Roy Johnson column in Al.com:

Evan Milligan was in church when his phone began to buzz. In church in Berlin, among a group visiting and studying an area that was once home to one of the region’s largest Jewish communities. “It’s much, much smaller now,” Milligan says, “because of the Holocaust.”

They were inside Marienkirche (St. Mary’s Church). Dr. Martin Luther King famously preached there on September 13, 1964, after crossing Checkpoint Charlie at the Berlin Wall with only a credit card for identification.

King had been invited to Berlin by Willie Brandt, mayor of West Berlin, to commemorate a cultural festival. King described the city as “a symbol of the divisions of men on the face of the earth,” yet in the pulpit said: “We are all one in Christ Jesus, and that faith overcomes all man-made barriers.”

Milligan, 42, is executive director of Alabama Forward, the statewide civic engagement network at the center of the legal battle against the state’s gerrymandered congressional districts, which pooled Black voters largely into one district. African Americans comprise 27 percent of the state’s population, yet byzantine district lines left them represented by only 14 percent of Alabama’s seven members of the U.S. Congress.

He is the named plaintiff in the case—Allen (Secretary of State Wes Allen) v. Milligan—that rose to the U.S. Supreme Court, which stunningly ruled this week that Alabama had indeed diluted Black voting power in violation of the U.S. Constitution. The 5-4 decision, conservatives Chief Justice John G. Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh joined the court’s three liberal justices, fortified provisions of the Voting Rights of 1965, which has long been under attack.

“Of all the places to receive this news,” Milligan shared with me Thursday from Berlin. “I broke down in tears thinking about my dad.”

For Evan, who was born in Houston and moved to Alabama as a young child, the now-historic case bears the name, too, of Bill Milligan, who died in 2021, just as his son was “getting in the groove” with redistricting coalition work.