Three-Judge Federal Court Blasts Alabama’s Intentional Discrimination Against Black Voters

By: Donald V. Watkins

Copyrighted and Published on May 9, 2025

U.S. Courthouse, Birmingham, Alabama

An Editorial Opinion

In a well-documented and masterfully written 571-page opinion, dated May 8, 2025, a three-judge federal court in Birmingham, Alabama unanimously affirmed what Black voters in Alabama have known since the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965 -- the state of Alabama intentionally discriminates against its Black voters on the basis of their race and for the purpose of diluting their votes in congressional elections.

The judicial panel consisted of two Alabama-based district court judges appointed by President Donald Trump and one Florida-based appellate court judge appointed by former President Ronald Reagan (for his district court judgeship) and former President Bill Clinton (for his appellate court judgeship).

Click here to read the Court’s full opinion.

The Court issued a permanent injunction in the litigation that eventually resulted in the creation of two "opportunity districts" for Black voters to elect candidates of their choice in the state’s 2024 congressional races. 

On June 8, 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court in Allen v. Milligan affirmed the three-judge court's issuance of a preliminary injunction.

For 60 years, the state of Alabama, which has a 26% Black population, had only one Black House member in its nine-person congressional delegation of two Senators and seven House members.

Last November, two Black candidates were elected to the U.S. House of Representatives under a court-ordered remedial congressional redistricting plan.

The Three-Judge Court's Key Findings of Fact

Ignoring the mindless wave of “anti-DEI” rhetoric spewing from the White House and "Red State" capitals, the Court used an extensive trial record of (a) 2,600 pages of transcripts, (b) live testimony from 23 witnesses (including 13 experts), (c) reports and rebuttal expert reports, (d) written testimony from 28 additional witnesses (from depositions in the case and live testimony in the state Senate redistricting trial that occurred before U.S. District Judge Anna M. Manasco in November 2024, (e) 39 pages of stipulated facts, and (f) more than 790 putative exhibits to make the following key findings of fact regarding the state of Alabama’s intentional, purposeful, racial discrimination against its Black voters:

• “[U]nder all the circumstances in Alabama today, Black Alabamians have less opportunity than other Alabamians to elect representatives of their choice.”

  
  

• “[W]e cannot understand the 2023 [Congressional Redistricting] Plan as anything other than an intentional effort to dilute Black Alabamians’ voting strength and evade the unambiguous requirements of [earlier] court orders standing in the way.”

• “This record thus leaves us in no doubt that the purpose of the design of the 2023 Plan [passed by the Alabama Legislature and signed into law by Gov. Kay Ivey after the Supreme Court ruling in Allen v. Milligan] was to crack Black voters across congressional districts in a manner that makes it impossible to create two districts in which they have an opportunity to elect candidates of their choice, and thereby intentionally perpetuate the discriminatory effects of the [unlawful] 2021 Plan.”

  
  

• “This is not the first time the Alabama Legislature has purposefully refused to satisfy a federal court order about redistricting even after the Supreme Court affirmed that order. . . .We hope it will be the last time.”

• “We do not diminish the argument that race-based redistricting under Section Two cannot last forever. But it seems painfully obvious to us that the State’s decision to purposefully dilute the votes of Black Alabamians, particularly after exhausting its appellate rights for a preliminary injunction entered under Section Two, flies in the face of its position that Section Two has outlived the purpose Congress intended.”

  
  

• “[W]e do not diminish the substantial improvements Alabama has made in its official treatment of Black Alabamians in recent decades.  Yet we cannot reconcile the State’s intentional decision to discriminate in drawing its congressional districts with its position that Alabama has finally closed out its repugnant history of official discrimination involving voting rights.”

  
  

• “The 2020 redistricting cycle in Alabama — the first cycle in 50 years that Alabama has been free of the strictures of federal preclearance — did not have to turn out this way. We wish it had not, but we have eyes to see the veritable mountain of evidence that it did.”

• “The Legislature knew what federal law required and purposefully refused to provide it, in a strategic attempt to checkmate the [preliminary injunction] that ordered it.”

  
  

• “And it would be unthinkable for us to hold that a state legislature that purposefully took calculated steps to make a court-required remedy impossible to provide, for the purpose of entrenching minority vote dilution, acted in good faith.”

  
  

• “[W]e observe that although the success of the Milligan Plaintiffs’ claim of intentional discrimination is unusual, we also do not regard it as a particularly close call.”

Despite a mountain of evidence of racial discrimination against Black voters in Alabama, the Trump White House and Department of Justice have failed to issue press statements about any plan they have to punish those state officials who conceived, orchestrated, and implemented a blatant, purposeful, and intentional scheme of racial discrimination against Black voters in federal elections, in violation of their rights under Section Two of the Voting Rights Act and the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection guarantee.

Considering the racial polarization in America today, it is important for Americans of interracial goodwill to recognize one key fact of life from this litigation -- with the exception of a handful of cases during the last 60 years, Blacks are the ones who have been the adjudicated "victims" of non-stop, hurtful, purposeful racial discrimination in Alabama in the thousands of civil rights cases litigated in the state since the Civil War ended in 1865.

Finally, since the 1950s, numerous federal courts have found that the state of Alabama discriminates against its Black citizens in every aspect of life, from the “cradle to the grave.”