Terri Sewell

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.

Former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, who backed litigation that resulted in the redrawing of Alabama's 2nd Congressional District, called next week's election a historic opportunity for the state's voters. Holder appeared with the district's Democratic nominee Shomari Figures at a series of Monday campaign stops in Mobile.

U.S. Rep. Terri Sewell has announced the Birmingham-Shuttlesworth International Airport will receive $6,481,875 in federal funding. The money will be used to make improvements to the safety and reliability of the airport’s aprons and taxiways.

“At that time, we’d been singing songs, we shall overcome, and before I’d be a slave…be dead and buried in my grave,” says Bennie Lee Tucker. He’s seventy…

The lone Democrat and black person in Alabama's congressional delegation says she is skipping the inauguration of president-elect Donald Trump.…