Small Alabama Town Wins Lawsuit Allowing Residents To Vote For First Time In Decades

Residents in a small Alabama town will be able to vote in their own municipal elections for the first time in decades after a four-year legal battle.

A proposed settlement has been reached inthe town’s voting rights case, allowing Newbern, a predominantly Black town with 133 residents, to hold its first legitimate elections in more than 60 years. The town’s next elections will be held in 2025.

The settlement was filed June 21 and must be approved by U.S. District Judge Kristi K. DuBose.

For decades, white officials appointed Newbern’s mayor and council members in lieu of holding elections. Most residents weren’t even aware that there were supposed to be elections for these positions.

“This is just one of many examples of the country’s longstanding racist practices that deny Black folks the right to vote,” said Leah Wong, a voting rights attorney with the Legal Defense Fund. “White folks in this town essentially handed down the positions of power to one another. Throughout the decades, there were never any municipal elections held for mayor or town council. Black folks weren’t even told how to get on the town council.”

Newbern is about an hour away from Selma, where civil rights activists were brutally attacked on the Edmund Pettus Bridge while marching for voting rights in 1965.

The settlement will reinstate Patrick Braxton as the mayor of Newbern, the first Black person to hold the position in the town’s 170-year history. Capital B News had first reported about Braxton’s fight.

Braxton was the only candidate who filed qualifying paperwork with the county clerk in 2020, so he won the mayoral race by default. The incumbent, Haywood “Woody” Stokes III, hadn’t even bothered to fill out the paperwork to run again.