Alabama Ruling Crushes Civil Rights Era

Terry H. Schwadron

June 7, 2026

There is no question that the U.S. Supreme Court decision in allowing Alabama — amid a primary election — to switch election maps to eliminate a Black-majority congressional district will be studied as a capstone in its campaign to squash the Voting Rights Act as a principled tool to protect Black voters.

The unsigned decision by the right-leaning supermajority on the court — with a fiery dissent from the three liberal judges — overtly helps the Republican election efforts in Alabama and already is sowing confusion into the primary process. Among other things, state officials said that 600,000 voter registrations needed to have been changed by this week to make elections work properly.

What sharpens the criticisms after the decision is that the final, approved election map is very similar to the map that this same Supreme Court had rejected three years ago as racist and in violation of the same Voting Rights Act.

Indeed, a lower court asked to review the Alabama maps after the recent Supreme Court decision that allowed Louisiana to forego creating a new minority-majority district in that state’s congressional redistricting. But this Supreme Court rejected the factual analysis from that lower court.

The lower court “failed to follow our instruction in Callais (the Louisiana case) that the mere fact that voters of different races vote for different parties is not relevant to proving racially polarized voting patterns,” ironically adding that the lower court had interfered with the state election plans at the last minute — as the Supreme Court justices were now doing themselves.

For anyone who aligns with the goals of decades of Civil Rights protests, campaigns and commitments, the final abandonment of protections offered by Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act is a slap well beyond some arcane interpretation of clauses. The decision, which follows a series of increasingly vote-limiting decisions by the Court, is an out and out attack on voter protections based on race.

What the Supreme Court says are outlived purposes in a post-racial America feels instead a repudiation of the entire spirit of the Civil Rights Movement — and a precursor to undercutting of other 14th Amendment protections.

The Alabama Case

The decision is most easily understood by its dissent, written by Justice Sonia Sotomayor and joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, in which she criticized the majority for paving the way toward “a chaotic election.” The majority “disregards both democratic values and the rule of law,” Sotomayor argued, and went beyond its own ruling in the Louisiana case.

Alabama had enacted a new map in 2021, which Black voters and Civil Rights organizations successfully challenged before the Supreme Court in 2023, based on a violation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act prohibitions on racial discrimination. Black voters were split among three congressional districts, leaving them a minority in each. Alabama then drew a new map, and the groups challenged it again, with a lower court agreeing that the map was racial and violated the law. Last month, the Supreme Court asked the lower court to reconsider its ruling after its Louisiana decision, and that lower court doubled down on its racial findings.

That is the matter that came before the Supreme Court anew in the form of an injunction about the state using basically the same redistricted map in this year’s election, for which preparations were already underway. The conservative supermajority ruled that the lower court should have presumed — but did not — that the Alabama legislature had acted in good faith in adopting the 2023 map. Instead, the majority explained, the lower court “interpreted the State’s legal disagreement with the court’s earlier remedial order as proof of discriminatory” intent. It added that the lower court had not heeded the Louisiana decision, essentially extending the suggestion that race does not matter in elections — which goes beyond any reasonable reading of the Louisiana case — and added that it was now too late to stop Alabama.

In her 17-page dissent, Sotomayor said Alabama “has no legitimate interest in enforcing an unconstitutional map, while vast harms will likely arise from upending the status quo, sowing chaos in Alabama, and rewarding Alabama’s gamesmanship.” She emphasized that the case for racial discrimination was well documented and added her time-sensitive clause — that electoral chaos would result.

Wider Applications

It is clear, argues Joyce Vance, a former U.S. Attorney in Alabama and legal commentator, that erasure of racial discrimination in congressional redistricting will not end with this Alabama case.

Basically, she says, the Alabama case has made challenge of partisan gerrymandering so difficult that no amount of evidence would allow for enforcement of Voting Rights protections.

Deuel Ross, director of litigation for the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, which represented one set of challengers in the dispute, said the decision “gives cover to Alabama and others to deliberately and openly discriminate against Black voters without fear of any consequence.”

At Democracy Docket, Mark Elias and others see a broad attack on all voter rights protections, and a definite lean in the Supreme Court that will help Republicans in particular, since Black voters tend to vote Democratic.

The immediate impact will be that Alabama likely will replace a Black Democratic congress member with a white Republican, using a map that previous courts have said violates the 14th Amendment to the Constitution.

The longer-range goal will be to undercut a basic commitment in this country to anti-discriminatory behavior in health, education, housing, environment and finances.

The unsheathed campaign for a dominant White, Christian nation that limits rights rather than commits to constantly growing them is an attack on basic American principles just in time for our 250th anniversary celebration.

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