MOBILE, Ala. — Suits, sundresses and Southern hospitality fill the pews in the church as the first prayer calls the room into silence.
The second prayer invigorates. A man in a white T-shirt emblazoned with an Alabama map takes the podium.
“Fired up!” he shouts at the Saturday morning crowd as his fists drum against the wood.
“Fired up!” the response rolls out, dampening the hum of gnats that accompany Mobile’s wet summer heat.
“Ready to vote?”
“Ready to vote!”
Credit: Jordan Moore
Credit: Jordan Moore
The scene repeats throughout the day – at another church in Monroeville, on the streets of Montgomery and across the entire 2nd Congressional District, one of two majority-Black districts in the state and the direct result of the first major congressional redistricting shake-up since 1992.
The U.S. Supreme Court decided in June 2023 that Alabama legislators had diluted the region’s Black vote, granting advocates a taste of victory.
Credit: Jordan Moore
Credit: Jordan Moore
Now, a year later, leaders of that movement join in a daylong celebration steeped in fight, faith, community and the need to push on.
“We will take the redistricting case in Alabama as a win, because that gives Black voters an opportunity to elect a person of their choice to send to Congress,” said Benard Simelton, president of the Alabama State Conference of the NAACP, which was a plaintiff in the Allen v. Milligan case.
Community advocates across Alabama have used the momentum of the Milligan decision to push voters to the polls, even as state lawmakers draft legislation that could hobble their work.
Moves to pick apart the voting rights of the country’s citizens of color is a hallmark of United States history. The past and present particularly coexist in the South, a microcosm of American democracy in tension with itself.
People are fighting for access to a fair vote across America, but the South is the summit.
“The battle is where the war is,” activist Shalela Dowdy said, “and the war is in the South.”
Against the current
The stillness of the Alabama River contradicts the flow of Hyundais and Volkswagens crossing the bridge above.
Only a small metal sign notes the significance of this span. Gazing at the scene, the river is just water, and the bridge nothing more than an overpass.
Credit: Jordan Moore
Credit: Jordan Moore
But the Edmund Pettus Bridge carries a weight that exceeds its tonnage.
In March 1965, the bridge bore witness to 25-year-old civil rights activist John Lewis and hundreds of other people who walked in a voting rights rally that turned violent. Police wielding billy clubs broke Lewis’ skull and injured 57 others dressed in their Sunday best, bloodying the span and changing history.
Five months later, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law.
In 1965, there were no Black senators and only six Black representatives in Congress, according to the Congressional Research Service. As of July 2024, there are four Black senators and 60 Black representatives.
Credit: Jordan Moore
Credit: Jordan Moore
Still, the past lingers. Alabama has never had a Black U.S. senator, and only six Black residents have been elected to the U.S. House.
The Milligan ruling could change that, even though the time taken to enact it diminished its influence, said Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Marymount University Law School and senior policy adviser for democracy and voting rights under President Joe Biden.
The case was argued before the U.S. Supreme Court in October 2022, but the decision wasn’t announced until eight months later, after the Alabama midterm elections.
“It postponed the delivery of justice,” said Levitt, who created a database to track lawsuits and legislation related to redistricting.
Sheila Tyson, a commissioner for Jefferson County’s District 2 and lifelong voting rights advocate, said such work often takes years of resilience and commitment.
“We were born with the NAACP card,” Tyson said. “I think I got that before I got a birth certificate.”
Tyson, now 63, says when she was 10 years old, she biked from neighborhood to neighborhood as her mother knocked on doors, urging people to go to the polls.
Tyson carried on the work as a teen.
Birmingham is saturated with places Tyson would go to register voters. She and her troop of bright-eyed voting acolytes placed themselves where people were: churches, movie theaters, doctor’s offices and restaurants.
Credit: Jordan Moore
Credit: Jordan Moore
Fourth Avenue, the thumping heart of Birmingham’s Black community in the 1970s, became Tyson’s playground. The street was a mosaic but a united front – voter registration cards were in nearly every business, on every block.
Pushback, past and present
The stale air in the cramped courthouse room stifles. A man peers, then pulls out a sheet of paper.
You have 10 minutes to finish the test. You already know this. You’ve been studying for months now.
Pencil in hand, you begin.
“To serve as president of the United States, a person must have attained: 25, 35, 40 or 45 years of age?” Easy enough.
Nine minutes left.
“If it were proposed to join Alabama and Mississippi to form one state, what groups would have to vote approval in order for this to be done?”
Six minutes. Next question.
“In the space below, write the word ‘noise’ backwards and place a dot over what would be its second letter should it have been written forward.”
Three minutes.
Time’s up.
Literacy tests, a Jim Crow-era practice implemented in states across the South, tested potential voters on their reading ability and often required them to recite government procedures and facts under a deadline.
Credit: Jordan Moore
Credit: Jordan Moore
Voting rights advocates say the Alabama Legislature and lawmakers in other states are continuing that legacy, proposing bills that have the same effect: making it harder for people to vote.
One new law, signed by Gov. Kay Ivey in March, makes it a felony to “knowingly pay or provide a gift” to help a voter fill out an application for an absentee ballot. There are some exceptions, such as for voters with disabilities.
Simelton sees the law as an attack on the NAACP’s work with low-income and Black voters. The organization helps people navigate the voting process, whether through voter registration or via absentee ballot applications. But under the new law, something as innocuous as a slice of pie or bottled water could be interpreted as a gift, Simelton said.
“Those are votes we might not get in November,” Dowdy said.
Wes Allen, Alabama’s secretary of state, said in a news release that the legislation is meant to secure elections by preventing so-called “ballot harvesting,” the practice of gathering and submitting ballots by third-party volunteers or workers.
He called the measure “a victory for Alabama elections.”
Tyson said state leaders made other moves that made it more difficult for people to vote, such as closing and moving polling locations, especially in predominantly Black precincts. With no car, no help and no money to spare, “the first thing you’re gonna do is not go vote,” she said.
After the 2020 election, then-Secretary of State John Merrill began purging voters, including people who had been convicted of a felony in the previous two years, from registration lists. Leaders with Greater Birmingham Ministries requested the full list but were told they’d have to pay more than $1,000 for the records. They sued – and lost.
Restrictions also arise at the federal level. At various times over the decades, the Supreme Court has rolled back portions of the Voting Rights Act.
And in November, a federal court, reversing 60 years of precedent, ruled in a case out of Arkansas that people and organizations can no longer sue over voting practices that might discriminate based on race. The decision affects seven states in the South and Midwest, but advocates fear it will make it harder to enforce voting rights nationwide.
In a 2013 decision out of Shelby County, the U.S. Supreme Court decided states no longer need approval from the U.S. Department of Justice for most changes to voting measures – a safeguard some believe prevented discrimination.
An Alabama march of mourning, held in June in front of the Shelby County Courthouse, grieved the 11-year-old loss.
“It tore a hole in our hearts and in our minds,” the NAACP’s Simelton said to the crowd.
But redistricting remained within the Justice Department’s reach.
A tightrope of tension
Redistricting is one of many bricks that help to maintain the voting structure’s integrity. It sets the boundaries of where people can cast their vote and who gets to represent them at every level of government.
Redistricting decides who gets elected to a school board and, in turn, dictates the quality of classroom supplies and textbooks. It decides whether parks will be renovated or where a homeless shelter is built. Ultimately, redistricting decisions determine who represents a community in Congress and if their decisions will align with the needs of their constituents.
Credit: Jordan Moore
Credit: Jordan Moore
“Your vote matters, and that particularly is true when the districts in which you live were designed to respond to you,” said Levitt, the Loyola law professor.
He said deeply conservative residents should be represented by deeply conservative elected officials, and more liberal residents by more liberal officials, if redistricting is done the way it’s intended.
“The system isn’t guaranteed to produce particular political results; it’s designed to respond to what voters prefer,” Levitt said.
Every 10 years, in conjunction with the census, the Justice Department requires states to examine their voting boundaries to make sure they are fair and don’t discriminate based on race.
That’s where the battles begin. More than 80 cases challenging district maps have been filed across the U.S. since 2020, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonprofit public policy institute.
Half of those cases are in the South.
The South Carolina Legislature improperly carved 30,000 Black residents out of Charleston County, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in May. Two ongoing lawsuits in Arkansas’ largest county accuse the state Legislature of drawing racially discriminatory maps that watered down Black votes. Eight cases challenging maps in Texas involve accusations of racial discrimination.
Voting rights advocates say redistricting can siphon power.
Nearly 6 out of every 10 eligible Black voters in the nation live in the South, and Black voters will account for 14% of the country’s eligible voters in the upcoming election, a January Pew Research Center study found.
The voting restrictions of the present are a warped reflection of the past – similar, but more subtle, experts say.
At the intersection of faith and political action
Across Alabama – in Birmingham, Mobile, Selma and Montgomery – the South has a presence at once centuries old and modern.
Credit: Jordan Moore
Credit: Jordan Moore
Civil War-era mansions sit on sprawling emerald lawns. Toddlers play on summer-worn grass, the soil beneath scuffed with the memory of marchers and “Whites Only” signs. The only visible shadows are cast by air-conditioned high-rises that protect residents and visitors from the humidity. Old-timers and newcomers alike show hospitality with a lilting “Bless your heart.”
But churches are the center of the American South.
The Rev. Kenneth Dukes sees the intersection of his personal faith and the way he votes as “the Autobahn – it has no speed limits.”
Simelton agrees, calling voting an act of reverence. “We need more than lip service,” he said. “We need the pastor to preach as to why it is important, biblically, to perform your civic duties and get people out to vote.”
Credit: Jordan Moore
Credit: Jordan Moore
As Tyson traversed 1970s Birmingham, voter registration clipboard in hand, she noticed faith rallied voters.
“The church played a big role on influencing the people in the community – not only with voting, (but also) with public health, education, motivation, mobilization,” she said. “All of it was being worked out of a church.”
During Saturday rallies in June, bookended by prayer and calls to action, churches in Mobile and Monroeville welcomed the Milligan plaintiffs as they advocated for voting across the new majority-Black district.
“We have to exercise that vote, that right that many of our foreparents fought, died, bled and some was hanged for,” Simelton said from the pulpit in Mobile, moments after leading the crowd in a call and response. “It would be a travesty if we do not go to the polls.”
Legacy, belief and change
The sanctity of the vote is palpable, advocates say – in courtrooms, in churches, in neighborhood parks tinged with history.
Tyson, the county commissioner, stops by Memorial Park on a hot summer day in June. Little boys send her a chorus of greetings: “Hello, Miss Tyson!”
She stands near a sign that commemorates the May 5, 1963, Miracle Sunday Prayer Vigil, a local march to protest the jailing of civil rights demonstrators.
Tyson made sure similar markers, showing how hundreds of people fought for democracy, were placed at other historic sites around the county.
Tyson says democracy is a “mess” right now. But she adds that people need to keep fighting for it anyway.
“You gotta make up your mind,” she said. “What side of history are you going to be on?”
News21 reporter Jordan Moore contributed to this story. This report is part of “Fractured,” an examination of the state of American democracy produced by Carnegie-Knight News21. For more stories, visit https://fractured.news21.com/.
