The Alabama Public Radio news team was recognized by the National Association of Black Journalists with a national “Salute to Excellence” award. The honor was announced at the group’s 50th anniversary convention in Cleveland over the weekend. APR received the national award for “Best Public Affairs Segment” for part one of the team’s eight-month investigation into the creation of the Alabama’s new U.S. House seat along the state’s black belt.
The U.S. Supreme Court ordered Alabama to redraw its voting map to create the new District 2, to better represent African American voters, who make up roughly a third of the state’s population. Even the plaintiffs in the legal case Allen V. Milligan told APR they were surprised they won, since this is the same conservative high court that had just overturned abortion rights and affirmative action at the nation’s universities. APR travelled to Mobile for a get-out-the-vote rally and sat down with leaders of Alabama Forward, a group inspired by Stacy Abrams effort to organize voters in Georgia.
APR was recognized alongside other public media outlets, including NPR for its coverage of racial integration at the University of Mississippi, GBH in Boston for “The Unsung Legacy of Margaret Burroughs,” Michigan Public Radio for “Malik Yakini and Detroit’s new Black owned food co-op aims to build food sovereignty.” The Washington Post, USA Today, and the Boston Globe were among the newspapers recognized.
The fate of the map for District 2 has made news since APR’s coverage. Democrat Shomari Figures was elected to the new U.S. House, as only the fourth African American to represent Alabama in the lower chamber. It’s also the first time in history that two black lawmakers have sat in the U.S. House for Alabama. Figures discussed his first term in office on “APR Notebook.”
Federal judges ordered Alabama to continue using a court-selected congressional map for the rest of the decade, but they declined to put the state back under the pre-clearance requirement of the Voting Rights Act. The decision is to keep the U.S. House district 2 map in place until 2030. What happens after that appears unclear. The order secures the current map, which created a second district where Black voters are the majority or close to it, for the next several elections. But the order leaves open what the districts will look like after 2030, when the Republican-controlled Alabama Legislature can again draw a map free from court oversight. The three-judge panel ordered the secretary of state to continue using the current congressional map, which was selected by the court last year, “until Alabama enacts a new congressional districting plan based on 2030 Census data” and said they will retain jurisdiction over the case until then. Lawmakers have said they did not intend to redraw Alabama’s congressional map before the 2030 Census.
