Dillard v. Crenshaw: Redesigning the Political Map of Alabama

Wiley Bolden speaking to a crowd at the Mobile County Courthouse in Mobile, Alabama, during a rally held to support the reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act.
(Photo courtesy of the Alabama Department of Archives and History)
By Carrie Hagen, Narrative Writer, Thurgood Marshall Institute
In 1975, a group of Black voters sued the city of Mobile, Alabama, for conducting unconstitutional elections that unfairly diluted the voting strength of Black residents. Even though over a third of Mobile’s population was Black, no Black person had ever been elected to the three-person City Commission that led the city’s government. The Black voters attributed this omission to the at-large election system, in which each position required a majority vote and the majority-white population of the city voted consistently as a bloc for exclusively white candidates—a phenomenon called racially polarized voting. Unfortunately, the legal action initiated by the Black voters, Mobile v. Bolden, culminated in a sobering defeat at the U.S. Supreme Court in 1980.
The loss, however, galvanized the Black voters of Alabama, who formed a grassroots campaign that pushed Congress in 1982 to ensure greater voter protections by extending and amending the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Their work set in motion legislative and courtroom developments that ultimately produced the breakthrough 1986 U.S. District Court ruling in Dillard v. Crenshaw County, which successfully eliminated at-large elections and redesigned the political map of Alabama.
Alabama’s History of Racist Election Policies
After the 15th Amendment gave Black men the right to vote in 1870, the number of registered Black voters in Alabama rose so quickly that state officials feared Black candidates could become elected county commissioners. To prevent this, legislators canceled county commission elections for a time at the end of the 19th century and empowered the governor to appoint the commissioners, all of whom were white. To further deter Black political participation, white state officials devised and adopted a new state constitution in 1901 that contained so many racist voter qualifications—including selectively enforced literacy tests and poll taxes—that by 1909, all except for approximately 4,000 of the nearly 182,000 Black people of voting age in Alabama had been removed from the rolls of eligible voters.
Many of the Black voters who met the state’s onerous, racist requirements were still blocked from some elections. Black Democrats could not vote in primaries until 1944, when the U.S. Supreme Court declared all-white primaries unconstitutional in Smith v. Allwright—a case argued by Thurgood Marshall, the founder and first Director-Counsel of the Legal Defense Fund (LDF) and a future Supreme Court Justice. But Alabama enforced poll taxes and literacy tests for another two decades after the Smith decision, and the state continued to find other methods of weakening the Black vote.
The only way that Black voters in Alabama could summon any political influence was to vote together as a group for representatives of their choice. Single-member districts, in which smaller geographical areas each elected a single representative, offered the best opportunity for this collective power. However, Alabama used many at-large districts: larger jurisdictions containing a greater number of people who each elected multiple representatives, meaning that all voters cast their ballots for all candidates in the jurisdiction and the group of candidates with the largest shares of the popular vote won. At-large districts virtually always had white majorities that voted for white candidates.
Even so, Black candidates had a chance of winning at-large elections with “single-shot voting.” On election ballots where voters could choose multiple candidates for a limited number of seats, single-shot voting permitted voters to instead choose only one candidate on the ballot. This allowed Black voters to concentrate their votes on a single candidate of their choice, without giving their remaining votes to white candidates. However, after Smith v. Allwright made all-white primaries illegal and gave Black voters an opportunity to participate meaningfully in politics, the Alabama state legislature responded in the 1950s by outlawing single-shot voting in at-large municipal elections and subsequently enacting even more stringent candidate qualifications and new at-large voting methods.
During a meeting of the State Democratic Executive Committee in the early 1960s, one legislator openly admitted that the reason for these exclusionary voting laws was “to protect the white people of Alabama.” These laws continued to “protect” the majority-white voting population even after Congress abolished poll taxes in 1964 through the 24th Amendment and passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which allowed Black voter registration numbers to again multiply.
A Legal Setback in Bolden

Wiley Bolden speaking to a crowd at the Mobile County Courthouse in Mobile, Alabama, during a rally held to support the reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act.
(Photo courtesy of the Alabama Department of Archives and History)
In 1975, an 83-year-old Black man named Wiley Bolden became the lead plaintiff in Bolden v. City of Mobile, which protested Alabama’s discriminatory voting laws. Born in 1892 on his family’s farm near Sawyerville, Alabama, Bolden later moved to Birmingham, where he found work in the coalfields of the Tennessee Coal, Iron, and Railroad Company. In 1917, he was drafted into the Army and served as part of a segregated unit in the 92nd Division on the Western Front during World War I. After being wounded in action, he returned home and moved his growing family to Mobile, where he became a sales manager for the Black-owned Atlanta Life Insurance Company. In 1925, Bolden registered to vote and also became the president of Mobile’s chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). After the U.S. Supreme Court declared all-white primaries unconstitutional in Smith v. Allwright in 1944, Bolden mobilized Black voters in Alabama. He also helped organize the Non-Partisan Voters’ League, a group that fought for Black voting rights.
In 1975, the League filed Bolden v. City of Mobile, alleging that Mobile’s at-large election system diluted the power of the Black vote. Bolden was the lead plaintiff in a group of 14. Lawyers for the Black voters—including Alabama-based civil rights attorneys James Blacksher, Larry Menefee, Gregory Stein, and Edward Still, along with LDF Director-Counsel Jack Greenberg and his colleagues James Nabrit and Charles Williams—argued that the at-large system of electing city commissioners kept Black voters from equal participation in elections, therefore violating the Civil Rights Act of 1871, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and also the First, 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution. In the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Alabama, Bolden’s counsel argued that because of racially polarized voting, the at-large election system in Mobile was as unconstitutional as the racially exclusionary primary system that had disenfranchised Black voters prior to the Smith v. Allwright ruling.
“White people say that we have a swing vote here, and we do,” Bolden later told The New York Times of Alabama’s discriminatory election system. “The swing vote we have, though, is to cast our votes on a field of white candidates who have already been cleared by the white power structure. A person can’t get elected here if they promise to do too much for the Black man.”
U.S. District Judge Virgil Pittman, hearing the case without a jury, found in favor of Bolden and the other Black voters. He ordered Mobile to replace its at-large election system with single-member district elections and to reorganize its municipal government so that a mayor and nine single-district council members would replace the three-person commission governing the city.
Lawyers for Mobile appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. When the Fifth Circuit affirmed Judge Pittman’s decision, the city appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court in City of Mobile v. Bolden. Civil rights advocates strongly expected that Bolden would win again. LDF’s 1980 Annual Report explained that previously, “many of the lower courts had been sympathetic to legal arguments attacking discriminatory uses of at-large voting schemes.” As a result, an increasing number of municipalities had been required to switch from at-large to single-member districts, which produced more Black elected officials.
But in a shocking reversal, the Supreme Court sided with Mobile on April 22, 1980. Writing for the six-three majority, Justice Potter Stewart referenced the role that Alabama’s history of official racial discrimination had played in the district and appellate court rulings. Despite this history, he wrote that “past discrimination cannot, in the manner of original sin, condemn governmental action that is not itself unlawful,” and he cited precedents that “illicit purpose must be proved before a constitutional violation can be found.” Because Bolden’s lawyers had not proven that Mobile established at-large districts with “racially discriminatory motivation,” Justice Stewart wrote, the city did not violate the equal protection guaranteed by the 14th Amendment or the right to vote guaranteed by the 15th Amendment.
Justice Harry Blackmun concurred. Calling District Judge Pittman’s ruling “a drastic measure,” Justice Blackmun said that the lower court should have considered alternatives to eliminating the at-large electoral system instead of ordering Mobile to change its commission government to a mayor-council form.
In his dissent, Justice Marshall wrote that the ruling placed a “stringent burden” on plaintiffs in future vote dilution cases because it tasked them with establishing a discriminatory intent behind disputed actions. He pointed to legal precedents that “an electoral system may not relegate an electoral minority to political impotence by diminishing the importance of its vote.” Implying that the Supreme Court was complicit in suppressing Black voting power, Justice Marshall wrote that “a plurality of the Court concludes that, in the absence of proof of intentional discrimination by the State, the right to vote provides the politically powerless with nothing more than the right to cast meaningless ballots.”
LDF called the verdict “potentially, the most damaging setback to minority representation in government.” Bolden’s attorney Blacksher told reporters that the decision was a “giant step backwards for civil rights.”
"A plurality of the Court concludes that, in the absence of proof of intentional discrimination by the State, the right to vote provides the politically powerless with nothing more than the right to cast meaningless ballots." – Justice Thurgood Marshall in his Mobile v. Bolden dissent
The Alabama Democratic Conference and the Voting Rights Act
Following the 1980 decision, Bolden’s legal team spent years collaborating with the Alabama Democratic Conference (ADC), the Black caucus of the state’s Democratic Party, on building a case to prove the racial motivation behind Alabama’s election practices. Created in 1960 to register and mobilize Black voters, the ADC was originally called the Black Political Caucus of Alabama. After the enactment of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the group harnessed Alabama’s growing Black political power by organizing local committees across the state that watched elections, collected election documents, and recorded election results. In the wake of Mobile v. Bolden, the ADC’s goal was to attack at-large elections by demanding that the state form single-member election districts.
First, however, the ADC needed to pressure Congress to extend and amend the Voting Rights Act, as key voter protections of this legislation would otherwise expire in 1982. Civil rights activists were especially interested in strengthening Section Two, which prohibited discriminatory voting practices or procedures. In its Mobile v. Bolden decision, the Supreme Court said that parties seeking judicial relief under Section Two had to prove there was purposeful discrimination in vote dilution cases. Voting rights advocates including Lani Guinier, who became an Assistant Attorney at LDF in 1981 and advised the ADC, wanted Section Two amended so that instead of having to prove intentional bias, plaintiffs would need to prove only that the law resulted in a discriminatory result—which would be easier to establish with concrete evidence.

Civil rights leaders marching in Mobile, Alabama, to support the reauthorization and extension of the Voting Rights Act.
(Photo courtesy of the Alabama Department of Archives and History)
To raise awareness among the public and elected officials, the ADC helped coordinate three voting rights marches and rallies in Selma, Birmingham, and Montgomery, Alabama between 1980 and 1982. Their campaign worked: In June 1982, President Ronald Reagan signed into law an extended Voting Rights Act that included the desired change to Section Two. The Anniston Star newspaper said the amendments soon led to an “avalanche of lawsuits against at-large elections in the South.”

President Reagan signed an extension of the 1965 Voting Rights Act in 1982, saying, "The right to vote is the crown jewel of American liberties."
(Photo courtesy of Getty Images - Bettmann / Contributor)

Voting Rights Act Extension Report with Supplemental and Dissenting Views
Seizing an Opportunity in Dillard v. Crenshaw
Between 1982 and 1984, the ADC and the Bolden legal team strategized on the case that would become Dillard v. Crenshaw. Whereas Bolden v. Mobile challenged at-large City Commission elections in Mobile, Dillard v. Crenshaw used the amended Section Two to target the at-large electoral systems for county commissioners in nine Alabama counties with significant Black populations. As ADC State Field Director Jerome Gray and Bolden attorneys Blacksher, Menefee, and Still worked together to research and prepare the case, they received legal advice and financial support from LDF.
“There is irony in the fact that the Supreme Court’s demand for proof of purposeful discrimination in City of Mobile v. Bolden made voting rights litigants begin a careful review of Alabama history,” Gray and Blacksher later wrote in an article published in the Cumberland Law Review. Even though the amended Section Two had removed plaintiffs’ burden of proving a racially discriminatory motivation, the legal team in Dillard v. Crenshaw would prove it anyway, showing how “the racially discriminatory agenda of politically powerful white landowners in the Black Belt” drove Alabama voting laws and policies like at-large elections, which created discriminatory election results.
To identify which counties would participate in the class action suit, Gray and his team studied election information that local ADC branches had collected for years. After considering several factors (including the percentage of Black people in a county’s population, its congressional and federal judicial districts, the number of Black officials it had elected, the number of Black candidates who had failed to win office, and the strength of the county’s local ADC chapter), they selected nine counties: Calhoun, Coffee, Crenshaw, Escambia, Etowah, Lawrence, Lee, Pickens, and Talladega.
The ADC selected Crenshaw County as the first to file the lawsuit that would become a statewide class action. Despite having a population that was over 20% Black, Crenshaw was the only county in Alabama that had not appointed any Black poll officials in the 1982 primary election. The ADC then had to identify the lead plaintiff who would represent the Black voters of Crenshaw. It was important that this person did not depend on income from employment because once the plaintiff’s name became public, the ADC expected disgruntled white authorities to retaliate by getting the plaintiff fired. Gray found the perfect candidate in John Dillard, an Air Force veteran who lived on his family’s farm near Luverne, Alabama. Dillard received disability benefits after suffering permanent vision loss as a technical sergeant on a gunship during the Vietnam War.
On November 12, 1985, the lawyers representing Dillard filed suit in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Alabama. They amended their complaint one month later to add as defendants the county commissions of the other eight counties. Their suit alleged that at-large county commission elections violated the amended Section Two of the Voting Rights Act.
Victories and Appeals
Within five months, the counties of Crenshaw, Escambia, and Lee reached settlements by agreeing to adopt single-member district elections. Years of preparation had yielded three victories even before the opening arguments.
“The first thing we were looking for was a speedy move to single-member districts. I think we got that,” Blacksher told The Montgomery Advertiser. “The Crenshaw County officials let us know early on they were willing to compromise. They wanted to hold the expenses down, and we tried to cooperate.”
Probate Judge I.T. Harbin, a Crenshaw official, confirmed in the Advertiser that the county’s motivation was financial. “I told them, ‘Don’t fight it, let’s get out of this as cheap as we can.’ They drew out the district they wanted and we drew the other districts around it. If the [B]lacks are satisfied, I guess we’ll have to be.”
Each of the remaining six counties had a majority-white population, a Black population ranging from 13% to 42%, and a governing board of commissioners. Although the type of at-large elections in each county varied, none of the counties had elected a Black commissioner in an at-large election.
On May 28, 1986, District Judge Myron Thompson issued a preliminary injunction in favor of the Black voters against the six counties. His opinion stated, “It is now generally undisputed that, where there is a history of elections polarized along racial or other group lines, at-large systems … tend ‘to minimize the voting strength of minority groups by permitting the political majority to elect all representatives of the district.’”
Judge Thompson gave five of the counties three weeks to submit plans to develop new election systems for county commissioners, to be implemented by January 1, 1987. In the following months, three more counties reached full settlement agreements with the plaintiffs, leaving only Calhoun, Lawrence, and Pickens counties in litigation. On October 21, 1986, Judge Thompson directed these counties to create single-member voting districts and to eliminate the elected role of a county commission chairman. The chair role would now rotate among commissioners so that minority commissioners could hold it at least once during their terms.
This change to the most powerful role in local government led to an uproar. When Calhoun County submitted its new election system, it said it planned to hold single-member elections for commissioners, but an at-large election for the county commission chairman. Judge Thompson refused to approve a plan that directly defied his order to abolish an at-large election for chairman.
Calhoun County appealed. Bert Jones, the attorney handling the appeal for Calhoun, said that Judge Thompson had overstepped his authority by eliminating an at-large election for chairman because this executive role, analogous to that of a mayor, differed from the legislative role of a regular commissioner. Jones argued that this unique position should allow for a more selective at-large election because a one-person job cannot be districted.
William Bradford Reynolds, the Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice (DOJ) in the Reagan administration, agreed. On February 24, 1987, the DOJ filed an amicus brief on behalf of Calhoun County with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, arguing that Judge Thompson had a responsibility to ensure the development of minority representation, not to restrict the election of the chairman.
Dillard’s lawyer Menefee said the DOJ and Calhoun County were ignoring the Voting Rights Act by insisting that at-large elections, which had been found to dilute Black political power, select the chairman.
The plaintiffs’ appellee brief (which lists the counsel for the Black voters as Blacksher, Menefee, and Still; fellow Alabama attorneys Terry Davis and Reo Kirkland Jr.; and LDF’s Lani Guinier, Julius Chambers, and Pamela Karlan) argued, “In this case, the district court properly rejected Calhoun County’s proposal for one full-time commissioner, with enhanced executive powers, elected at large.” It denounced the DOJ’s amicus brief, which it said would require courts to accept local jurisdictions’ plans that failed to address “the ability of Black citizens equally to influence all levels of local government.” If the Court sided with the county and the DOJ, “The [Justice] Department’s radical new rule would literally read the Equal Participation Clause out of Section Two.” They asked the Court of Appeals to “reject the Department’s regressive adventurism in the strongest possible terms.”

Dillard v. Crenshaw County Brief for Plaintiffs-Appellees
On November 2, 1987, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit upheld the District Court’s ruling and sided with Dillard, finding that Calhoun County’s plan violated Section Two of the Voting Rights Act.
By then, the Dillard legal team had become even more aggressive in challenging at-large elections. In March 1987, they asked to add to the defendant list the names of every county commission, city commission, and school board in Alabama that used at-large elections. The expanded lawsuit was broken up, ultimately naming a total of 192 local governments as defendants in over 150 lawsuits.

Dillard v. Crenshaw County Plaintiffs' Post-Trial Brief
Gray and his ADC staff worked diligently to maximize the impact of the legal victory in Dillard v. Crenshaw. As jurisdictions agreed to shift from at-large to single-member districts, the ADC team traveled to each county and municipality to discuss remedial election plans with Black leaders, bringing with them datasets and sketches of redistricting maps. Over several years, both as they prepared for Dillard v. Crenshaw and after the victory, ADC members drove through counties, knocked on doors, and compiled an informal census on where Black populations lived and where district lines should be drawn to encapsulate Black voting majorities. They shared these maps with local Black leaders to help guide their redistricting decisions, then presented the preferred redistricting plans to local plaintiff class members. In places where the Black population was too small or not concentrated enough to warrant a majority-Black single-member district, the ADC proposed alternative voting systems that would ensure more equal participation for Black voters, upon the advice of attorney Still and LDF’s Guinier.
By 1992, Dillard v. Crenshaw and the related cases had forced the state of Alabama to create more than 280 new minority districts. This legal victory produced new opportunities for Black people to participate in local government and served as a platform for greater minority representation on the national political stage.