Alabama tried it again. The courts said no — again.
According to The New York Times, a three-judge federal panel blocked Alabama on Tuesday (May 26) from using a Republican-backed congressional map that would have eliminated one of the state's two majority-Black districts, ruling the plan intentionally discriminated against Black voters.
The ruling keeps in place the court-ordered map that enabled Black voters to elect their candidates of choice in 2024, and protects those gains heading into the November midterms.
The judges were unsparing in their language.
"We cannot see our way clear to requiring Alabamians to cast their votes in the 2026 elections under a districting plan tainted by intentional race-based discrimination," the panel wrote, per NYT. The court also flatly rejected Alabama's argument that politics — not race — drove the map-drawing process, writing that the enormous record before them contained "no evidence of a partisan motive.
The backstory matters. Alabama's redistricting fight stretches back years.
After the Supreme Court ruled in 2023 that the state's original map violated the Voting Rights Act, lawmakers returned to Montgomery and drew a new map — one that raised the percentage of Black voters in one district to about 40 percent but stopped well short of creating a second majority-Black district as ordered.
Courts rejected that map too, appointed a special master to draw new lines, and the resulting map was used in 2024. That election sent Rep. Shomari Figures to Congress, marking the first time in Alabama history that two Black lawmakers served in the House simultaneously. Republicans have been trying to claw that seat back ever since.
Alabama is expected to appeal the ruling directly to the Supreme Court, which last month struck down a majority-Black congressional district in Louisiana — a decision that gave Republican-led Southern legislatures fresh hope to redraw maps diluting Black voting power ahead of the midterms.
Rep. Figures responded Tuesday: "This is a significant step in the right direction, but there is still a long way to go before this fight is settled."
He's right. Alabama will appeal. The Supreme Court will likely have the final word, and what it decides could reshape Black political power across the South.
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