Yet the United States Supreme Court, in an unsigned order issued without opinion, on Feb. 7 stayed the preliminary injunction. The injunction compelled the Legislature to revise its post-census legislative map, to recognize a second Black majority congressional district.

The Supreme Court granted certiorari, removing the case from the district court. The majority offered no explanation but Brett Kavanaugh, joined by fellow Justice Samuel Alito, explained that the district court had acted too close to the late May primary which selects candidates for the November midterm election, and for which mail-in voting begins in late March. The court, said Kavanaugh, was relying on the cautionary principle of Purcell v. Gonzalez—a 2006 chambers opinion which has now hardened into a stone wall of uncertain extent. Chief Justice John Roberts dissented, saying that “the District Court properly applied existing law in an extensive opinion with no apparent errors for our correction.”

In Purcell, 18 days before a Nov. 7, 2006, election, the United States Supreme Court in a brief per curiam opinion vacated a three-judge district court panel’s “four-sentence October 5 order enjoining Arizona from enforcing” an Arizona law which required voters to present proof of citizenship at the polls. That emergency docket order has by repetition been elevated to an indeterminate but foundational principle that courts should avoid issuing highly disruptive orders too close to an election. But now too early means early in an election year.

Absentee primary voting begins March 30 for the late May primary. As Justice Elena Kagan pointed out in her dissent, Alabama has plenty of time to redraw its map: the feasibility of which plaintiffs had demonstrated. The state’s Black voters are concentrated in Montgomery County and in the rich soils of the region long known as the “Black Belt.”

We are alarmed by the ruling. The Supreme Court has long emphasized that injunctions are an extraordinary remedy—and that courts should be loath to stay the preliminary order of a lower court unless the public interest compels it to act. Justice Kagan’s dissent emphasizes that the “Thornburg v. Gingles, 478 U. S. 30 (1986), principles are: (1) that the ‘minority group is sufficiently large and geographically compact to constitute a majority’ in a district, (2) that the minority group ‘is politically cohesive,’ and (3) that the ‘white majority votes sufficiently as a bloc to enable it …’”

There is no doubt that those conditions have been met. What is also certain is that the Supreme Court, by granting certiorari, has locked in place for the 2022 midterm elections the existing racial disparities. It has cemented Alabama as a state in which its Black citizens remain—as they have always been—underrepresented in the Congress of the United States.

This sad episode reminds us that in the 60 years since Baker v. Carr’s “one person, one vote” rule was declared—despite its promise and the VRA—African Americans have not achieved an end to denial of the right to equal participation that Alabama long and notoriously withheld on the basis of race.