Black voters will maintain a relative majority even after Mobile annexed three areas west of the city limits that are combined majority white.

The results of Tuesday’s special election, which will not be certified until next week, will close the white-Black gap among the city’s voting age population – those who are over 18. The annexation vote brought 15,212 new voters into Mobile, of whom 9,532 are white (62%), 4,114 are Black (27%) and 1,557 are labeled as “other” (10.2%).

The city’s voting age demographics will go from 49.7% Black, 44.4% white and 6% other to 47.5% Black, 46.1% white and 6.3% other.

The City Council will still have to undergo another redistricting of its council districts, restarting a process that was contentious throughout 2022.

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“Since the annexation brought in nearly 20,000 new residents, we will have to redistrict,” said Councilwoman Gina Gregory, whose district in far northwestern Mobile grew with the addition of King’s Branch and Orchard Estates.

She said while the Zoghby Act might not require it, the “Voting Rights Act does.” The Zoghby Act is the law from the 1980s that created Mobile’s current city government.

Diluting votes

The results stirred a reaction from Stand Up Mobile, an annexation opposition group that warned the effort was aimed at diluting the city’s Black voting relative majority.

“Adding thousands of additional residents who voted to be annexed into our city will fundamentally alter the demographics of Mobile,” a statement released Wednesday from Stand Up Mobile reads. “Our fear has been that this change will also mean that the needs of historically under-served communities will continue to grow in the coming weeks, months, and years. We will continue the fight to ensure they don’t and to ensure all promises made by our elected leaders throughout this process are kept.”

Candace Cooksey, a spokeswoman for Stimpson, said in a statement that a “great deal of thought and effort went to ensure any annexation outcome did not ‘fundamentally alter the demographics of Mobile.’”

“Growing Mobile puts us in the best position to continue investing in communities and neighborhoods throughout the city, while also attracting additional economic opportunities that benefit Mobilians,” Cooksey said. “Stand Up Mobile has attempted to malign this annexation process from the beginning, despite many attempts to bring them in as a community partner. It is disappointing, but not surprising, to see them continue to spread misinformation.”

Beverly Cooper, co-founder of Stand Up Mobile, which also advocates for increasing Black voter engagement in Mobile, said the idea now is to allow the process “run its course” and to scrutinize how elected leaders administer policies affecting underserved areas.

The annexation plan, if fully implemented, would have left Mobile with almost an event split of white and Black voters. But voters in the Airport corridor, which had 67% white voters, shot down annexation. It was the only one of four corridors to vote against it.

Had the Airport corridor voted to annex, it would have further eroded the city’s Black voting age relative majority to 46.8% Black-46.7% white.

The largest of the three areas to vote in support of annexation was the Cottage Hills corridor, which has a total of 9,532 voters, 8,456 or 63% who are white. The other two areas are much smaller — King’s Branch and Orchard Estates. Both areas consist of majority Black voters.

SPLC concerns

The annexation efforts had also been scrutinized by the Southern Poverty Law Center. The Montgomery-based civil rights and legal advocacy agency, wrote to the Stimpson administration in late 2021, warning the city it should not dilute Black political power through redistricting and annexation.

SPLC Senior Staff Attorney Jess Unger, in a statement, said the organization is concerned about history repeating with cities annexing large swaths of white suburbs to alter its racial demographics and ensure white political leadership.

Richmond, Virginia, is one glaring example. In the 1970s, the city annexed more than 47,500 residents from an adjacent county, the vast majority of them white. Attorneys for the city later admitted the effort was aimed at keeping Black voters from the polls and to keep them out of office.

“SPLC is concerned about the troubling resonance with past eras of a newly majority-Black Southern city annexing majority-white areas and will closely monitor the impacts on voting and elections for Mobile’s communities of color going forward,” Unger said.

Redistricting and election

Redistricting will likely be watched closely. The last effort led to months of strong and often critical comments directed at the city and the council over ensuring Mobile had a 4-3 Black majority on the council. The council’s current and longtime makeup has been four white members, three Black.

The district represented by Gregory, who has been on the council the longest at nearly 18 years, was the subject of much of the scrutiny. The maps produced by the Stimpson administration had District 7 at a 51% Black-42% white split. A compromise map pushed up that district’s Black majority to 53.2% Black, 41.2% white. The district, for the past decade, was 48% white-45% Black.

The compromise map was approved during a council meeting last August. It is supposed to take effect for the 2025 municipal elections – that is, until the redistricting process starts anew, and a new map is voted on.

The new map will also likely alter District 6, which will grow considerably after the majority white Cottage Hills district is annexed. That area includes 16,662 residents. Of those 12,781 or 66% are of voting age.

The approval from voters in Cottage Hills area, which consists of some long-established subdivisions just west of the city’s municipal boundaries, is the main reason why Mobile’s overall population is surging to more than 204,600 residents and ahead of the cities of Birmingham and Montgomery.

But those residents will not get to vote immediately. A special election for the vacant District 6 council seat will take place on Tuesday, which is the day in which Mobile County Probate Judge Don Davis is expected to certify the results of the annexation election.

The District 6 council seat has been vacant since Scott Jones abruptly resigned in April.

The candidates for the District 6 seat include Kyle Callaghan, a retired law enforcement professional and current member of the Mobile County Board of Registrars; Josh Woods, executive director of The Gounds; Karla DuPriest, owner and found of Chris & Carla Heavenly Rids; and Linh Nguyen-Hoach, a small business owner.