Thomas, J., dissenting
expand District 2 east and west to encompass predominantly majority-black areas throughout the rural “Black Belt.” In the process, the plans are careful to leave enough of the Black Belt for District 7 to maintain its black majority. Then—and critically—the plans have District 2 extend a southwestern tendril into Mobile County to capture a dense, high-population majority-black cluster in urban Mobile.[1] See Supp. App. 184, 186, 188, 190, 193, 195, 197, 199, 201, 203; see also id., at 149.
Those black Mobilians currently reside in the urban heart of District 1. For 50 years, District 1 has occupied the southwestern pocket of Alabama, consisting of the State’s two populous Gulf Coast counties (Mobile and Baldwin) as well as some less populous areas to the immediate north and east. See id., at 205–211. It is indisputable that the Gulf Coast region is the sort of community of interest that the Alabama Legislature might reasonably think a congressional district should be built around. It contains Alabama’s only coastline, its fourth largest city, and the Port of Mobile. Its physical geography runs north along the Alabama and Mobile Rivers, whose paths District 1 follows. Its economy is tied to the Gulf—to shipping, shipbuilding, tourism, and commercial fishing. See Brief for Coastal Alabama Partnership as Amicus Curiae 13–15.
But, for the plaintiffs to secure their majority-black District 2, this longstanding, compact, and eminently sensible district must be radically transformed. In the Gulf Coast region, the newly drawn District 1 would retain only the majority-white areas that District 2 did not absorb on its path to Mobile’s large majority-black population. To make
- ↑ I have included an Appendix, infra, illustrating the plaintiffs’ 11 proposed maps. The first 10 images display the “black-only” voting-age population of census-designated voting districts in relation to the maps’ hypothetical district lines. The record does not contain a similar illustration for the 11th map, but a simple visual comparison with the other maps suffices.
