black members of Congress from the state – said he is holding out hope his district will not be erased.

“Republicans are doing everything they can to try to rush this to try to act as if this case is over, but it’s not,” he said.

Representative Terri Sewell, the only other Black representative in the state, could also see her district, where more than half of residents are Black, collapse if Republicans redraw the state’s map in the coming years to further dilute Black voting power.

Beyond Figures’ and Sewell’s districts, the Callais decision will have deep, long-term consequences for Black voters across Alabama. The impact will also be felt at every level of government – in the state senate, on county commissions, on school boards – and on the issues that bear most directly on Black Alabamians, including infrastructure, water access, hospital closures and prison conditions. Black voters and officials are sounding the alarm that without this representation, life outcomes for Black Alabamians will worsen.

“I’m mighty afraid,” Sewell said. “On our collective watch, we’re going backwards and not forwards. And I plan on doing everything I can to fight it.”

The long road to Black representation in Alabama

The Selma marchers brought the country closer to the ideal of a multiracial democracy. What followed over the next six decades was a slow, contested, legally enforced expansion of Black political representation across Alabama and the wider south.

By 1980, 15 years after the act’s passage, the number of Black elected officials in the US had grown from roughly 72 to more than 1,500. A landmark 1985 ruling, Dillard v City of Greensboro, forced Alabama counties to replace at-large elections, where voters cast district-wide ballots for every open seat, with single-member districts, where residents only vote for representation in their specific community.

“That case gave us the opportunity to elect officials in over 270 cities and 67 counties” across the south in the years immediately following the decision, said Alabama state senator Bobby Singleton, who has been a plaintiff or litigant in redistricting cases before the supreme court three times and has served as minority leader of the Alabama senate since 2012.

District 7, which Sewell represents, emerged from that era of voting rights expansion. Created in the 1990s as Alabama’s first Voting Rights Act opportunity district, it was drawn to give Black belt voters – among the poorest in the country, descendants of enslaved people forced to work the dark, fertile soil that gave the region its name – a meaningful voice in Congress. Sewell, who grew up in Selma, won it in 2010 and has held it since being sworn in in 2011.

Sewell’s efforts over the past 16 years have improved outcomes in education, healthcare, poverty and other areas, constituents said. She has brought more than $334m to Alabama’s HBCUs (historically Black colleges or universities) and temporarily cut child poverty in the state in half by expanding the child tax credit – before congressional Republicans blocked its renewal in 2024. She was also the only member of Alabama’s congressional delegation to vote in favor of a law that brought more than $6bn to Alabama to rebuild roads and bridges, fix the state’s broken wastewater systems, expand access to broadband and modernize public transportation.

Sewell’s impact has also been felt in other areas of the state. “If I wanted help or information regarding the federal government, I would have to call Terri Sewell because I had no representation,” said Letitia Jackson, a longtime community organizer in the rural area of Dothan, who recently defeated a 20-year incumbent to win the Democratic primary for Houston county commissioner. “My representative did not even engage with us at all. Did not meet with us. Did not talk to us. Never came to our community.

“Before Figures came along,” Jackson said, “Sewell was representing all Black people in the state of Alabama because we basically had no representation.”

The cost of erasure

Figures won his seat in 2024 – a direct product of the supreme court decision in Allen v Milligan a year earlier that ordered Alabama to draw a second majority-Black district. It was the first time since Reconstruction that Alabama had sent two Black members to Congress simultaneously.

In his first term, Figures secured nearly $19m in community project funds, much of it going to rural counties that had never before received a direct federal appropriation. He has elevated the crisis of the district’s potential medical desert – where 22 of 26 rural hospitals are rated at immediate risk of closure, where residents in some counties wait more than 45 minutes for an ambulance and where a baby can only be delivered in two of 13 counties.

Figures said he was only just beginning to get more attention on the long list of needs in rural south Alabama. “We have to give voters a reason to go vote and believe in how we will look out for their communities and their needs,” Figures said. “It’s beyond just saying we will get them healthcare. The healthcare argument looks a lot different when you don’t have a hospital.”

In Sewell’s district, former state representative Phillip Ensler – who is now running for lieutenant governor – described a basic sanitation crisis that federal investment has only begun to address. Thousands of residents in the district, he said, are not connected to a proper sewage system.

“They literally have straight pipes that run out of the back of their house, and sewage and wastewater just gets dumped in the backyard,” Ensler said. “And then what happens is that sometimes it gets backed up and that dirty water comes back up in the kitchen sink.”

Sewell’s Black belt outreach coordinator, Byron Evans, said the threat of redistricting had cast a shadow over years of development work. There are plans for a new National Park Service welcome center that would preserve the history of the 1965 voting rights marches in downtown Selma. A health and science school is also in the works, Evans said.

“I’m really worried about these plans because of lines being redrawn,” Evans said. “It’s scary.”

The broader impact, beyond Congress

The congressional seats are only part of the story. In the same special session where Alabama Republicans voted to eliminate Figures’ district, they also moved to revert state senate maps to older configurations, threatening two majority-minority districts in Montgomery.

Singleton said the state’s Black caucus would lose a lot of gains without a seat at that table: “We’ve seen bills like DEI, critical race theory. We’ve seen attempts to wipe out books in our libraries, wipe out history at our archives. And thus far, because we’ve been at the table, we’ve been able to kill some of those bills.”

At the county and local level, the implications of Callais may ultimately be more consequential, still. In Alabama, county commissioners and school board members run on partisan lines, in drawn districts. Where Black officials have won those seats, it has been in part because the Voting Rights Act required district lines to give Black voters an opportunity to elect candidates of their choice, Ensler said.

The Brennan Center for Justice noted in an amicus brief that nearly half of all section 2 cases challenging at-large elections since 1982 have resulted in hundreds of local government bodies, including school boards, adopting fairer electoral systems with measurable positive impact on representation. All of that is now in jeopardy.

“All politics start locally,” said Selma’s mayor, Johnny “Skip” Moss III, who served on the city’s school board for nine years. Selma is a majority-Black city in a deep-red state, and its outcomes are tied directly to the quality of its congressional representation – to having, as Moss said, “people speaking for us to make sure we get the resources we need”.

He noted that recent local elections had been decided by margins of three and 11 votes.

“If it didn’t matter, people wouldn’t be trying to change the laws,” Moss said.

‘Squeeze every bit of good out of the time we have left’

A few weeks after the Callais decision, thousands of demonstrators, who arrived from more than a dozen other states, gathered at the Alabama state capitol to protest against Republican redistricting and demand the protection of Black voting power.

The day began with a silent march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma to echo the historic 1965 civil rights marches. At the Montgomery rally, political and civil rights leaders – including Senators Cory Booker and Raphael Warnock and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – energized the crowd, while others reminded participants about the struggle to gain the right to vote.

“We have done so much work over the years in this state to make sure that there is a vibrant electorate, and we’ve been able to make some progress because of the representation we’ve gained,” said LaTosha Brown, co-founder of Black Voters Matter, who helped organize the Montgomery rally. “The supreme court is undermining all those folks who fought and gave their lives in the voting rights movement.”

Jackson said in the wake of the Callais decision, grassroots organizers are returning to the original playbook: door-to-door organising, voter registration, sustained community engagement in places national campaigns routinely ignore.

Sewell said she was inspired by the rally’s “fired-up” crowd: “Instead of bemoaning [the decision], people have become energized. I expect more people to go to the polls. I expect a greater showing in November and a bigger victory for the Democrats.”

Figures and Sewell don’t intend to go out without a fight.

“We have a term to represent,” Figures said. “We go to work, continue to do everything we can to squeeze every bit of good and every bit of progress out of the time we have left.”

Meanwhile, the Rev Benny Tucker, beaten on the Edmund Pettus Bridge on Bloody Sunday and still living in Selma, offered the same counsel he has offered for six decades. “Keep marching,” he said. “Our voice is going to be heard.”