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Black Voters Just Scored a Big Victory—in Alabama

A federal district court struck down the state’s new congressional map as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.

Demonstrators hold signs in support of Black voting rights outside the Supreme Court on October 15, 2025.

The US District Court in Alabama has decided not to let the state go quietly back to the Jim Crow era as the Supreme Court would like. In a ruling issued on Tuesday, a three-judge panel, which included two judges appointed by Donald Trump, rejected Alabama’s latest attempt to gerrymander away the political power of Black people.

Alabama has already indicated that it will file an emergency appeal. I’m forced to assume that this appeal will be granted and the white-wing Supreme Court will overrule the lower court. But the decision is still a striking and emphatic rejection of the racism Republicans wish to reinject into American elections.

The case is just the latest in the long-running saga of Allen v. Milligan. After the 2020 Census, Alabama redrew its congressional map in such a way that only one of its seven districts was majority-minority. The map purposely diluted the voting power of Black people in Alabama, especially those living in the so-called “Black Belt,” which cuts laterally across the state.

This map was challenged by voting-rights activists who asked the state to draw a second majority-minority district. Alabama is 26 percent Black and 6 percent Latino, so having two of seven districts be majority-minority makes mathematical sense. The voting-rights activists won in district court but, in February 2022, the Supreme Court ruled that it was too close to the November 2022 midterms to force Alabama to redraw its maps. The 2022 election went ahead with only one majority-minority district.

In 2023, the Supreme Court once again took up the case—this time to rule on its merits, not just timing—and ruled that Alabama’s maps were racist and therefore unconstitutional. The Alabama legislature then put forth another map, which the district court calls the 2023 Plan, which was essentially the same as the 2021 map the Supreme Court had just rejected. The district court rejected this 2023 Plan as well, and ordered a special master to draw a new map. That new map had two majority-minority districts that kept Black communities intact across the state.

The district court calls this map the “special master map.” The 2024 elections took place under this map, and the 2026 midterm elections were set to take place under the same map. But at the end of April, the Supreme Court issued its ruling in Louisiana v. Callais. This case effectively killed the 1965 Voting Rights Act and allowed the states to resurrect Jim Crow types of voter suppression, including gerrymandering away Black voting power.

Whites in Alabama immediately sprung into action. The state interpreted Callais as overruling........

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