By April Ryan
The NAACP Legal Defense Fund is taking a victory lap for a Supreme Court win against Alabama’s discriminatory redistricting practices that targeted Black voters there. Attorney Deuel Ross for the Legal Defense Fund says, “The Supreme Court ruled that Alabama had violated the Voting Rights Act by chopping up that Black population and declining to create two majority Black Districts.” Ross emphasized to BlackPressUSA that Alabama’s Black Belt is hundreds of years old with a “very large Black population.” Ross, who argued the case in the trial court and the United States Supreme Court, successfully proved that “Alabama had both intentionally discriminated against Black voters” by chopping up the Black Belt, a majority Black population that “runs straight through Alabama.”
This victory comes after recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions have undermined voting rights laws. “If any case was going to show that the Voting Rights Act was still needed, it was our case,” offered Ross. One of the first major blows to the 1965 Voting Rights Act was in 2013. The Supreme Court decision then gutted the pre-clearance portion of the act. The ruling was made in the Shelby V. Holder case, throwing out the pre-clearance portions of the law. That law section was created to prevent discriminatory election practices in “certain southern states” like Alabama. Within that law was a portion called pre-clearance, where the southern states that were found to be practicing discriminatory election practices against Black voters had to get clearance from the Justice Department before they made any changes to the election process or rules.
