‘It should have been long ago’: majority-Black US city elects first Black officials
Alabama’s Pleasant Grove held landmark election after two residents sued to change its discriminatory voting system in 2018
Pleasant Grove, a small Alabama city outside of Birmingham, made history Tuesday by electing a majority-Black city council. The city, which is nearly 60% Black, had never previously elected a Black candidate to the city council.
Tuesday’s election was the first after the city settled a 2018 lawsuit filed under the Voting Rights Act, the landmark 1965 civil rights law, and agreed to change its system for holding elections. The city had long allowed all residents of the city to vote for all the city council members, regardless of where they lived, allowing white voters to cast their ballots in a cohesive bloc that blocked Black candidates from winning elections. Similar practices, often called “at-large elections”, had long been used throughout Alabama to block African Americans from gaining political power at the local level.