He made history in Congress – then the Supreme Court changed its mind
Getty Images
When a glass door shattered on the arm of 19-year-old De’Mari Benham, with blood running down his limb and with few other options, he was rushed to the fire department in a friend’s car.
Firefighters bandaged him and encouraged the Tuskegee University student to go to a hospital the next town over to receive stitches and medicine.
“I decided not to go,” he said. “Both because it’s far and because I just simply don’t have the funds.”
Brandon Drenon/BBC
It’s a common problem. In Tuskegee, a rural Alabama city with less than 9,000 people, over 80% of them African American, nearly one in three people live in poverty. There’s no general hospital. No 24-hour emergency-care clinic. The fire department is where many people go, but the building is not fit for purpose.
“We get calls, crazy calls, for all kinds of things,” says Dondrell Hopson, the fire department’s captain. “Treating bullet wounds. Guys bleeding out.”
When Shomari Figures was elected to the US House of Representatives, becoming the first black person to represent Tuskegee in Congress in modern history – he sought to help.
Brandon Drenon/BBC
Barely a year after his election in 2024, Figures helped secure $1m (£746,885) from the US government to help build a civic centre in Tuskegee. It will serve as a fallout shelter against deadly storms and also house the city’s police department and the fire department that came to Benham’s aid.
But just as federal funds were arriving, the political winds shifted.
This April, the US Supreme Court struck a blow to a part of the Voting Rights Act that had helped give minority voters more representation in Congress. The ruling has allowed Republican-led states across America’s South to redraw congressional maps to erase majority-black districts.
The changes could help shift the balance of power in Congress in November and either halt or help drive President Donald Trump‘s agenda for the rest of his presidency.
Some residents and city officials in Tuskegee fear that if Figures loses under a new map, then they will lose out too.
“All of our issues, we do depend on federal funding,” Tuskegee Mayor Chris Lee said.
“It’s very important that we have someone who has our back.”
Brandon Drenon/BBC
‘Tip of the iceberg’
On a drizzly morning in June, all was still on Tuskegee’s South Main Street, a two-lane road that runs into the heart of the town square, where a towering Confederate monument loomed over the emptiness.
Vines snaked through broken windows on abandoned buildings, street after street.
City officials had grown optimistic with Figures in office, but worry has started to creep in since the Supreme Court allowed the state to dissolve his district.
Figures, a Democrat, now goes into November’s midterm elections defending a redrawn, white-majority seat. Research shows roughly 83% of black voters support the Democratic Party, while non-Hispanic white voters are more likely to lean Republican.
“I hate that this happened, especially this early,” Tuskegee’s mayor said. “We’re really just at the tip of the iceberg of seeing the real impact.”
In the years before Figures, Tuskegee was lumped into a more white, more conservative district.
“I cannot even remember seeing our congressman before,” Mayor Lee said.
The area was represented by Republican Mike Rogers who did not respond to the BBC’s request for comment.
Brandon Drenon/BBC
‘For the benefit of all’
States customarily redraw their maps every 10 years to reflect population changes in a process called redistricting. Sometimes, the party in power – Democratic or Republican – will try and draw the new lines in their favour.
Other times – as was the case for Figures’ district – courts intervene when states are accused of breaking the law.
In 2023, the US Supreme Court struck down a congressional map drawn by Alabama’s Republican-led legislature. It ruled that the map violated a key clause of the 1965 Voting Rights Act byunfairly dividing black voters in southern Alabama across multiple districts, diluting their voting power.
A new map was forced on the legislature, which resulted in two seats where African Americans were in the majority, or close to it.
Most liberals have supported the creation of such majority-minority districts over the past half century as a way to overcome historical discrimination – although some have worried it could limit black voting power to just certain districts. Conservatives, meanwhile, say such gerrymandering is itself discriminatory because voters are explicitly categorised by their race.
For Figures, a native of Mobile, Alabama, it was a long-awaited opportunity.
“When you come from those communities, when your people come from a line of those communities, you care more about making sure that you leverage the position that you’re in for the benefit of all communities,” Figures says.
But in April, the Supreme Court changed course, issuing a new ruling that makes it significantly more difficult to challenge maps based on racial discrimination.
“I think it’s purely racially motivated,” Figures says about Alabama’s desire to use the latest map. “There’s literal evidence in the record of state legislators referring to Montgomery during the redistricting process as ‘monkey town.'”
That text message was cited by the three judge panel that first blocked Alabama’s map. Montgomery, the state capital, is over 60% African American. Like Tuskegee, it will become part of the newly redrawn second district.
Brandon Drenon/BBC
Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall says efforts by Republicans in the state to pry power from Democrats are partisan political battles, and not motivated by race.
“I don’t believe that there’s been a direct targeted history… in a way that suppresses minority voter participation,” he adds.
He points out that Democrats have redrawn the maps in states that lean to the left politically, such as California, to boost their chances of winning more seats. Republicans, he says, are following the same “race-neutral” principles.
Cedric Coley, a chair of the Alabama Young Republicans, says his state is strongly conservative and deserves representatives who reflect those values. He does not want federal judges interfering in the redistricting process, not even to prioritise black Americans like himself.
“I would rather have family disputes, with the people of Alabama, instead of federal judges stepping in and saying because your past is racist, we must be racist in the future and create racial maps, and box people in racial quotas. I just don’t believe that.”
Coley says people should be judged on merit. “You don’t base it off the content of someone’s skin or where they come from,” he adds. “It’s based on what they’ve earned.”
Many black Alabamians, however, simply don’t buy the argument this is just about party politics.
“It’s a big setback for black people,” Joe Reed, a Montgomery-based civil rights activist and lawyer, tells the BBC. “You can discriminate based on politics, but you can’t discriminate based on race. Well, hell, in Alabama, with the polarised voting we have, everything is race. Everything.”
Brandon Drenon/BBC
‘I’d hate to lose anybody that cares’
The district Figures represents touches Alabama’s eastern and western boundaries, stretching through Montgomery and across a region known as the Black Belt, named after its fertile black soil and the large black population that remained in the area post-slavery.
The landscape is drenched in civil rights history. And many who live here know the struggle for racial equality intimately.
In Tuskegee, monuments to the Confederacy – which sought to break from the Union and preserve slavery during the American Civil War – are erected on the same grounds where America’s first black US Air Force pilots trained for World War Two to fight for freedoms abroad they were unable to enjoy at home.
Sixty-two miles east of Tuskegee is the rural outpost of Eufaula, where pickup trucks haul fishing boats to the muddy banks of the nearby Chattahoochee River. Being part of a congressional district with a majority of black voters has special significance here, where, in 1874, a white mob fired hundreds of rounds into a group of black men headed to vote, killing six.
Eufaula’s population is now racially diverse, with white and black residents accounting for roughly 45% each. But inequality remains high. Black residents here experience poverty at more than four times the rate of the white population – at nearly 57%.
Resident Mary Porter lives on a fixed income with no means of transportation.
The 71-year-old recalls marching as a child to pass the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which made it illegal to discriminate against race in voting practices (the same landmark legislation was used to help create Figures’ district – and is the same act the Supreme Court has gradually weakened in recent years).
“We should have a voice here, and it should be equality and justice for all,” she says.
Brandon Drenon/BBC
Porter says she relies on God and friends to get to her doctor over 50 miles away, in Columbus, Georgia. After suffering two strokes, she worries about the fate of Eufaula’s hospital, which has struggled financially.
Medical Center Barbour – the lone hospital in town that serves a roughly 60-mile radius across multiple counties – does not have an MRI machine.
But since Figures was elected to represent the area, he helped the medical center receive $500,000 in federal funding for a new MRI, in addition to more than $1m in federal tax credits.
Medical Center Barbour CEO Janet Kinney said the machine will improve patient care and raise revenue. She would like to keep him in office.
“I think he cares,” Kinney said about Figures. “And I’d hate to lose anybody that cares.”
Brandon Drenon/BBC
Eufaula’s four-term mayor, Jack Tibbs, shares Kinney’s concern. Tibbs, who votes Republican but is nonpartisan in his role, praised Figures’ impact on the community.
“I’ve seen him four times since he went into office,” Tibbs said. “I can’t say that about the previous guy.
“The guy before him, and the guy before him, weren’t doing that.”
Eufaula’s previous representative was Barry Moore, a strong conservative and Trump loyalist who is now running for Senate. His office did not respond to the BBC’s request for comment.
After the Supreme Court’s ruling, he told local media that “elections should be determined by Alabama’s values and candidates’ ideas, not the color of anyone’s skin.”
Brandon Drenon
‘We gone fight’
In November, Figures faces off against a Republican for who will lead the newly redrawn district two. His opponent will be whoever wins the Republican primary on 11 August. State Representative Rhett Marques appears to be the favourite, after receiving a slate of high-profile endorsements, including from House Speaker Mike Johnson and President Trump.
Marques has spent much of his time campaigning in Alabama’s wiregrass region, a mostly-white, rural farming community named after the long-stemmed grass native to the region.
It’s this area that was folded into Figures’ district after the Supreme Court’s ruling.
In an April social media post, Marques called himself a “proven conservative fighter” who is ready to “put more money in your pocket, deport every illegal immigrant out of this country, and end the woke agenda once and for all”.
Brandon Drenon/BBC
While many assumed the new district and its largely white, conservative voting bloc was a shoe-in for a Republican like Marques, recent polls suggest Figures might have a chance.
On a recent Sunday in Tuskegee, parishioners gathered outside Butler Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, grappling with the Supreme Court ruling and their future in the district.
“They’re trying to remove our voices and our votes, trying to make our votes less powerful,” said 18-year-old Tuskegee University student Deirdre Newcomb.
“It hurts me,” Gale Brown, 73, said. “I never thought this would happen in my lifetime.”
“We gone fight,” Emmanuel Freeman added. “That’s all we ever done.”
Supreme Court limits use of race in drawing electoral maps
Alabama violated voting rights law, top court rules
Tears. Shock. Joy. Why Alabama boat brawl matters
United States
Alabama
Voting rights in the United States
