The Plaintiffs Behind Alabama’s Voting Rights Case Are Ready to Fight Again

This story first appeared on For the Record: A Black Oral History Archive. The archive is a collection of over 100 firsthand stories of Black life in America.

MONTGOMERY, Alabama — Evan Milligan was visiting Berlin when he learned that he had won a voting rights case against the state of Alabama at the U.S. Supreme Court. 

It seemed like destiny: He was sitting in a Lutheran church where Martin Luther King Jr. had visited in 1964, a critical year in the struggle for Black voting rights.

“I get a text that says, ‘We won. We won the case,’” the Montgomery resident told Capital B. The decision forced Alabama to remedy its discrimination against Black voters, ultimately leading to the replacement of its election map. “I just started crying,” Milligan said.

Milligan’s case, Allen v. Milligan, decided in 2023, was one of the most important victories in Black voting rights in recent years. Alabama’s new map finally gave Black voters the amount of political power the court said that they deserved based on their share of the state’s population.

But in the three years that have passed since Milligan and his fellow plaintiffs won the case, the voting rights gains that he and others had made across the South in the past 60 years have begun to evaporate, and the joy that had overwhelmed him has curdled into anger.

As a result of a series of judicial and legislative setbacks in Black voting rights, the number of Black Americans in Congress is expected to decline significantly in 2027, and the influence of Black voters — over critical federal policy and funding for schools, infrastructure, healthcare, and more — is shrinking. 

The setback in Milligan’s case came on June 2, when a Supreme Court order said that Alabama was no longer obligated to replace the map once declared discriminatory.

But this wasn’t the first setback. In April, the Supreme Court made it harder for voters to prove racial discrimination under the Voting Rights Act of 1965, deciding in Louisiana v. Callais that it’s no longer enough for voters to show that racial disparities existed in voting. They have to prove that lawmakers intended to racially discriminate — a feat that voting rights advocates argue is practically impossible.

“It’s all felt hyper-absurd,” Milligan said from his home in April.

With the Supreme Court’s blessing, Alabama and other Southern states have capitalized on these setbacks to create additional challenges, gerrymandering, or manipulating, maps in ways that weaken Black voting power across the region.

Southern lawmakers have embarked on their quest to redraw their maps partly in response to a push from President Donald Trump to disadvantage people likely to vote for Democrats in the November midterm elections. 

But Republicans say that they aren’t doing it to weaken the Black vote, and the Supreme Court has accepted Alabama’s argument that what they’re doing isn’t discriminatory under the new standards set in Louisiana v. Callais.

Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall, a Republican, has defended his party’s approach to redrawing maps.

“I don’t think the legislature at all drew these maps for either intentional or unintentional racial reasons,” he said in May. “What you saw is what the legislature in every state across this country has the ability to do — use partisan reasons, along with traditional redistricting principles to draw a map.”

But many Black voting rights organizers disagree, arguing that these states are engaging in unconstitutional racial gerrymandering while the Supreme Court looks the other way until there’s a smoking gun.

“This effort to silence our communities through an intentionally discriminatory map cannot be permitted to stand,” Milligan and his fellow plaintiffs said in a statement on June 2. “We deserve a fair shot at electing officials, regardless of party, who understand our lives and our goals, and are responsive to our concerns.”

The rise and fall of the Milligan district

The five-year arc of Allen v. Milligan, from struggle to victory to defeat, symbolizes the sudden decline of Black voting power taking place across the South.

Three of the key players in the Milligan story told Capital B how they got involved and what they plan to do now that the tide has turned. 

Milligan’s saga began in 2021, when Alabama enacted a new map that redrew the lines creating the state’s seven congressional districts. 

Because Black voters made up about 27% of the state’s voting-age population, Milligan and others argued that they should have the opportunity to elect the winner in at least two of those districts. But Alabama’s maps had given them majority control in only one district, or 14%.

This disparity led Milligan to join a group of voters and civil rights organizations that sued the state, which was represented by Alabama Secretary of State John Merrill until Wes Allen assumed office in 2023.

Their group consisted of four voters and two organizations: Greater Birmingham Ministries, and the Alabama State Conference of the NAACP. Greater Birmingham Ministries hasn’t responded to Capital B’s request for comment. Ronald Ali, the president of the Alabama State Conference of the NAACP, told Capital B that the organization’s work will continue in terms of educating people, mobilizing them, and making sure that they vote — because “freedom is a process.”

The plaintiffs argued that Alabama’s map violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which gave marginalized groups an equal opportunity “to participate in the political process and to elect representatives of their choice.”

Khadidah Stone, 29, a civil rights organizer, was one of the plaintiffs in the case. Her passion for justice began when she was 13 and her father was sentenced to 60 years in prison for selling marijuana.

Like Milligan, Stone remembers where she was when she learned about the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision — she was inside a beauty supply store.

“I was standing in the aisle crying,” the Montgomery native told Capital B on the 60th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act. She felt hope. “And the guy at the front of the store,” she added, “was like, ‘Ma’am, are you OK?’”

The person who won the 2024 race to represent the new heavily Black district created in Alabama as a result of Milligan was U.S. Rep. Shomari Figures. He told Capital B in May that he knew that the district would be at risk. Inspired by his parents’ legacy as state lawmakers and advocates, he ran for it anyway.

“What we are seeing now is a renewed effort by Republicans who feel emboldened to try to redraw district lines and weaken representation,” he said. “But we expected that in Alabama and across the South. They’re going to keep trying, and we’re going to keep, first and foremost, representing the people and fighting back.”

Racial gerrymandering of the Black vote

A handful of states — including North Carolina and Texas — quickly joined President Trump’s July 2025 call to redraw their maps. But the Callais decision enlarged the redistricting wave by freeing the Southern states to participate.

After the decision, the Supreme Court allowed Alabama lawmakers to enact the 2023 map that the lower court had deemed discriminatory.

The new maps that Republicans are pushing diminish Black voting power by changing the boundaries of the districts where Black Americans vote. 

The new boundaries often chop up Black communities and blend them with white ones, effectively making Black Americans the minority group in the district. In this position, they can “elect a representative of their choice” — as the Voting Rights Act says — only if white Americans approve.

In addition to Alabama and Louisiana, Southern states that have eliminated or undercut heavily Black districts include Tennessee and Florida. Efforts to do the same in South Carolina and Georgia have stalled, at least for now.

The Milligan district, which is Alabama’s 2nd Congressional District, is one of as many as 19 House districts that Black voters could lose control of in the coming months due to the gutting of the Voting Rights Act, according to an October report by Fair Fight Action and Black Voters Matter — two civil rights organizations.

That’s roughly a third of the Congressional Black Caucus — a loss that U.S. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver of Missouri, an early target of the redistricting arms race, has warned could reduce Black political representation to levels not seen since Reconstruction.

“It’s enough to cement one-party control of the U.S. House for at least a generation,” the report said. 

Damon Hewitt, the president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, told Capital B in May, “We’re witnessing a racialized political power grab in real time. And this is only the beginning.”

“Grief, exhaustion, joy, and still more emotions”

In Alabama, redistricting has been so extensive that the Milligan district is going from Black voter control to white voter control. White voters — who constitute about 71% of the state’s voting-age population — will again control about 86% of the state’s districts.

The outcome of the case and the redrawing of other heavily Black districts have galvanized Black voters and advocates to rally, train, and engage in direct action, an effort they’re calling Freedom Summer and Freedom Fall.

Their goal is to draw attention to the grim state of Black voting rights and support local voter registration and mobilization efforts. The first stop on the tour was in May in Montgomery.

On the stage at the rally, an energized Figures, 40, said that his 2024 victory represented the continuation of Alabama’s civil rights struggle.

He called Alabama “the home of ‘We’re not taking this anymore’” and said that “it’s not lost on me that you guys are here to have my back.” Then the crowd started chanting, “We’re not going back!”

Milligan also was at the rally with his wife and children. They had spent the morning creating protest signs before going into the blinding heat.

More than 60 private buses, he estimated, brought people in from out of state, and he had the chance to give “lots of bear hugs to friends from near and far.”

“Over the course of our journey with these cases, there have been moments of grief, exhaustion, joy, and still more emotions,” he told Capital B after the event. “At the rally, I felt an extension of these emotions, and of the hyper-absurdity of this moment.”

Alabama is holding special primaries under the 2023 map on Aug. 11.

Figures said that he’s dismayed by what the Supreme Court has done to the Voting Rights Act, once considered the crowning achievement of the Civil Rights Movement.

“The Supreme Court has now confirmed that there is no longer a Voting Rights Act in America, and states are essentially free to discriminate against minority voters with no consequences,” he said in a statement on June 2. “This is a dangerous ruling that sets the State and this nation back decades.”

Milligan has an added stake in the outcome of the case: His name is on it, as is that of his father, Bill, whom he described as a “poet, DJ, photographer, and grassroots griot.”

“I feared that my dad’s name — people just called him Milligan as a first name — was going to become synonymous with failure,” Milligan said. 

Referring to his father, he added, “And that’s the last thing he should ever be associated with. This is a guy who should be lifted up.”

Capital B staff writers Aallyah Wright and Alecia Taylor contributed to this report.

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