Allen v. Milligan, Alabama's Second Black District and the Ruling of June 2023

The Black Belt of Alabama got its name from the soil, not the people: a crescent of dark, rich earth that runs across the middle of the state, which made it cotton country, which made it, before the Civil War, the part of Alabama where the most people were held in slavery. The descendants of those people still live there in large numbers, in Selma, in Montgomery, in small towns along the old cotton routes. For decades after the 1990s, Alabama's congressional map treated the region in a particular way. It gathered a large share of the state's Black voters into one district, the 7th, which reached from Birmingham down through the Black Belt, and divided the rest of the region among districts where white voters were a solid majority. Black Alabamians, more than a quarter of the state's population, could reliably elect the candidate of their choice in one of seven congressional districts. On June 8, 2023, the Supreme Court ruled, 5 to 4, that the map likely violated the Voting Rights Act. What Alabama did next is the part of the story worth knowing.

In short: In Allen v. Milligan, the Supreme Court upheld a lower court's finding that Alabama's congressional map likely diluted Black voting power and required a second district where Black voters had a fair chance to elect a candidate. Alabama's legislature responded with a new map that still had only one such district; the lower court rejected it, the Supreme Court declined to intervene, and a court-drawn map produced a new 2nd District that elected Shomari Figures in 2024.

From Selma to the 7th District

The Voting Rights Act itself was born in this part of Alabama. On March 7, 1965, state troopers and a sheriff's posse attacked peaceful marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, at the edge of the Black Belt, as they set out for Montgomery to demand the right to register. The violence, broadcast across the country, pushed Congress to act, and President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act on August 6 of that year. Within a few years, Black registration in Alabama rose sharply.

Registration did not translate quickly into representation in Congress. For most of the century after Reconstruction, Alabama sent no Black member to the U.S. House. That changed only in 1992, when the state, under pressure from Voting Rights Act litigation, drew a majority-Black 7th District and voters elected Earl Hilliard, the first Black member of Congress from Alabama since Reconstruction. The 7th District has elected a Black representative ever since; Terri Sewell has held it since 2011.

So the map that Black voters challenged after the 2020 census was itself a product of an earlier Voting Rights Act fight. The question in Milligan was whether one district was still all the law required, in a state where the Black population had grown and where, the plaintiffs argued, a second compact district could be drawn without contortions. Put more bluntly: was the 1992 settlement a floor or a ceiling?

There is a reason that question kept recurring. A district created to remedy discrimination tends to become a fixture, and the political system arranges itself around it. Incumbents of both parties come to depend on the lines. A new census can show that the remedy no longer matches the population, but the people with the power to redraw the map have little reason to change something that keeps their own seats safe. That is why these questions usually end up in court.

How the case got to the Court

After the 2020 census, Alabama redrew its seven congressional districts in late 2021, and the new map looked much like the old one: one district where Black voters were a majority, and six where they were not.

Several groups of Black voters and civil rights organizations sued. One of the named plaintiffs was Evan Milligan, a Montgomery resident; the defendant was Alabama's secretary of state, which is why the case first bore the name of John Merrill, who held the office then, and later Wes Allen, who succeeded him. The plaintiffs argued under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act that the map diluted Black votes by packing many Black voters into one district and cracking the rest across districts where they could not elect anyone.

A three-judge federal court heard the case. Two of its three judges had been appointed by President Trump. In January 2022, after a lengthy hearing, the court unanimously found that the plaintiffs were likely to win and ordered Alabama to draw a new map with a second district in which Black voters had an opportunity to elect a representative of their choice.

The Supreme Court put that order on hold in February 2022, before the election. Alabama held its 2022 congressional elections under the challenged map. Then the Court took up the case on the merits.

Alabama's argument

Alabama's lawyers made an argument that went beyond the facts of this map. They asked the Court to change how Section 2 worked.

The state proposed what it called a race-neutral benchmark. It argued that courts should compare a challenged map to the universe of maps a computer could draw without considering race at all, and should find a violation only if the state's map departed meaningfully from that neutral range. Because Black voters in Alabama are spread across much of the state, and because traditional districting principles tend to keep counties and communities together, Alabama argued that a race-blind process would often produce only one Black-opportunity district, and therefore that its map was not discriminatory. It also argued that requiring a second district would force the state to sort voters by race in violation of the Constitution.

That argument was not crazy, and it had support among some legal scholars. It rested on a real worry: that Section 2 could become a machine for maximizing the number of minority districts, regardless of whether any discrimination had occurred.

The ruling of June 8, 2023

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority, and the coalition surprised many observers. He was joined by Justice Brett Kavanaugh and by the Court's three liberal justices, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett dissented.

The majority declined Alabama's invitation to rewrite the law. It held that the framework the Court had used since Thornburg v. Gingles in 1986 remained the test: whether the minority group was large and compact enough to form a majority in a reasonably configured district, whether it voted cohesively, and whether the white majority usually voted as a bloc to defeat its preferred candidates. The district court had applied that test faithfully, the majority said, and its findings were well supported. The plaintiffs had shown that a reasonable second district could be drawn while respecting traditional districting principles.

The majority also rejected the race-neutral benchmark. Section 2, Roberts wrote, focuses on whether the political process is equally open to minority voters, and the law does not require plaintiffs to show that their proposed map matches what a race-blind computer would draw. At the same time, the opinion repeated that Section 2 does not require proportional representation and that the Gingles preconditions are demanding.

Justice Kavanaugh wrote separately. He joined most of the opinion but noted that the authority to conduct race-based redistricting could not extend indefinitely into the future, while saying Alabama had not raised that argument in this case. Readers who followed the Court afterward will recognize that note; it pointed toward questions the Court took up later, in Louisiana v. Callais in 2026.

The map Alabama passed instead

What made Alabama's response notable was not that it disagreed with the Court. States disagree with the Court all the time. It was how it responded.

In July 2023, Alabama's legislature met in a special session and passed a new congressional map. It did not create a second district where Black voters were a majority or close to one. Instead, it raised the Black share of the 2nd District to roughly 40 percent, below the level that the evidence in the case suggested would give Black voters a real opportunity to elect their candidates, given how racially polarized voting is in the state. Some of the map's defenders said openly that they hoped the Supreme Court would look at the case again.

The plaintiffs went back to the three-judge court, and in September 2023 the court rejected the new map. In unusually sharp language, the judges said they were deeply troubled that the state had enacted a map it readily admitted did not provide the remedy the court had ordered. Alabama asked the Supreme Court to step in again. On September 26, 2023, the Court denied the request without any noted dissents.

That order deserves more attention than it got. Some of the same justices who had dissented in June did not record a dissent in September. Whatever they thought of the June ruling, the Court as a whole did not appear willing to let a state openly ignore it.

The court-drawn map and the 2024 election

The three-judge court had appointed a special master to draw a remedial map in case the state did not produce an adequate one. In October 2023, the court adopted one of the special master's proposals. It reconfigured the 2nd District, running across the southern part of the state through Montgomery and into Mobile, so that Black residents made up nearly half its voting-age population, enough, given voting patterns, to give Black voters a realistic chance to elect their preferred candidate.

The new map took effect for the 2024 elections. In November 2024, voters in the new 2nd District elected Shomari Figures, a Democrat and former Justice Department official, who became one of two Black members of Congress from Alabama, alongside Representative Terri Sewell of the 7th District. For the first time in the modern era, Black voters in two of the state's seven districts had chosen their own representative.

The litigation did not end there. In 2025 the same three-judge court went further and found that the legislature had acted with discriminatory intent when it passed the 2023 map, and ordered that the court-drawn map remain in place. Alabama appealed, and the Supreme Court's Callais ruling in 2026 changed the legal ground under the case. Where Alabama's districts end up for the rest of the decade is still being fought out in court.

Why this case matters past Alabama

Allen v. Milligan matters for three reasons, and they hold even after the Court narrowed Section 2 in Callais.

First, it showed that a remedy can work. A district drawn under the Voting Rights Act gave Black voters in a large part of the Black Belt a real choice for Congress, and they used it. Arguments that such districts are futile or merely symbolic are harder to make when a new representative is sworn in.

Second, it showed how much depends on states accepting court rulings. Alabama's defiance was not illegal on its face, since the legislature passed a new map, but it was an attempt to keep the old result under a new shape. The judiciary's power ultimately rests on officials complying with judgments they dislike. When they do not, the remedy takes longer and costs more, and voters live under unlawful maps in the meantime.

Third, it demonstrates something about the alliances that can form in the law. The majority in June 2023 included two conservative justices and three liberal ones. That alignment did not last; the Court's later rulings moved in another direction. But there are moments when legal principle crosses the usual lines, and advocates who write off the possibility in advance leave wins on the table.

There is a fair critique here of how voting rights advocates sometimes argue these cases, and I'll make it as opinion. The legal strategy has relied heavily on drawing majority-minority districts, which can have the effect of concentrating Black voters in a few seats and making surrounding districts whiter and more Republican. Some advocates have pressed instead for coalition districts and for systems like ranked-choice or proportional voting that do not depend on drawing lines by race at all. That debate is worth having openly, especially now, as federal courts step back.

What you can do

The Black Belt's second district came from voters who sued, judges who held firm and a community that turned out. Here is how to help that kind of work.

• Find out who represents you now. District lines change; the representatives page finds your U.S. representative, senators and state legislators by address, with phone numbers, contact forms and their latest votes.
• Follow the cases. The court watch page lists the Supreme Court's opinions this term with the Court's own summaries, plus the emergency docket where many election orders are issued. Our voting rights and redistricting coverage follows the maps state by state.
• Support the plaintiffs and organizers. Section 2 cases are brought by local voters with the help of civil rights groups. The organizations directory lists civil rights, voting and legal aid nonprofits in every state.
• Register and vote under the map you have. The voting page has registration deadlines, voter ID and early voting rules for every state, linked to each state's election office.
• Connect the history to the present. Read about the long fight for racial justice in the South; the Black Belt's story did not begin with this case and will not end with it.