Must read TNR cover story by Jason Zengerle on African American political power in Alabama and in the South.

Similarly, after a lawsuit was brought by the Alabama Democratic Conference and the Alabama Legislative Black Caucus, a three-judge federal court upheld the maps in a two-to-one ruling. Noting that several of the plaintiffs had been content with the majority-minority districts drawn by Democrats in 2001, the court’s majority opinion asked: “What has changed in the last few years to support the conclusion, from the perspective of the Black Caucus plaintiffs, that the new majority-black districts are unconstitutional when the old majority-black districts were constitutional? The answer is simple: The Republicans now control the Legislature instead of the Democrats.”

But the implications of this go far beyond partisanship. Because of increasingly racially polarized voting patterns in the South, party has become a stand-in for race. As University of California at Irvine law professor Rick Hasen recently wrote in the Harvard Law Review, “The realignment of the parties in the South following the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s has created a reality in which today most African American voters are Democrats and most white conservative voters are Republicans.” That means that, as Democrats have lost ground in statehouses in Alabama and elsewhere across the South, so have African Americans. According to research by David Bositis, in 1994, 99.5 percent of black state legislators in the South served in the majority. By 2010, the percentage had fallen to 50.5. Today, it’s a mere 4.8 percent.

Political scientists distinguish between descriptive representation and substantive representation. The former focuses on the number of, say, African Americans who are elected to a legislative body, while the latter focuses on the effect of those African American representatives on the legislation passed by that body. It was easy to see, by the early ’80s, that the Voting Rights Act had successfully achieved descriptive representation for African Americans in the Southern state legislatures. But, as time went on, it began to achieve substantive representation, as well. “There was a thirty-year period in the South, from about 1980 to 2010, where there really was biracial collaboration and cooperation in politics,” says Bositis. “And it was a genuine biracial politics—more genuine than in some northern states.” The political scientist David Lublin, who did pioneering research on the impact of the VRA, recalls making his first visit to Mississippi in the early 2000s and attending a legislative session in Jackson. “You walk down this long hallway lined with all the old legislature photos, and everyone in the pictures is white,” he says. “But then you enter the actual chamber and you watch people discussing things, and it’s a racial mixture, black and white politicians having a good and substantive debate. It felt like, ‘Wow, democracy!’ ”

But as any visitor to the Alabama statehouse in the past four years could tell you, those days of wonder are long gone—and they’re not likely to return any time soon. While the U.S. Supreme Court recently agreed to hear a pair of appeals of the Alabama redistricting decision, it’s doubtful that the conservative Roberts court—the same court, after all, that last year struck down a key provision of the VRA—will overturn the lower court’s decision. This, in turn, will affect far more than the politics of just Alabama and the region.