Two years ago, I witnessed a living monument speak. Autherine Lucy Foster was the first Black student to attend the University of Alabama. Nearly a century after Jim Crow, that year’s Alabama midterms hewed to a legislative map the highest court in the land deemed unconstitutionally racist.
To our shame, the blight of state-mandated racism has outlived Foster. On June 28, 2023, the Supreme Court of the United States of America ruled that the redistricting plan enacted by the Alabama state legislature in 2021 violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which ensures that the bloody fingers of racial discrimination stay cut off from the hands that draw legislative districts in our state.
The ruling stated that:
- The African American minority in the state of Alabama was sufficiently large and compact enough to “constitute a majority in a reasonably configured district”
- The African American minority in the state of Alabama was politically cohesive
- The white majority in the state of Alabama “votes sufficiently as a bloc to enable it… to defeat the minority’s preferred candidate”
It was a win for democracy, a win for justice, a win for decency, and a step forward for the citizens of our state. The maps drawn in 2020 and used in 2022, the court said, were unconstitutional.
Of course, the Republican state legislature fought, and continues to fight, against this court order with broken knuckles and gnashing teeth.
Soon after the decision came down, the state legislature (with solicitor general Edmund LaCour) drew a second map, which did not include a second African American majority district required by law, in flagrant violation of the aforementioned court order. They wasted the time and money of Alabama taxpayers to litigate this second map, and failed.
Three years later, and their third attempt is ongoing. Edmund LaCour and the Republicans in the state legislature are still trying to keep the specter of Jim Crow hanging over our heads. To date, the expenses of this litigation have cost taxpayers in Alabama $5.25 million, every cent of which was spent in the name of disenfranchising the Black Alabama voters.
The powers at be want to embarrass and insult the decent folk living here for their pure and unadulterated pursuit of power. They will surely fail again, in embarrassing fashion. How much will it cost us in the end? How many teachers, firefighters, health inspectors, and state troopers are we willing to forego to satiate the hubris of politically motivated ghouls who wish to keep us living in the past?
Alabama deserves to be the state of Martin Luther King Jr., not the state of George Wallace. Those who represent us continue to stand in the way of the hallowed right to be heard for those most in need of it.
We deserve better than this.
https://www.al.com/news/2023/08/meet-the-architect-behind-alabamas-voting-rights-defiance.html
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/22pdf/21-1086_1co6.pdf