Alabama, like Mississippi, has a notorious history of racial discrimination in voting. See Morton Stavis, A Century of Struggle For Black Enfranchisement in Mississippi: From the Civil War to the Congressional Challenge of 1965-and Beyond, 57 Miss. L.J. 591, 603 (1987). By 1892, only 68,127 white voters qualified as eligible and a mere 8,615 black voters.
In Allen v. Caster the Supreme Court has ok'd the dissolution of one of Alabama's two Black majority Congressional districts. This in a state in which 25% of the electorate is African-American and another 5% Hispanic.
The three Democratic-appointed justices dissented vigorously:
JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR, with whom JUSTICE KAGAN and JUSTICE JACKSON join, dissenting.
Today, the Court vacates a District Court order enjoining Alabama’s 2023 Redistricting Plan and remands for reconsideration in light of the Court’s new interpretation of §2 of the Voting Rights Act in Louisiana v. Callais, 608 U. S. ___ (2026). There is no reason to do so. In addition to holding that Alabama’s 2023 Redistricting Plan violates §2, the District Court held, in one of the three cases before this Court, that Alabama violated the Fourteenth Amendment by intentionally diluting the votes of Black voters in Alabama. That constitutional finding of intentional discrimination is independent of, and unaffected by, any of the legal issues discussed in Callais. Vacatur is thus inappropriate and will cause only confusion as Alabamians begin to vote in the elections scheduled for next week. I respectfully dissent.
Scotus Blog: Supreme Court clears Alabama to dissolve a Black-majority Congressional district
The Supreme Court on Monday afternoon cleared the way for Alabama to use a congressional map that a lower court had blocked on the ground that it violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits racial discrimination in voting. The justices threw out the lower-court order barring Alabama from using the map, which it had adopted in 2023, and sent the dispute back to the lower court for another look.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented from Monday’s decision, in a four-page opinion joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. In her view, the court’s order was “inappropriate and will cause only confusion as Alabamians begin to vote in the elections scheduled for next week.”
The dispute began five years ago, when Alabama enacted a new congressional map in the wake of the 2020 census. A group of Black voters and civil rights organizations went to federal court, where they alleged that the new map violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, because it spread Black voters in southern Alabama across three congressional districts, leaving them a minority in each.
The district court agreed that the 2021 map likely violated Section 2, and it barred the state from using the map. The Supreme Court upheld that decision in 2023 in Allen v. Milligan.
