Terri Sewell

Alabama Governor Kay Ivey reversed her original decision to not call a special session over the state’s Congressional map. The National Association of Black Journalists, the Public Media Journalists’ Association, and the Society of Professional Journalists honored the Alabama Public Radio newsroom for its eight month investigation into the state’s newest Congressional seat, which now may be at risk. Click below to listen to APR’s special report from 2024, “…a U.S. House seat, if you can keep it.”

A Supreme Court decision striking down a majority Black congressional district in Louisiana has amplified an already intense national redistricting battle by providing Republican officials in several states new grounds to redraw voting districts. Alabama is joining in.

The Supreme Court on Wednesday hollowed out a landmark Civil Rights-era law that has increased minority representation in Congress and elsewhere, striking down a majority Black congressional district in Louisiana and opening the door for more redistricting across the country that could aid Republican efforts to control the House. Here in Alabama, the decision could decide the fate of the newly created District 2 seat, currently occupied by Democrat Shomari Figures. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are speaking out on the issue.

The Supreme Court has weakened a key tool of the Voting Rights Act that has helped root out racial discrimination in voting for more than half a century in a case concerning a Black majority congressional district in Louisiana. Back in 2023, the high court ordered Alabama, in Allen v. Milligan, to draw a second district where Black voters had a fair chance to elect their preferred representative. Today’s ruling may remove that criteria, possibly enabling Alabama’s Republican majority to redraw the map.

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."

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 APR news team spent eight months investigating issues surrounding the new U.S. House seat along the state’s “black belt.” Congressman Shomari Figures was interviewed about the new district on “APR Notebook.”

Facing a sea of state troopers, Charles Mauldin was near the front line of voting rights marchers who strode across the now infamous Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, on March 7, 1965. The violence that awaited them shocked the nation and galvanized support for the passage of the U.S. Voting Rights Act a few months later. The APR news team covered this year’s sixtieth anniversary of “bloody Sunday.”

The Alabama Public Radio news team is known for its major journalism investigations. We've been doing them for over a decade. Our most recent national award winning effort was an eight month investigation into Alabama's new U.S. House seat in the rural Black Belt region of the state. The new voting map was ordered by the U.S. Supreme Court so Alabama would be more fair to black residents. Now, anybody who follows the news might reasonably be thinking— what? The same high court that overturned Roe versus Wade and ended affirmative action in the nation's universities told Alabama that they needed to treat black voters better. Even the plaintiffs in the legal case of Allen versus Milligan told APR news they were gobsmacked they won. The goal after that legal victory was to make sure the new minority congressional district works. The point there was to keep conservative opponents from having the excuse to try to flip the voting map back to the GOP. And that's a moving target that could change at any moment, even as we speak, the job of managing all of these issues now falls to Congressman Shomari Figures. He was elected last November as the first US House member in Alabama's redrawn District two. Shomari figures joins me next on APR Notebook.

I talked with Alabama's newest member of Congress about the possible future impact on the state from Donald Trump's so called Big, beautiful Bill. Democratic U.S. House member Shomari Figures is the first person elected to Alabama's newly redrawn district two the US Supreme Court ordered the new voting map to better represent African Americans.

Alabama’s two U.S. Senators briefly used the website "X" to show their support for Saturday night’s U.S. Air strikes that reportedly showered three Iranian nuclear sites with a dozen or so “bunker buster” bombs and other weapons launched by B-2 stealth bombers and Navy submarines.