The Supreme Court let Alabama dissolve a majority-Black district by calling it partisan. The state’s own redistricting record contains a text message from legislators calling Montgomery — a city over 60% African American — “monkey town.”

That text was cited by the three-judge panel that first blocked Alabama’s map. The panel found the state had diluted Black voting power in violation of the Voting Rights Act and ordered a second majority-Black district drawn. Alabama defied the order. The case returned to the Supreme Court. In April, the Supreme Court allowed Alabama to use the map eliminating the majority-Black district — the same decision that eliminated the state’s second Democratic seat.

Less than two years after his election as the first Black representative for Tuskegee in modern history, Shomari Figures now goes into November’s midterm defending a redrawn, white-majority seat.

What did that seat deliver for Tuskegee?

A city of fewer than 9,000 people where over 80% of residents are African American and nearly one in three live in poverty, where a 19-year-old Tuskegee University student named De’Mari Benham cut his arm on shattered glass, got bandaged at the fire station, and was told to go to the next town for stitches. He told the BBC he chose not to go — “both because it’s far and because I just simply don’t have the funds.”

The fire station is where many residents seek help. Captain Dondrell Hopson told the BBC, “We get calls, crazy calls, for all kinds of things. Treating bullet wounds. Guys bleeding out.” Fire Chief Willie Smith added, “we need a building.”

Figures delivered that building. He helped secure $1 million from the federal government to construct a civic center that will house the police department and the fire department and serve as a storm shelter. He secured $500,000 for Medical Center Barbour in Eufaula — a hospital without an MRI machine — plus more than $1 million in federal tax credits. The hospital’s CEO, Jannet Kinney, said the MRI will improve patient care and raise revenue. “I think he cares,” Kinney told the BBC. “And I’d hate to lose anybody that cares.”

In his May 1967 Report to SCLC Staff, King asked why there are forty million poor people in America and said one day the country must answer that question. The answer, for these towns, was just beginning to arrive. A million dollars for the building the fire chief said they need. A half-million for the machine the hospital has never had. That is what federal funding looks like when the representative holding the seat has the constituency’s interest rather than the donor consortium’s. That is what the Court’s April decision put at risk.

Eufaula’s four-term mayor, Jack Tibbs — a Republican — praised Figures’s engagement. “I’ve seen him four times since he went into office,” Tibbs told the BBC. “I can’t say that about the previous guy. The guy before him, and the guy before him, weren’t doing that.” Eufaula’s previous representative, Barry Moore, a conservative and Trump loyalist now running for Senate, did not respond to the BBC’s request for comment. After the ruling, Moore told local media that “elections should be determined by Alabama’s values and candidates’ ideas, not the color of anyone’s skin.”

That sentence is doing what the entire apparatus is doing — relabeling a documented racial act as something race-neutral.

Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall told the BBC the redistricting efforts are partisan battles, not motivated by race. “I don’t believe that there’s been a direct targeted history… in a way that suppresses minority voter participation,” he said. He pointed to California.

The AG’s comparison does not hold. California uses an independent redistricting commission. Alabama’s legislature drew its own map, and the record contains its own members calling the state capital — a majority-Black city — “monkey town.” The three-judge panel that first blocked the map cited that text as evidence. The mechanism of suppression is not speculative. The rally in Montgomery this past May was organized by people who read the same record.

Cedric Coley, chair of the Alabama Young Republicans, told the BBC he opposes federal judges intervening in redistricting. “I just don’t believe in federal judges stepping in and saying because your past is racist, we must be racist in the future and create racial maps, and box people in racial quotas.”

The Voting Rights Act does not create racial quotas. It prohibits racial vote dilution — the precise conduct the three-judge panel found Alabama had committed. Coley’s characterization reframes the Act’s protections as a form of tyranny. The technique the catalog calls frame-engineered relabeling is operating here: substituting “racial quotas” for “the prohibition against diluting Black voting power” shifts the frame from constitutional protection to overreach.

The coordinated message discipline is worth naming. The AG says “partisan, not racial.” Coley says “family disputes, not federal judges.” Moore says “values and ideas, not the color of anyone’s skin.” Three distinct speakers. Three distinct positions. One frame: what happened here is not about race. The documented “monkey town” text in the redistricting record is the rebuttal none of them address.

The district Figures represented stretched through Montgomery and across Alabama’s Black Belt — a region named for its fertile black soil and the large Black population that remained after slavery. The landscape is saturated with civil rights history and with the specific structural violence that history recorded.

Sixty-two miles east of Tuskegee is Eufaula. In 1874, a white mob fired hundreds of rounds into a group of Black men walking to vote, killing six. Today, the population is roughly 45% white and 45% Black. Black residents experience poverty at nearly 57% — more than four times the rate of the white population.

Mary Porter, 71, lives on a fixed income with no means of transportation. She marched as a child to pass the 1965 Voting Rights Act — the Act whose protections the three-judge panel invoked, and the Supreme Court’s April decision overrode. She relies on God and friends to reach her doctor more than 50 miles away in Columbus, Georgia. After two strokes, she worries about the hospital — Medical Center Barbour — that Figures helped fund.

“They’re trying to remove our voices and our votes, trying to make our votes less powerful,” Deirdre Newcomb, an 18-year-old Tuskegee University student, told the BBC outside Butler Chapel AME Zion Church on a recent Sunday. Gale Brown, 73, said, “It hurts me. I never thought this would happen in my lifetime.”

What happened is specific. The Court did not redraw the map. Alabama did. But the Court let it stand. The state’s “partisan” label — the frame-engineered relabeling documented across the AG, Coley, and Moore’s coordinated statements — is the instrument that makes the Court’s permission palatable. If the redistricting is merely partisan, the Voting Rights Act does not reach it. If the redistricting is racial, the Act prohibits it. The label does the legal work. The “monkey town” text is in the record either way.

The redistricting places Figures in a white-majority seat where the August 11 Republican primary winner — state Representative Rhett Marques, endorsed by House Speaker Mike Johnson and President Trump — appears to be the favorite. Marques has spent his campaign in Alabama’s wiregrass region, a mostly-white, rural farming community folded into the redrawn district.

Figures does not need to win the wiregrass to keep his seat. He needs to win the Black Belt and enough of the redrawn district to hold. In a state with documented racial bloc voting — a state where, as Joe Reed, a Montgomery-based civil rights activist and lawyer, told the BBC, “you can discriminate based on politics, but you can’t discriminate based on race. Well, hell, in Alabama, with the polarised voting we have, everything is race. Everything” — the arithmetic of a white-majority district in Alabama is not complicated.

The structural mechanism is 150 years old and counting. In 1874 in Eufaula, the instrument was rifles. In 2026, it is a map and a Supreme Court decision and a label — “partisan” — that lets the state do what the rifles once did and face no scrutiny under the Voting Rights Act. The Act was written because the rifles were not aberrations but instruments of a system. The system did not end when the rifles stopped. It found new instruments.

In his May 1967 Report to SCLC Staff, King said that the movement must recognize it cannot solve the problem until there is a radical redistribution of economic and political power. In Tuskegee, that redistribution was underway — a million dollars for the building the fire department needs, half a million for the MRI the hospital has never had, the federal tax credits the community depends on. The Supreme Court’s April decision said the map that made that representation possible does not have to exist.

Mary Porter said it plainly: “We should have a voice here, and it should be equality and justice for all.”

She marched as a child to pass the law that was supposed to guarantee it. The Court said the law does not reach this map. Alabama’s officials called it partisan. The “monkey town” text is in the record. The fire chief in Tuskegee still needs a building. The hospital in Eufaula still needs an MRI. The question for November is whether the voters of this redrawn district will return the representative who delivered those things or replace him with one endorsed by the apparatus that dissolved the district to keep him from winning it.

Figures put the receipts on the table. The Court took the table away. Now the voters decide whether they want the receipts back.