Shomari Figures, a Democrat and former Justice Department official, won election in Alabama’s newly drawn Second Congressional District, according to The Associated Press, handing his party a rare pickup in the South.
Mr. Figures’s victory over Caroleene Dobson, a Republican lawyer and political newcomer, means that Alabama will have two Black representatives at the same time in Washington for the first time.
His win also signals that the state’s new congressional map, enforced by a federal court to undo Alabama’s illegal dilution of Black voting power, successfully ensured more equitable representation for the Black voters who make up more than a quarter of the state’s voting-age population.
The district was drawn after a protracted legal battle in which the U.S. Supreme Court found that Alabama had violated voting rights laws by carving Black voters into predominately white districts. When a federal court later found that the state’s Republican supermajority had still failed to impose fair boundaries, an independent special master crafted a new congressional map.
The new Second District stretches across hundreds of miles and includes the state capital, Montgomery; a sizable portion of the coastal city Mobile; and much of the rural counties in the Black Belt, where enslaved people labored in the fertile cotton fields. About 49 percent of the district’s voters are Black, compared with 30 percent in its prior form.
Mr. Figures will now join Representative Terri Sewell, a Black Democrat, alongside five white Republicans in Alabama’s House delegation.
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