Driving through downtown one misty, humid morning, Evan Milligan pointed out landmarks historic and personal. There once stood the Black barbershop where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. got his hair cut. There was the street corner where Rosa Parks boarded a city bus and, later, refused to give up her seat to a White passenger. There was the church where King organized a bus boycott after Parks’s arrest.
And there was the house where Milligan’s mother grew up, blocks from a Whites-only park that had a petting zoo and an ice-skating rink. His mother lived so close she could hear the animals at night, but she was not allowed in to see them.
He drove past neighborhood streets where vacant plots of grass replaced abandoned and blighted houses. Many homes still stood in disrepair, their lawns overgrown. At a corner rose a two-story brick building with boarded-up windows and graffiti: “John Lewis was here.”\
Milligan is a descendant of enslaved Blacks, only six generations removed. Once freed, his ancestors moved from the rural Black Belt — so named for its rich topsoil — to neighborhoods in eastern Montgomery. Decades later, they would be foot soldiers of the civil rights movement, thrust into the nation’s most historic battles over segregation and voting rights in the Jim Crow South.
Now Milligan, 40, is on the front lines of the latest discrimination fight, lending his family name to what will be the marquee Supreme Court case over racial gerrymandering, centered on the invisible district line that divides the Black neighborhoods of eastern Montgomery. In Milligan v. Merrill — that’s Alabama Secretary of State John Merrill (R) — the nation’s highest court will determine whether federal law requires states such as Alabama with large minority populations and racially polarized voting to take race into account in redistricting or whether they have free rein to squeeze minority voters into as few districts as possible — one, in Alabama’s case — giving White politicians dominance in all the others.
The decision could have sweeping implications across a huge swath of the South where the Black population and those of other minorities are growing at a faster rate than the White population but the power is disproportionality held by White politicians.
“These are Black people that come from the Black Belt communities. They move to Montgomery, have endured all of this, and then today aren’t able to elect a person they choose,” Milligan said. “They’re not able to have any influence on the outcome of the elections.”