[Last week’s annexation vote in Mobile, Alabama, added thousands
of white residents, reducing the black-white voter gap in the
majority-minority city. It’s an effective strategy used by city
elites to artificially inflate conservative political power.]
[[link removed]]

MOBILE, ALABAMA, JUST DILUTED THE BLACK VOTE THROUGH ANNEXATION  
[[link removed]]


 

Ryan Zickgraf
July 28, 2023
Jacobin
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ Last week’s annexation vote in Mobile, Alabama, added thousands
of white residents, reducing the black-white voter gap in the
majority-minority city. It’s an effective strategy used by city
elites to artificially inflate conservative political power. _

A recent annexation vote in Mobile, Alabama, will shrink the
white-black voter gap by thousands., Win McNamee / Getty Images

 

Last week’s annexation vote in Mobile, Alabama, was pitched as a
race to be among the biggest cities in the Southern state. The Gulf
Coast city added more than fifteen thousand residents
[[link removed]],
hoisting Mobile above Montgomery and Birmingham, and just below
Huntsville.

“God answers prayers! We’re the second-largest city in Alabama!”
proclaimed Mobile mayor Sandy Stimpson.

What annexation supporters were more reluctant to talk about was the
racial disparity. Only 27 percent of the city’s new residents are
black, shrinking the white-black voter gap by thousands in a
majority-minority city with a history of institutional racism.

The annexation was less God’s plan than a years-long effort to
“Make Mobile Great Again” by the city’s elite Republican power
players. The campaigners were led by Stimpson, a wealthy lumber scion
who once served as Jeff Sessions’s finance chairman.

A History of White Supremacy

Since the era of the civil rights movement, annexing white suburbs has
been a tool for Southern and Sunbelt cities seeking to dilute the
black vote.

In 1970, Richmond, Virginia, annexed twenty-three square miles and
fifty thousand people, primarily white. That instantly changed
Virginia’s capital from a majority-black to a majority-white city.
The Supreme Court later ruled that the annexation had been made for
racial reasons and placed an injunction on Richmond’s municipal
elections for seven years.

The following year, Atlanta mayor Sam Massell tried and failed to do
much the same thing in Georgia’s capital city. The Justice
Department blocked a Houston, Texas, annexation
[[link removed]] in
1979 that would have added one hundred forty thousand mostly white
people to the city’s population, diluting the voting power of blacks
and Latinos. In North Carolina, Charlotte’s boundaries have swollen
to the physical size of New York City due to constant annexation over
the last several decades.

The July 18 vote was actually plan B for Mobile’s annexation plan.

In 2019, Stimpson tried to fast-track a “Grow Mobile” plan to
annex land from unincorporated areas in suburban West Mobile County,
where approximately 70 percent residents are white and where voters
chose Stimpson over his two black opponents by a nine-to-one ratio.

The city council voted 4-3 along racial lines in favor of that first
annexation plan. Still, a five-vote supermajority was required as part
of the Zoghby Act, reconfiguring Mobile’s government in 1985
following a civil lawsuit. The US Department of Justice’s Civil
Rights Division had previously found that Mobile’s city commission
form of government was discriminatory, with “smoking gun” evidence
in the form of a 1909 letter
[[link removed]] written
by a white state senator, which explicitly said the
post-Reconstruction government was set up because “we were trying to
exclude not the ignorant vote, but the Negro vote.” Little wonder
that no black people had been elected in Mobile’s city government
from Reconstruction until after the Zoghby Act.

After the initial defeat of the 2019 annexation plan, Mobile County
sheriff Sam Cochran held a press conference announcing a petition
effort to strip the supermajority rule from the city council. The
council’s three black members condemned the petition as a
“full-out assault on our citizens,” and it eventually failed.

A Zombie Election

As Stimpson pressed for another annexation vote in 2021, Mobile
politics turned darkly surreal.

First, city council president Levon Manzie, who was black, died a few
weeks before the municipal election in November 2021. Almost
immediately after Manzie’s passing, dark money from a conservative
PAC chaired by a man with political ties to Tommy Tuberville, Jeff
Sessions, and the Alabama Republican Party flowed into the dead
councilman’s campaign coffers.

Meanwhile, Stimpson appointed Manzie’s mother, Jeanette, to serve on
the city council for a month in her deceased son’s seat. Two black
pastors in Mobile said they believed Jeanette was being used as a pawn
to vote for annexation before the election. After Jeanette withdrew a
day later, a mysterious campaign started to elect the recently
deceased Manzie, with mailers claiming that people should vote for him
to honor him.

Former Mobile mayor Sam Jones, the city’s first black mayor,
wasn’t convinced. “The attempt was apparently to buy who you
wanted into that seat to influence [policy],” Jones said at the
time. But the wild scheme to elect a dead man in order to handpick a
candidate favorable to annexation failed after William Carroll,
another black candidate, won by just four hundred votes.

Carroll’s win and the threats of lawsuits put Stimpson’s
annexation plan on ice. Shortly after the election, the Southern
Poverty Law Center sent the City of Mobile a letter warning they’d
sue the city if they found evidence of a “racial gerrymandering
technique” of “packing” and “cracking” in the city’s
redistricting plan, or an annexation plan that “would serve to
dilute the political power of communities of color.”

Mobile’s black voters won a victory in August of 2022 when the
council voted for a redistricting plan
[[link removed]] that
included majority black council representation for the first time in
city history. But thanks to Stimpson, annexation continued to hang
over the city like the sword of Damocles.

Stimpson’s latest annexation plan was finally successful in last
Tuesday’s special election, with three of four areas voting to enter
the City of Mobile. The new voting age demographics have narrowed from
49.7 percent black and 44.4 percent white to 47.5 percent black and
46.1 percent white.

Shalela Dowdy, a Mobile native
[[link removed]], had won a recent victory as
a plaintiff in _Allen v. Milligan_, in which the Supreme Court ruled
in June that the state of Alabama had violated the 1965 Voting Rights
Act with a racially gerrymandered congressional district map. But
Dowdy sees Mobile’s annexation as a setback. “Throughout the
years, there have been obstacles and voter suppression tactics put in
our way to prevent us from voting,” she said
[[link removed]].
“Voter suppression continues, but in disguise through the
rose-colored glasses of annexation.”

_RYAN ZICKGRAF is a journalist based in Atlanta._

_Subscribe to JACOBIN [[link removed]] today, get
four beautiful editions a year, and help us build a real, socialist
alternative to billionaire media. Donate to Jacobin.
[[link removed]]_

* elections
[[link removed]]
* voter suppression
[[link removed]]
* voter rights
[[link removed]]
* Alabama
[[link removed]]
* Black voters
[[link removed]]
* Republican Party
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]

Manage subscription
[[link removed]]

Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]