It was perhaps the most important voting rights case the U.S. Supreme Court would decide since the passage of the Voting Rights Act.
A federal judge in Alabama had upended Mobile’s city government in October 1976, striking down the at-large elections that ensured that white candidates held every elected office in the city with a large Black population and replacing them with geographic districts, opening the possibility of equitable Black representation in one of the nation’s most segregated cities. That opportunity was denied by the Supreme Court.
Now never-before-seen letters and memos show that behind the scenes at the court, Justice Lewis Powell, an influential jurist with an undeserved reputation for decency and moderation, used wildly racist code words on the court’s letterhead as he strenuously—and successfully—drove a decision in City of Mobile v. Bolden four years later that would overturn the lower court and reinstate a system that reliably produced all-white rule.
Should his side not prevail, and should districts replace at-large systems nationwide, Powell warned Justice Potter Stewart in a barely coded racist letter from Feb. 28, 1980, “our cities could become jungles.”
It is startling, even horrifying, to turn the pages of an archival folder in a beautiful Yale research library and come across such incendiary and racist language on official Supreme Court letterhead and dated during one’s own lifetime. What’s perhaps more horrifying is that Powell’s thinking in the Mobile case shaped a young John Roberts, who would years later become the chief justice of the United States and defined the early chapters of Roberts’ lifelong efforts to unravel voting rights from the bench.
By the 1970s, Mobile, Alabama’s second-largest city, had become a symbol of urbanized Jim Crow rule as one of the most segregated cities in the nation. Many of Mobile’s neighborhoods were either 100 percent white or entirely Black.
Another city fixture that was entirely white: Mobile’s City Council. Black residents made up one-third of the city’s population, but because Mobile elected its three-member council via at-large elections, the white majority had controlled the mayor’s office and every seat on the council for a century. The at-large elections, one of the oldest tricks to preserve white supremacy, which exploded in popularity across the South after the Civil War, ensured that when whites banded together—as they did in Mobile—they would not need to share any power with Black or other minority voters. With that power base established, all the familiar machinery of Southern segregation swung into action: 100 percent white councils would budget 100 percent white neighborhoods and the vast majority of city resources, from park budgets to schools, public works, and public safety.