JIM CROW'S ROBE

ALABAMA SHOWS THE NEW JIM CROW WEARS A ROBE.

The Supreme Court just gave Alabama a green light to move backward. In a brief May 11 order, the Court vacated lower-court rulings blocking Alabama’s 2023 congressional map and told lower courts to reconsider the cases after Louisiana v. Callais, the Court’s new Voting Rights Act decision. The order came while Alabama’s elections were already close enough for Justice Sonia Sotomayor to warn that the Court was creating confusion as voting began.

This is not an abstract fight about lines on paper. Alabama’s court-ordered map had two districts where Black voters had a real opportunity to elect candidates of their choice. The map Alabama now wants to revive has only one such district out of seven, even though Black voters make up roughly a quarter of the state’s electorate. Reuters reports that the previous map could help Republicans regain a House seat, and AP reports the decision sets the stage for Alabama to eliminate one of two largely Black congressional districts before the midterms.

The brutality is in the timing. Alabama officials pointed to Callais as the reason to end the court-ordered map, and the Supreme Court moved fast enough to disrupt an election already in motion. Democracy Docket reported that Alabama lawmakers had raced to pass legislation authorizing new elections for affected seats, while state officials asked the Supreme Court to lift injunctions against the challenged map.

The Court’s own record makes this sharper. In Louisiana v. Callais, the majority held that Louisiana’s creation of an additional majority-minority district was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander because Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, as the majority reinterpreted it, did not require that district. The Court also said plaintiffs must now do more to separate race from party when proving racial-bloc voting.

That is the trap. In the Deep South, race and party are braided by history: slavery, Jim Crow, racial terror, housing exclusion, school segregation, felony disenfranchisement, and decades of racially polarized voting. Critical race theory helps name what polite doctrine hides: when courts demand that Black voters prove race without touching party, they can turn white political power into an invisibility cloak.

Sotomayor’s dissent says the Alabama record included more than a Voting Rights Act finding. The lower court also found that Alabama intentionally diluted Black voting power in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment, a finding she said was independent of Callais. She wrote that Alabama had adopted a plan with one opportunity district after being ordered to remedy discrimination, and that the district court found Alabama made “an intentional choice to perpetuate and entrench” discrimination.

Alabama officials celebrated. Attorney General Steve Marshall called the order a major victory, saying mapmaking power was returning to elected representatives; AP reported that he said his job was to put the legislature in the best legal position to draw a map favoring Republicans “seven-to-zero.” Civil-rights advocates heard something else: the old song in a new key. AP reported NAACP President Derrick Johnson warning, “We are witnessing a return to Jim Crow.”

So let us be clear: this is not colorblindness. This is power-blindness. It treats Black political representation as the constitutional problem and white political domination as the neutral baseline.

The civic answer is peaceful, disciplined, relentless resistance: litigation, legislation, mass political education, nonviolent moral witness, and a national demand for fair maps. If the Court keeps cutting holes in the Voting Rights Act, the people must build a bigger shield.