The effort to redraw US House districts is winding down….
Efforts to use race in drawing the voting districts lines are about political parties and power…
The Washington Post focuses on the issue in Alabama….
[Evan] Milligan is a descendant of enslaved Blacks, only six generations removed. Once freed, his ancestors moved from the rural Black Belt — so named for its rich topsoil — to neighborhoods in eastern Montgomery. Decades later, they would be foot soldiers of the civil rights movement, thrust into the nation’s most historic battles over segregation and voting rights in the Jim Crow South.
Now Milligan, 40, is on the front lines of the latest discrimination fight, lending his family name to what will be the marquee Supreme Court case over racial gerrymandering, centered on the invisible district line that divides the Black neighborhoods of eastern Montgomery. In Milligan v. Merrill — that’s Alabama Secretary of State John Merrill (R) — the nation’s highest court will determine whether federal law requires states such as Alabama with large minority populations and racially polarized voting to take race into account in redistricting or whether they have free rein to squeeze minority voters into as few districts as possible — one, in Alabama’s case — giving White politicians dominance in all the others.
The decision could have sweeping implications across a huge swath of the South where the Black population and those of other minorities are growing at a faster rate than the White population but the power is disproportionality held by White politicians.
“These are Black people that come from the Black Belt communities. They move to Montgomery, have endured all of this, and then today aren’t able to elect a person they choose,” Milligan said. “They’re not able to have any influence on the outcome of the elections…
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At a recent town hall in Birmingham, Rep. Terri A. Sewell (D), the first Black woman elected to Congress in Alabama, stood before about three dozen constituents, nearly all of them Black, and took questions about sewage in their yards and affordable housing. But first, she spoke about voting rights and her work to preserve them.
Sewell is the lead sponsor on stalled voting-rights legislation named after Lewis, the civil rights icon and congressman who was bludgeoned by police in his youth while helping lead a march from Selma to Montgomery for voting rights.
“Nothing is more sacrosanct to our district than the progress that was made on the backs of people from our district,” Sewell told them.
Alabama’s population is 27 percent Black, and many of those voters are packed into Sewell’s 7th District, which stretches along the western border of Alabama, grabbing parts of the Black Belt in its fist and extending two fingers into heavily Black Montgomery and Birmingham. The remaining Black communities are dispersed among the state’s six overwhelmingly White districts. The result, voting rights advocates argue, is a dilution of Black voting power….