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Friend,
The U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision ordering the state of Alabama to draw a new congressional voting map reaffirms the essential role of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in ensuring that communities of color have the opportunity to be fairly represented in our political system.
On June 8, the court found that Alabama’s congressional map violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) by diluting the votes of Black Alabamians.
The historic ruling in Allen v. Milligan means that Alabama must redraw the map to include a second congressional district in which Black voters have an opportunity to elect candidates of their choice.
Even though Black people comprise 27% of the population in Alabama, the Legislature enacted a gerrymandered map that “cracked” the Black population, dividing it up so much that the map created just one majority-Black district out of seven in the state.
With this ruling, the court upheld nearly 40 years of its precedents by applying the legal framework of Thornburg v. Gingles, the seminal vote dilution case.
In its reasoning, the court recited the three preliminary legal requirements that the plaintiffs had to satisfy to win under Gingles. First, the Black voting-age population is sufficiently large and geographically compact to constitute a majority in a reasonably configured district. Second, Black citizens vote in a politically cohesive way. And third, white citizens vote as a bloc to defeat Black voters’ preferred candidates.
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In solidarity,
Your friends at the Southern Poverty Law Center
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