|
Friend,
At 16 years old, Evan Milligan worked his first paid social justice job with the Federation of Child Care Centers of Alabama, a grassroots organization born out of the civil rights movement with a focus on improving the lives of low-income families in Alabama.
This was not the start of his long-standing devotion to civil rights, nor was it the end. He grew up surrounded by friends and family who doubled as community leaders, visionaries and activists. His relationship with civic engagement was cultivated at a young age.
Raised in Montgomery, Alabama – the site of numerous pivotal events during the civil rights movement – Milligan can’t pinpoint the exact moment he became interested in serving his community. Whether it was hearing stories from community elders about the struggles of growing up Black during the Jim Crow era or helping his mother hand out flyers for HIV/AIDS awareness, Milligan was constantly involved in his family’s advocacy.
“There wasn’t really a moment when we weren’t attached to the movement in some way,” he said. “With parents who were doing movement work in the ’60s and ’70s, all of that shaped how I was thinking and how I was feeling.”
Today, Milligan is carrying on his family’s legacy as executive director of Alabama Forward, a civic engagement network that has received over $300,000 in grants from the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Vote Your Voice initiative over the past two years. The grants enable nonprofits to work on a range of activities to secure full voter participation and achieve equitable representation.
He was also the named plaintiff in Allen v. Milligan, a case that resulted in a historic U.S. Supreme Court ruling that Alabama’s new congressional district map violated the Voting Rights Act (VRA) by diluting the votes of Black residents. The June 8 decision means that the state, where Black people comprise 27% of the population, must redraw the map to include a second majority-Black congressional district (out of seven total).
“At a time when states continue to enact discriminatory redistricting maps, this ruling reaffirms the Voting Rights Act’s essential role in countering efforts to dilute the voting strength of communities of color,” said Jack Genberg, senior staff attorney for voting rights at the SPLC.
Read More
In solidarity,
Your friends at the Southern Poverty Law Center
|
