Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall says efforts by Republicans in the state to wrest power from Democrats are partisan political battles and are not motivated by race.

“I don’t think there’s been a history of direct attacks… in a way that suppresses the participation of minority voters,” he adds.

He notes that Democrats have redrawn maps in states that lean politically left, like California, to increase their chances of winning more seats. Republicans, he says, follow the same principles of “racial neutrality.”

Cedric Coley, president of the Alabama Young Republicans, says his state is strongly conservative and deserves representatives who reflect those values. He doesn’t want federal judges to interfere in the redistricting process, even to prioritize black Americans like him.

“I would rather have family disputes, with the people of Alabama, rather than have federal judges step in and say that because their past is racist, we have to be racist in the future and create racial maps and pigeonhole people into racial quotas. I just don’t believe that.”

Coley says people should be judged on their merits. “It’s not based on the content of someone’s skin or where it comes from,” he adds. “It’s based on what they’ve earned.”

Many black Alabamans, however, simply don’t buy the argument that it’s just partisan politics.

“It’s a big setback for black people,” Joe Reed, a Montgomery-based lawyer and civil rights activist, tells the BBC. “You can discriminate on political grounds, but you can’t discriminate on race. Well, hell, in Alabama, with the polarized voting we have, everything is race. Everything.”