In 1871, Alabama sent Benjamin Turner to Congress — the first of three Black congressmen the state elected during Reconstruction, when Alabama's population was roughly 48% Black and its politics, for a brief window, actually reflected that. James Rapier followed in 1873, Jeremiah Haralson in 1875.^[4] Then Alabama's 1901 constitutional convention rewrote the rules on purpose. Convention president John B. Knox said so in his own inaugural address: the goal was "to establish white supremacy in this State," achieved "by law, not by force or fraud" — literacy tests, a poll tax, provisions built specifically to end what 1871 had started.^[5] It worked. No Black Alabamian represented the state in Congress again for 116 years.

That gap closed only in 1993, when Earl Hilliard won a newly redrawn, Black-majority district — the first Black Alabama congressman since Haralson left office in 1877.^[6] Terri Sewell followed in 2011. But the underlying fight from 1901 never fully ended — it just changed shape. By 2021, Black Alabamians were 27% of the state's voting-age population, and the congressional map the legislature passed that year gave them a real chance to elect their preferred candidate in exactly one of seven districts. On June 8, 2023, the Supreme Court ruled in Allen v. Milligan that the map likely violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act — the same law written in 1965 to finish what Reconstruction started and the 1901 convention deliberately undid.^[1]

Alabama's first attempt at a fix after the 2023 ruling didn't survive review — a federal court rejected the state's new map in September 2023 for failing to actually remedy the violation, and ordered a special master to draw a real second opportunity district instead. The result was a new District 2, running from Mobile through Montgomery to the Georgia line, with a Black voting-age population of 48.7% — close to Alabama's actual Black population share for the first time since a court, rather than the state legislature, was the one drawing the lines.^[2]

The map was used for the first time in the November 2024 election, and it worked exactly as designed: Shomari Figures won the new District 2 with 54.5% of the vote. For the first time in Alabama's history, the state sent two Black representatives to Congress at the same time — Figures alongside Sewell.^[3] That is not a new chapter in a separate story about race in Alabama. It is the same one continuous story — 1871, 1901, 1965, 1993, 2023, 2024 — of how closely Alabama's actual political representation has tracked its actual population, at every point in a 150-year record that was never really about a side issue at all. It was always just Alabama's history, told in full instead of in parts.