What if Alabama had never taken anyone’s vote away?

  There’s a chance — not a guarantee, but a better-than-average possibility — that two Black Alabamians will represent the state in the U.S. House of Representatives in 2025. 

  A federal court created two new congressional districts for the state, one with a Black Voting Age Population (BVAP) of 51.9% and one with a BVAP of 48.7%.

  To this point, the declared or likely candidates for the districts are nearly all Black Democrats. Because voting in Alabama is racially polarized — white Alabamians tend to support Republicans and Black Alabamians tend to support Democrats — it’s a good bet that two Black Alabamians will serve in the state’s seven-member U.S. House delegation. 

  That’s never happened before. 

  It’s never happened in a state where Black Alabamians make up 27% of the population. A state where that number was about 45% in the first 80 years of Alabama’s existence.

  And it’s easy to list the reasons.

  Slavery, where whites treated Black Alabamians as property. Disenfranchisement, where whites forced Black Alabamians out of the public sphere. And Jim Crow, where whites pushed Black Alabamians into second-class facilities and subjected them to terrorism. 

  But there was an eye in this storm.

  For six years during Reconstruction, the Victorian era’s experiment in multiracial democracy, Alabama’s government came close to representing its people.

  Between 1871 and 1877, three Black Alabamians, all Republicans, served in Congress. 

  Benjamin S. Turner; James Rapier, and Jeremiah Haralson went to the House at different times. They all served a single term. And as one-term representatives, none of them had a chance to accumulate power in Congress.

  But they did the jobs voters sent them to do.

  Some of these were low-stakes issues, like getting a grant to repair a church or helping arrange the funeral of a constituent.

  And there were existential ones. Turner supported school desegregation. Haralson tried to secure federal funding for education. Rapier voted for the 1875 Civil Rights Act, the last major bill on the subject for eight decades.

  But it all ended.

  Rapier’s re-election bid in 1874 fell victim to violence and fraud. So did Haralson’s quest for a second term two years later. Alabama would not send another Black person to Congress until 1992. A century of oppression came in between. 

  I can’t help but wonder what would have happened if history had taken another turn. 

Another age

  Imagine that from 1870 on, every assembly making laws for Alabama — local and national — reflected the state. Imagine every year, from the Gilded Age to the Edwardian Age, through the Jazz Age and World War II, Black Alabamians could vote and choose their leaders as freely as anyone else.

  Political representation can’t solve every problem. And politicians, as Alabama knows all too well, often put their private needs ahead of public welfare. White Alabama politicians created a terrorist regime after Reconstruction because it served their interests. Or because they feared opposing it. Or both.

  But representatives, whatever moral ballast they possess, bring their communities into important conversations. They force the powerful to pay attention. And they make it much more difficult for a majority group to turn their hatreds, fears, and blind spots into law. 

  Think of how different Alabama would be if we had taken the path of democracy. 

  Jim Crow regimes hated public education. School funding was the first target of the white supremacists who took power in Alabama in 1874. They imposed still-existing property tax caps that starved Alabama schools of funding.

  Whatever their other differences, Black legislators of Reconstruction promoted and defended universal education. Think of how much less we’d have to worry about Alabama schools if Black legislators in the 19th century and beyond had been present to team up with white allies and protect money for teachers and students. 

  Think of the compounding effect of school children, year after year, decade after decade, getting the resources needed for a basic education, who applied that education to Alabama business, government, and the arts.

  Think of what we lost from a century of educators getting cheated and shortchanged by a hostile state government.

  There’s more.

  Imagine a Black legislator on Goat Hill rising from his desk in 1885 to denounce the U.S. Supreme Court’s specious opinion striking down the 1875 Civil Rights Act and introducing a state-level civil rights law. Just like John W.E. Thomas, a Montgomery native, did in the Illinois General Assembly that year. 

  Imagine a Black senator taking the floor of the chamber in 1890 to introduce a bill to crack down on lynching. Picture a government that stopped the mobs and enforced the rule of law, no matter who the victims were.

  Imagine the men squirming in their seats on a crisp fall day in 1891 as a Black representative discussed his committee’s shocking findings about Alabama’s convict lease system, spurring an abolition movement.

  Think of the thousands of “whites only” signs never painted. Think of the tens of thousands of lives saved.

  And think of the hundreds of thousands of Black Alabamians down through the decades who would have felt safe. Whose children would have had a decent education. Who would have lived, worked, and thrived in Alabama.

  Who would not have fled the state for Chicago, Kansas City, Philadelphia, or New York.

  We would be a safer, fairer, and more prosperous state. We might even have more congressional representatives. Alabama had 10 U.S. House seats in Congress in the 1920s. It’s seven today, due in part to the Great Migration.

  Alabama wouldn’t be a paradise. But it wouldn’t have become an apartheid hell, either. It would have been a place where the law protected the mightiest and the weakest. Where all people, white and Black, had a voice. 

  We didn’t get that opportunity. 

  But the state could take a step toward a political system that’s more representative of the people who live here. One that actually addresses the concerns of the many and not the delusional obsessions of a small elite.

  We can’t rewrite the past. But if we can create a system that better reflects Alabama, our children might have fewer reasons to regret what came before.

  About the author: Brian Lyman is the editor of Alabama Reflector. He has covered Alabama politics since 2006 and worked at the Montgomery Advertiser, the Press-Register, and The Anniston Star. His work has won awards from the Associated Press Managing Editors, the Alabama Press Association, and the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Human Rights.

  This article was published by Alabama Reflector.