U.S. Rep. Terri Sewell, D-Birmingham (left) and incoming U.S. Rep. Shomari Figures, D-Mobile (right) will be the first Black U.S. House representatives from Alabama to serve together at the same time. (Left: Courtesy Terri Sewell for Congress; Right: Mike Kittrell for Alabama Reflector)
The 2024 election and a court-ordered redistricting led to this result: next year, Alabama will have two Black U.S. House members serving together, for the first time in history.
Shomari Figures, elected Tuesday night to represent the 2nd Congressional District, will join U.S. Rep. Terri Sewell, D-Bimingham, who has served in the U.S. House of Representatives since 2011 and won her eighth term last week.
Figures wrote in a statement Friday that he understood the history of the district and how that history impacted the opportunity to represent the people in it.
“The opportunity for fair representation is an essential element of democracy, as it affords people from different backgrounds an opportunity to make sure their voices are heard and interests represented,” he wrote.
Sewell said in a statement that the results were about “having people in office who will fight for the issues that matter to us and the values we share.”
“Too many Black voters in Alabama have had their power diluted by unfair congressional maps,” the statement said. “By sending Shomari Figures to Washington, those voters finally get the chance to claim their seat at the decision-making table. I look forward to having him as a partner in Congress and working on behalf of all Alabamians, especially those whose voices have yet to be fully heard.”
Alabama’s population is about 64% white and about 27% Black, but Black Alabamians have fought for centuries against voter suppression and disenfranchisement. During Reconstruction, when the state was about 48% Black, Alabama voters sent three men to the U.S. House of Representatives — Benjamin Turner; James Rapier and Jeremiah Haralson — but their terms did not overlap. Sewell and Figures’ districts include areas represented by all three men during the 1870s. Rapier, like Figures, was elected from Alabama’s 2nd Congressional District.
The state had already begun enacting voter suppression laws by the time Haralson left Congress in 1877. Those culminated in the 1901 Constitution, which denied the ballot to Black Alabamians and poor whites. The state did not elect another Black Alabamian to Congress until 1992, when Earl Hilliard won the 7th Congressional District, located in the western Black Belt and drawn to be a majority-minority district.
The 7th Congressional District, which Sewell represents, remained the only one district to elect Black representatives for decades. In 2022, though, a federal court ruled that racially polarized voting in the state — in which white Alabamians tend to support Republicans and Black Alabamians tend to support Democrats — meant most Black voters were swamped in elections and did not have the opportunity to choose their preferred leaders.
The court ordered the state to drawn a second “opportunity district” to give Black voters a chance to elect their candidates. After battles with the Alabama Legislature, the court last year approved a map that drew a new 2nd Congressional District running from Mobile to the Georgia border and taking in Montgomery. The district has a Black Voting Age Population (BVAP) of 48.7%.
‘At no point was it a foregone conclusion’
The court case, known as Allen v. Milligan, is still pending. Evan Milligan, the lead plaintiff in the case, said in an interview Wednesday that he had been less confident than a co-plaintiff that the lawsuit would be successful in providing more representation.
“At no point was it a foregone conclusion,” he said. “I’ll say that, and it’s still not, because this is an active case.”
Milligan said the laws all favored the outcome.
“The only reason the law needs to point to it is because of the decades of resistance that the state of Alabama has had to uniform enforcement of civil rights protections and voting rights protections at every branch and every step of the democratic process,” he said.
Benard Simelton, president of the Alabama State Conference NAACP, also among the plaintiffs, said that he hopes that the courts will uphold the decisions made so far on the case.
He said that, a few days ago before the presidential election, he would say that he expected the courts to uphold the rulings made so far in the case, but he is less sure know.
“Still, I think the courts cannot help but see that the way the state of Alabama had this, had gerrymandered the district and that they will rule in favor of the keeping that district the way it is,” he said.
Simelton said they expected the outcome of two Black candidates because they had a good candidate, and they did a lot of work trying to get people excited about voting.
“It showed that again, when Blacks get an opportunity to elect and show up to the polls, they will do and elect the person that they want to represent them,” he said.
Milligan said he thinks there’s a tradition in the state, and in his life as a child of activists, for these challenges.
“I think in every generation there’s an opportunity for us to hold our state and to hold our nation to the values that are written down in our Constitution, because freedom and fairness and justice, those are action words,” he said.
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