This article is the fourth in a six-part MSNBC Daily series, “Meet the Freshmen,” featuring six of Congress’ newest faces — three Republicans and three Democrats — in a series of diverse columns that explore the new members’ backstories, policies, home districts and where they fit in this historic political moment. You can read the rest of the series here.
Rep. Shomari Figures, D-Ala., used his election night victory speech to recognize his win’s emergence from the long shadow of Alabama’s racist history and his family’s enduring legacy of anti-racism.
His father, the late Michael Figures, was elected one of just three Black Alabama state senators in 1978. Thomas Figures, his uncle, was the first Black person to serve as assistant district attorney and assistant U.S. attorney in Alabama’s Mobile County. But the two Figures brothers are most famous for the roles they played in seeking justice against two Ku Klux Klan members who brutally lynched a Black teenager, Michael Donald, in 1981. Thomas played an indispensable role in securing the Klansmen’s convictions, while Michael won a $7 million wrongful death suit against the men, bankrupting the United Klans of America in 1987.
Michael Figures served in the Legislature until his untimely death in 1996. Shomari’s mother, Vivian Davis Figures — then a Mobile City Council member — ran for and was elected to the seat, which she still holds.
Rep. Figures used his election night victory speech to recognize his win’s emergence from the long shadow of Alabama’s racist history.
The new U.S. House member is also an attorney, as well as an experienced politico, having served in both the Obama and Biden administrations. Roughly one year ago, Figures left Washington and his post as Attorney General Merrick Garland’s deputy chief of staff to return to his native city, Mobile. He was drawn back by the chance to represent Alabama’s 2nd Congressional District, which has included Figures’ hometown since 2023 — the year it was redrawn to reshape a political landscape historically contoured to suppress Black votes into one that amplifies them.
That transformation came only after a protracted legal battle, the unexpected defense of the Voting Rights Act by members of the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority and the flouting of both law and judicial mandates by Alabama’s Legislature. Despite ostensibly serving a populace that is nearly one-third African American, making Alabama one of the country’s blackest states — the Legislature has maintained a congressional map with only one majority-Black district for more than three decades.
The state’s 7th District — which is roughly two-thirds Black — was also created only after a court agreed with a 1992 lawsuit alleging Alabama’s map was “unconstitutionally malapportioned” and racially gerrymandered. The revised map led to the election of Earl Hilliard, Alabama’s first Black U.S. representative since Jeremiah Haralson left office under the white racial terror at Reconstruction’s end in 1877. For a staggering 115 years, the state’s almost exclusively white lawmakers would craft maps that ensured Alabama’s representation in Congress remained lily white.
Against the backdrop of widespread Jim Crow segregation, Alabama disenfranchised its Black voters right up until 1965, when the Voting Rights Act (VRA) finally outlawed the discriminatory standards that had kept Black Americans from Southern ballot boxes.
But in 2013, Alabama’s Shelby County would file the lawsuit that began dismantling the VRA, arguing that such protections were no longer needed. And yet, evidence of the VRA’s necessity remained clear, proved by the racist voting practices that abounded throughout the state. In 2017, a federal court concluded the Alabama Legislature had illegally gerrymandered precincts by race, triggering the redrawing of 12 local districts afterward.
And yet, after the 2020 census showed the state’s Black population had grown over the prior decade, the Legislature yet again crafted a map with a single majority-Black district. At least three different federal lawsuits followed, all alleging racial discrimination in voting.
One might conclude the racism embedded in Alabama districting was breathtakingly blatant, considering a three-judge district court (including two Trump appointees) unanimously ruled the question of its violating the VRA’s Section 2 was not “a close one.”
Thus, the court granted the plaintiffs a preliminary injunction and ordered the state’s congressional districting maps redrawn. The Supreme Court affirmed that decision, noting that “Alabama’s congressional map has remained remarkably similar” since the state was forced to create the 7th District three decades previously and mandating a redrawn map including “two districts in which Black voters either comprise a voting-age majority or something quite close.”
Figures won his election despite Alabama GOP shenanigans that included sending out mailers that played on transphobia and racist stereotypes.
But the Legislature openly defied the order, keeping the 7th District majority Black but upping the percentage of black voters in another district from 30% to only just over 40%. In an order noting it was “deeply troubled” by the state’s defiance and reiterating the jurists had “now said twice that this Voting Rights Act case is not close,” the district court rejected that map. After the Supreme Court declined to step in, an independent special master was appointed to do what the Legislature had flatly refused to. The resulting map included both the 7th District and newly redrawn 2nd District, its lines reshaped to include a population that is 48.7% Black.
In late May, roughly five months before his election victory, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee announced that Figures had been added to its “Red to Blue” program, which provides funding support to candidates with the potential to flip Republican House seats. If that recognition did not fully reveal the faith placed in Figures by party tastemakers, his inclusion in the speaking program of the Democratic National Convention’s final night — with its focus on the future — did. Figures chose to use his time on the main stage illuminating the 2nd District’s historic importance in not just Alabama, but across the country’s Black Belt.
“This is the district that gave America the Tuskegee Airmen, Rosa Parks, Fred Gray, and it is the birthplace of the Civil Rights Movement in Montgomery, Alabama,” Figures said by way of introduction. “And of course, this district is home to Mr. Good Trouble himself, Congressman John Lewis.”
Democrats’ faith turned out to be well-founded. Figures won his election despite Alabama GOP shenanigans that included sending out mailers that played on transphobia and racist stereotypes around Black criminality. More than 6,000 voters in the 2nd District also reported receiving postcards with incorrect polling site information. Alabama, it seems, keeps Alabama-ing.
That’s true in more ways than one. The redrawn borders of Alabama’s 2nd District, which remain the creation of a preliminary injunction, are still being litigated. The case will return to federal court on Feb. 10.
Figures took office on Jan. 3, becoming the first Democrat of any race to represent Alabama’s 2nd District since 2008. Perhaps more notably, he is also the first African American elected to the U.S. House from the district since 1872. Figures is only the fourth Black person elected to Congress from Alabama since Reconstruction. And with his win, Alabama will have two Black representatives in the House simultaneously for the first time in the state — or this country’s — history.
Kali Holloway
Kali Holloway is a writer and journalist. She contributes to The Nation, and her writings have appeared in The Guardian, Salon, Time, The Daily Beast and numerous other outlets.