Alabama’s New Electoral Lines: A Casement into Racial Gerrymandering and the Dilution of the Black Vote

Throughout the history of the United States, the Civil Liberties of Black Americans have been legal quandary generations of Law practitioners have had to reckon with. Amongst these, most notably in recent history, is suffrage for the Black American: the right to vote. The right to vote for the Black community is relatively recent, officially granted to Black individuals with the passage of the 14th and 15th amendments, as they extended official citizenship and instilled voting rights to all born and naturalized Black people within the country. Despite this, they were continually denied for decades after that. Via Jim Crow-era policies like the Literacy Tests, the Grandfather Clause, and Intimidation Methods, Black people were effectively prevented from going out to exercise their newly acquired rights. 

As time went on, state governments utilized a relatively new way to suppress the growing black vote: Gerrymandering, the process of drawing voting districts in such a way as to dilute the vote potency of a particular region and subgroup. 

The legal issue of Gerrymandering is an old one, well documented within the court system, stemming back to cases like Baker v. Carr, in which the Court determined the failure of the Tennessee legislature to reapportion state legislative in such a way to account for significant changes in district populations, effectively reducing the power of votes in more urban districts, to amount to a violation of the Equal Protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, or in Wesberry v. Sanders, in which the Court had ruled that when redistricting, states must draw the lines “as is practicable, one man’s vote in a congressional election is to be worth as much as another’s” (Duignan, Brian), a decision later reaffirmed in Reynolds v. Sims. Gerrymandering as a means by which to specifically disenfranchise Black voters, however, or racial gerrymandering, became a common practice by state legislatures around the mid to late 20th century. States first engaged in this through the drawing of district lines with the intent of splitting up heavily minority-populated areas into areas more densely populated with White constituents, thereby diluting the Black vote and preventing the Black electorate from conglomerating and effectively being able to elect their preferred candidate. The Supreme Court’s solution to this was to mandate the creation of majority-minority districts by state legislators to ensure the minority population could still elect their candidates of choice (Soffen, Kim). 

However, this is not a legal issue that has been long settled. Instead, states are still instituting creative ways to dilute the impact of voters, seemingly to target the Black vote specifically. One can more closely examine a phenomenon by examining how courts handle such cases via the recent SCOTUS decisions in the Alabama “redistricting” proposals. 

The State of Alabama submitted its proposal to redraw congressional districts. Within this proposal, it was determined by lower appellate courts that Alabama had unfairly packed Black voters into one majority-black district near the capital city of Montgomery, diluting Black residents’ voting power near that area by placing them in three other majority-white districts. A move that would significantly reduce the power of the Black vote in Alabama as “with just one Black-majority district, the maps greatly diminished the ability of Black voters to select lawmakers” (Walker, Chris). 

This situation resulted in the lawsuit Allen v. Milligan over the legality of the Alabama legislature’s decision. The Supreme Court agreed with the judgment of the lower appellate courts. Determining that Alabama was attempting to institute new benchmarks for drawing districts, benchmarks “thwarting precedent established by the Supreme Court in the 1980s” (Walker, Chris). Chief Justice Roberts went on to chastise the Alabama legislatures for their “aggressive efforts” to rewrite longstanding law to render much of what remains of the Voting Rights Act an empty husk. Roberts writes, “The heart of these cases is not about the law as it exists. It is about Alabama’s attempt to remake our [Voting Rights Act] jurisprudence anew” (Millhiser, Ian). 

SCOTUS affirmed the appellate court rulings, and as a result of that decision, a second district encompassing a majority of Black voters will be part of Alabama’s congressional delegation moving forward.

Though this decision was viewed by many as a significant win for the protection of minority interests within government and policy, it did not come without ominous preludes about the future security for minority voters. Chief Justice Roberts asserts that even though he joined four other justices in opposing the gerrymandered districts, he left open the possibility, in his opinion, of justices further diluting the VRA (Voting Rights Act) in the future, writing that the majority’s ruling doesn’t “diminish or disregard” his and other conservatives’ concerns that the law “may impermissibly elevate race in the allocation of political power within the States” (Truthout). 

This leaves the state of minority voting rights and security in a state of unease in the near future, not guaranteeing their ensured protection to any extent.

Bibliography: 

Walker, Chris. 2023, Supreme Court Rules against Racist Gerrymandering in Alabama, Upholds Voting Rights Act, Truthout (2023), Online at 

https://truthout.org/articles/scotus-rules-against-racist-gerrymandering-in-alabama-upholds-votin g-rights-act/. 

John Cook, Supreme Court Rules — Just Barely — That Racial Gerrymandering Still Violates Voting Rights Business Insider (2023), Online at 

https://www.businessinsider.com/supreme-court-upholds-ban-racial-gerrymandering-alabama-20 23-6. 

Little, Becky. How Gerrymandering Began in the US, HISTORY (2021), Online at https://www.history.com/news/gerrymandering-origins-voting. 

Duignan, Brian, Gerrymandering | Definition, Litigation, & Facts, In Encyclopædia Britannica (2019), Online at https://www.britannica.com/topic/gerrymandering 

Soffen, Kim, How Racial Gerrymandering Deprives Black People of Political Power, The Washington Post (2016), Online at 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/06/09/how-a-widespread-practice-to-polit ically-empower-african-americans-might-actually-harm-them/. 

Millhiser, Ian. “Surprise! The Supreme Court Just Handed down a Significant Victory for Voting Rights.” Vox (2023), Online at 

https://www.vox.com/scotus/2023/6/8/23753932/supreme-court-john-roberts-milligan-allen-voti ng-rights-act-alabama-racial-gerrymandering.