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The majority-black city blocked from electing black officials

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Everyone in Pleasant Grove, Alabama, seems to know that if you really want to find out what the city council is working on, you have to get to city hall an hour early for the pre-council meeting. But one Monday in February, two residents, La-Tanya Dunham and Robert Sellers, arrived at about 6pm, only to find the room already packed with about a dozen people discussing pay raises, Little League sign-ups and street lights. Other than Dunham and Sellers, everyone in the room was white. While it may have been an inadvertent scheduling mix-up, Dunham said it was symptomatic of a broader problem. The majority-black city has never elected an African American person to be its mayor or to serve on its five-person city council. Black candidates have run for office, and lost. That’s not an accident, civil rights advocates say: Pleasant Grove’s election system is discriminatory, making it almost impossible for African Americans to win seats.“It’s like Pleasant Grove is stuck in a bubble,” said Dunham, 46, who moved to the city in 2005. “It’s like we’re stuck in a period – ‘This is how it used to be and we can’t go past that.’”Pleasant Grove has been using a voting system that has historically disadvantaged African Americans by allowing powerful blocs – in this case, of white residents – to vote en masse for their candidate of choice and win every seat. It’s a system Alabama municipalities instituted over a century ago to dilute the impact of African American voters on local elections, in conjunction with other discriminatory rules, to allow white majorities to maintain their political influence in cities across the state.“It provided hegemony for white supremacy,” said Peyton McCrary, a historian who has closely studied at-large elections in Alabama. “It was totally successful.”But two years ago, residents of Pleasant Grove decided they’d had enough. For decades, Pleasant Grove, just outside of Birmingham, was virtually all white. The city of about 10,000 is what residents call a quiet “bedroom community” with winding roads, one-storey homes and a smattering of restaurants and businesses. The city’s motto is the “good neighbor city”, but it has a long history of being hostile to African Americans. In 1985, a federal court intervened to block the city’s attempt to selectively annex white areas, citing “astonishing hostility to the presence and the rights of black Americans”. The supreme court later upheld the decision in a ruling that included conservative justice Antonin Scalia in the majority. In the past two decades, the demographics have changed. After a tornado destroyed many homes in the city in 2011, residents say, white people left and African Americans moved in from Birmingham. In 2000, the city was about 14% black. Now, African Americans make up about 60% of the population, and about 53% of registered voters are black. In 2014, Priscilla McWilliams, a short, no-nonsense woman who has lived in the city since the early 2000s, was appointed by the

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