“Bleaching” Black residents from S.C.’s 1st District Bishop William Barber of the Poor People’s Campaign regularly invokes the fusion movement that allowed formerly enslaved citizens (men, anyway) joined by white allies to vote and win public office in the post-Civil War South. Nineteenth-century Supreme Court rulings backing white backlash to fusion politics set the stage, Politico Magazine reports, for “the American slide toward autocracy.” The backlash to Barack Obama’s 2008 election provided the jolt of momentum autocrats needed, particularly in the former Confederate states, for resurrecting the not-yet-cold corpse of Jim Crow. Georgetown University law professor Sheryll Cashin recounts recent history with which Hullabaloo readers are already familiar, plus Alabama’s recent insistence on defying court rulings to preserve white dominance of the state’s congressional delegation: In 2022, a three-judge district court found that the state’s proposed redistricting map diluted minority votes, in violation of the Voting Rights Act. It ordered Alabama to create a second majority-Black congressional district or “or something quite close to it” so that Black voters would “have an opportunity to elect a representative of their choice.” In a 5-4 ruling, the court in Milligan rejected Alabama’s arguments for a reinterpretation of the Act and ordered it to follow the lower court’s decision. Instead, this state — where “Heart of Dixie” is still required messaging on all license plates — defied the court with a new map that did not create a realistic possibility for Black voters to elect a second congressperson. That led the annoyed lower court to…