MOBILE, Alabama — Critics challenging Alabama’s design of its congressional districts want the Supreme Court to make its legislature create a second “black-majority” district (among Alabama’s seven districts total) by breaking up coastal Mobile County in the state’s southwest corner and joining its most heavily black neighborhoods with black areas all the way over on the eastern end of the state, near Georgia.
As I asked yesterday, why would a black voter in the rural “wiregrass” area of Alabama, near Georgia, automatically “choose” to be represented by a black politician from urban Mobile over a white politician whose lifetime in the wiregrass region helps him understand local concerns?
After all, as Mobile TV reporter Brendan Kirby said, “They read different newspapers, watch different TV channels, listen to different radio stations. They have different local issues. Their kids go to different school systems. They have different community colleges and four-year universities. The only thing they share in common is skin color.”
IN ALABAMA REDISTRICTING CASE, LIBERAL JUSTICES EMBRACE SEGREGATION
Well, here’s more grist for the mill, explaining how strongly the two coastal counties of Mobile and Baldwin, the entireties of which have been in the same congressional district for 40 years, identify with each other and seek common representation. Adline Clarke, a black Democrat who is a third-term state representative from Mobile (and before that, a prominent reporter for the Mobile Register newspaper), spoke up just a year ago, in September 2021, about the importance of keeping both coastal counties in one political unit.
“I consider Mobile and Baldwin counties one political subdivision,” she said, “and would prefer that these two Gulf Coast counties remain in the same congressional district because government, business, and industry in the two counties work well together — with our congressman — for the common good of the two counties.”
Liberal justices would break up this obvious community of interest by wrongly claiming the mantle of racial justice. It’s sickening, really, that nearly 60 years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, it is political liberals who insist on adjudging almost everything on the basis of race and assuming that skin color is more determinative of political interests than all other commonalities combined.
This assumption is especially misguided when considering Alabama’s coastal counties. Under longtime city commissioner and Mayor Joseph Langan, Mobile integrated with far less fanfare than the rest of Alabama. As early as 1963, the Wall Street Journal ran an article about Mobile headlined, “An Alabama City Builds Racial Peace as Strife Increases Elsewhere.”
A plethora of good legal and constitutional arguments should lead the Supreme Court to abandon its vague and confusing racial calculations, laid out in the 1986 case of Thornburg v. Gingles, as amended by subsequent decisions that slice and dice its dubious logic into an evermore unappetizing goulash. Still, the most compelling argument is as much commonsensical and ethical as it is legal. The “candidate of choice” of minority voters, as mentioned in the Voting Rights Act, cannot be correctly assumed to be determined solely by racial interests.
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To assume that race is the be-all and end-all is to deny, not honor, our common humanity. As Adline Clarke said, the “common good” is served by recognizing those other commonalities and allowing them, not race, to be represented in Congress.
