The 2024 election and a court-ordered redistricting led to this result: next year, Alabama will have two Black U.S. House members serving together, for the first time in history.
Shomari Figures, elected Tuesday night to represent the 2nd Congressional District, will join U.S. Rep. Terri Sewell, D-Bimingham, who has served in the U.S. House of Representatives since 2011 and won her eighth term last week.
Figures wrote in a statement Friday that he understood the history of the district and how that history impacted the opportunity to represent the people in it.
“The opportunity for fair representation is an essential element of democracy, as it affords people from different backgrounds an opportunity to make sure their voices are heard and interests represented,” he wrote.
Sewell said in a statement that the results were about “having people in office who will fight for the issues that matter to us and the values we share.”
“Too many Black voters in Alabama have had their power diluted by unfair congressional maps,” the statement said. “By sending Shomari Figures to Washington, those voters finally get the chance to claim their seat at the decision-making table. I look forward to having him as a partner in Congress and working on behalf of all Alabamians, especially those whose voices have yet to be fully heard.”
Alabama’s population is about 64% white and about 27% Black, but Black Alabamians have fought for centuries against voter suppression and disenfranchisement. During Reconstruction, when the state was about 48% Black, Alabama voters sent three men to the U.S. House of Representatives — Benjamin Turner; James Rapier and Jeremiah Haralson — but their terms did not overlap. Sewell and Figures’ districts include areas represented by all three men during the 1870s. Rapier, like Figures, was elected from Alabama’s 2nd Congressional District….