Federal judges on Thursday selected new congressional lines for Alabama to give the Deep South state a second district where Black voters comprise a substantial portion of the electorate.
The new map sets the stage for potentially flipping one U.S. House of Representatives seat from Republican to Democratic control and could lead to the election of two Black Congressional representatives to the state’s delegation for the first time. The judges stepped in to pick a new congressional map after ruling that Alabama illegally diluted the voting power of Black residents, and that the Republican-controlled Alabama Legislature failed to fix the Voting Rights Act violation when they adopted new lines this summer.
“It’s a historic day for Alabama. It will be the first time in which Black voters will have an opportunity to elect candidates of their choice in two congressional districts,” said Deuel Ross, an attorney with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund who represented plaintiffs in the case.
Black voters in 2021 filed a lawsuit challenging the state’s existing plan as an illegal racial gerrymander. The U.S. Supreme Court in June upheld the three-judge panel’s finding that Alabama’s prior map — with one majority-Black district out of seven in a state that is 27% Black — likely violated the federal Voting Rights Act. The three-judge panel said the state should have two districts where Black voters are the majority or close to it.
The panel selected one of three plans proposed by a court-appointed expert that alters the bounds of Congressional District 2, now represented by Republican Rep. Barry Moore, who is white. The southeast Alabama district will stretch westward across the state to the Mississippi border. Black residents will go from comprising less than one-third of the district’s voting-age population to 48.7%.
