Shomari Figures now faces a redrawn white-majority seat in November after the US Supreme Court’s April ruling let Alabama dissolve the district that elected him to the US House of Representatives in 2024. The change leaves Tuskegee watching a race that will decide whether its first black congressional representative in modern history keeps the seat.
Figures also helped secure $1m from the US government for a civic centre in Tuskegee, barely a year after his election. The project is planned to serve as a fallout shelter against deadly storms and to house the city's police department and fire department, tying his political future to a city still waiting on the work that money is meant to support.
April Supreme Court ruling
The April ruling struck a blow to a part of the Voting Rights Act that had helped give minority voters more representation in Congress. It also allowed Republican-led states across the South to redraw congressional maps and erase majority-black districts, including the one Figures had won.
Figures was elected in 2024 and became the first black person to represent Tuskegee in Congress in modern history. He now goes into November defending a seat that has been redrawn to a white-majority district, a change that turns the next election into a test of whether that representation survives the new map.
Tuskegee federal funding
Tuskegee has less than 9,000 people and over 80% of them are African American. Nearly one in three people live in poverty, the city has no general hospital, and it has no 24-hour emergency-care clinic. In that setting, Chris Lee said, “All of our issues, we do depend on federal funding,” and “It's very important that we have someone who has our back.”
Lee also said, “I hate that this happened, especially this early,” and added, “We're really just at the tip of the iceberg of seeing the real impact.” The city’s fire department is where many people go for help, and Dondrell Hopson said, “We get calls, crazy calls, for all kinds of things” and “Treating bullet wounds. Guys bleeding out.”
De'Mari Benham and Tuskegee
De'Mari Benham, a 19-year-old Tuskegee University student, was rushed to the fire department in a friend's car after a glass door shattered on his arm. He said, “I decided not to go” to a hospital the next town over, “Both because it's far and because I just simply don't have the funds.”
Tuskegee is receiving new federal funding while the district that helped elect the city’s first black modern congressional representative has been dissolved. The question now is whether the redrawn seat makes it harder for Figures to keep the support that had already started to flow to Tuskegee before November.
