Originally posted on the Braver Angels Substack and placed here for increased distribution.
On May 11th, the Supreme Court cleared the road for increasingly unrestricted partisan gerrymandering in America, upholding the decision of the state of Alabama — with a voting-age population 26% African American and seven congressional districts — to reinstate a congressional map with only one predominantly Black district. There had been two previously, following a federal court’s strike-down of the Republican state legislature’s 2023 proposal relegating Black voter concentration to a single zone. Now the Alabama 7th stands as the only Alabama district likely to produce a Black member of Congress supported by Black Alabamians.
This unsigned order was made possible by the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Louisiana v. Callais. That decision, led by the conservative majority on the court, makes it harder to use race as a factor in drawing congressional district lines. It also builds on previous decisions of the court which have weakened federal oversight of electoral reforms in southern states that, with the Voting Rights Act, were once subject to federal approval meant to ensure that such states were no longer engaging in racial discrimination.
History is always with us. The past is never past. That is true for just about all of our politics — the way people see things is a reflection of memories lived and received that usually don’t announce themselves in conversation, or in how political battles are covered in the media. But given the history of the Civil Rights Movement, the Voting Rights Act, the fall of Jim Crow, and the rise of the “new South,” history is a little more visible than usual in the background of the controversy over race and redistricting in the state of Alabama. We should acknowledge that history — not to vindicate or condemn either side in the present debate, but to humanize both sides, and to make clear what needs to be worked through if America is to pull a deep thorn out of our politics without tearing a deeper wound between our people on the matter of race.
It is here that we come to a longer history, one that many people are rightfully making reference to in this moment. The Civil Rights Movement was fought, in large part, to secure the right to vote as a practical reality for African-Americans who, though having the right to vote through the 15th Amendment, were effectively barred from doing so in most southern states through poll taxes, ludicrous tests, and outright violence and intimidation by White Citizens’ Councils and the Ku Klux Klan. (Even non-southern states had more subtle means of ensuring Black politicians were not elected in places with substantial Black populations.)
The state of Alabama was ground zero for much of this brutality and disenfranchisement. On the evening of February 18th, 1965, in the city of Marion, some 500 nonviolent protestors marched in disciplined fashion from Zion United Methodist Church toward the Perry County jail, where SCLC field secretary James Orange was being held. They were met by a contingent of Alabama state troopers. The streetlights went dark — many later said they were shot out — and on-site reporters could only listen as billyclubs rained down on the protestors. NBC News correspondent Richard Valeriani was beaten so badly he was hospitalized. Twenty-six-year-old Jimmie Lee Jackson, a Baptist deacon and Army veteran, fled into Mack’s Café with his mother and 82-year-old grandfather. Troopers followed them in. When a trooper began beating his mother, Jackson moved to shield her — and was shot twice in the stomach. He died eight days later, on February 26th.
This incident precipitated the most impactful demonstrations in the history of the movement in Alabama, with Dr. King leading two of three marches from Selma to Montgomery to focus the eyes of the public on the injustice of George Wallace’s Jim Crow regime. The first march, however, led by John Lewis, resulted in the beating and tear-gassing of protestors on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in an event that would come to be known as Bloody Sunday.
It was events like these that would lead to the passage of the Voting Rights Act in August of 1965, completing a project of racial enfranchisement at the ballot box that spanned from Bloody Sunday to the end of the Civil War a full one hundred years before.
This history is well known to many of us. When the headlines appear noting that Alabama has been largely freed by the Supreme Court of accountability for the racial impact of its electoral reforms, the outcry against this — in the eyes of critics — is situated against a backdrop of experience that even now is not outside the memory of many who were alive to see it.
This reality demands our empathy. That empathy, however, does not in and of itself require agreement with the political indignity it yields. Republicans and conservatives insist that partisan redistricting is nothing like the poll taxes and direct voter disenfranchisement the Voting Rights Act was meant to prevent. After all, no Black voter has lost the right to vote at all. As Republican Scott Jennings and businessman Kevin O’Leary argued on CNN following the Supreme Court’s May 11th order, the principle of one person, one vote has been upheld for all races. As O’Leary put it, “the rest is just map wars.”
Across the panel from O’Leary, civil-rights veteran’s son and former South Carolina state legislator Bakari Sellers reminded the audience that “there are people in this country who fought, died, and bled for the right to vote.” The exchange went viral as a kind of microcosm of the impasse — and it is worth sitting with as such. From the vantage of many African-Americans, the Civil Rights Movement was an effort to ensure the collective voice of Black Americans just as surely as Jim Crow was meant to suppress the shared power of the Black vote. There is a deep pain at these historic injustices that resonates through our history right down to the present moment, expressing itself in the grievances of many Black people toward the Supreme Court, the GOP, and the Republican majority in the state of Alabama. This is a human experience we should be reckoning with.
This does not negate the fact that there are only human beings on each side of this equation. For most white southerners today, there is no felt fidelity to a Jim Crow history that did not, even at the time, represent the feelings of all white Alabamians. If Bloody Sunday darkened the conscience of the state in 1965, it is worth remembering what had happened in Birmingham the year before. On Easter Sunday, 1964 — just six months after the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing killed four young Black girls — Reverend Billy Graham held an evangelistic rally at Legion Field. The Jefferson County Citizens’ Council and the United Americans for Conservative Government formally protested the event. The Klan removed and vandalized signs publicizing the rally. And 35,000 Alabamians came anyway — white and Black roughly evenly split, in what was reported as the largest integrated audience in the state’s history.
Social change was a grueling process in the deep South. But the movement toward Dr. King’s beloved community was so profound in the hearts of even some of the most bitter opponents of civil rights that the long arc of the years that followed bent in a direction many would not have predicted. In 1972, after George Wallace had been shot and paralyzed on the presidential campaign trail, Shirley Chisholm — the first Black woman elected to Congress, and the first Black major-party presidential candidate — visited him in his hospital room. “I wouldn’t want what happened to you to happen to anyone,” she told him. He cried, and took her hand, and did not want to let go. His own daughter would later say that Chisholm planted in him the seed of a transformation. By 1979, Wallace — in a wheelchair — came to the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Dr. King’s old pulpit, and from before that congregation he begged forgiveness for the harm he had done. As he left the sanctuary, the congregation stood and sang “Amazing Grace.”
For many white people in America today, certainly in recent years, there is a sense that to be white is to be seen as prejudiced until proven otherwise — regardless of one’s friendships, one’s kindness, or the sympathies of one’s politics. For white southerners, there is the added sense that the racial past of the South condemns the racial present of the South in terms of how southerners are perceived. After all, gerrymandering is a partisan practice engaged in by both parties, including in states where there are few Black voters at all. Most Black voters happen to be Democrats, and so redistricting along party lines marginalizes Black voters only by marginalizing Democrats. The GOP, many white Republicans would say, would welcome Black voters into the Republican Party with open arms if only they would come aboard. The very fact that Alabama and other southern states had to continually check their voting reforms with the federal government under the Voting Rights Act for so many decades — until recently — was a subtle and ongoing humiliation to a state whose white citizens saw themselves as having changed enormously on race since the days of Jim Crow.
For many white Republicans in Alabama, Jim Crow was a long time ago, and much has changed. For many Black Democrats in America, Jim Crow was almost yesterday, and far too little is truly different. The way each side reads the events of the moment is colored greatly by this lens.
Yet while we are all individuals with the capacity to reason beyond our circumstances, as groups none of us fully choose those lenses. History inevitably shaped our outlooks on current events.
But the promise of Martin Luther King Jr.’s nonviolent movement, and the promise of Billy Graham’s evangelical movement, was that we could find community and fellowship across the bounds of race — despite the histories none of us chose. There is no need to denigrate any of us for being a product of a history none of us chose. What is left to us is the responsibility to frame a conversation over race, gerrymandering, and voting rights that allows for progress and compromise to emerge as the fruit of goodwill — as our ancestors found the moral courage to do years before.
We will only be repeating the tragedies of history if we do otherwise.
– John Wood Jr. - Braver Angels National Ambassador
