Down in Alabama, in the nation’s newest congressional district, an interesting battle is brewing—one that pits the daughter of the family that birthed the KKK against the son of the man who bankrupted it.
Democrats nominated Shomari Figures in the newly redrawn Alabama 2nd Congressional District, while Republicans opted for Caroleene Dobson. The district is a result of the Supreme Court’s Allen v. Milligan surprise decision which ordered the state to draw a second Black-opportunity district.
Dobson comes from one of the wealthiest families in America—the Kings of King Ranch, the largest contiguous land ownership in the country (825,000 acres!), larger than the size of Rhode Island. How did they get all that land? This story by the amazing Michael Harriot for TheGrio has all the gory details, and it’s a sordid affair.
Dobson is the great-great-great-great-great-great granddaughter of John Hardee, a “prominent state senator and slaveholder” who lived in North Carolina before receiving 1,360 acres in Camden County, Ga., for his service as a soldier in the American Revolution. The plantation became known as the Rural Felicity Plantation, where Hardee’s descendants bought and sold 183 human beings between 1816 and 1850, according to our search of Camden County census records and Tara D. Field’s abstracts of Georgia Slave Deeds. By 1840, the Hardees owned 137 pieces of human chattel, placing Dobson’s ancestors in the top .1% of American enslavers.
Also this:
In 1817, 200 years before Caroleene Dobson’s conservative colleagues used their “Alabama roots and values” to outlaw squatter’s rights, John Ziba Hardee, moved to Alabama. By the time the U.S. government kicked an estimated 23,000 members of the Muscogee Nation off their native land in the 1830s, his son Joel Hardee (Dobson’s great-great-great grandfather) had already moved to Monroe County, Ala., and claimed squatters rights on 50 acres of land. Then Joel used the Land Act of 1820 to take advantage of this massive redistribution of native American wealth, paying $1.25 per acre for nearly 400 acres in Monroe County, including a 198.235-acre tract, a 39.9-acre plot and another parcel containing 37.64 acres.
It’s much easier to accumulate generational wealth when you build it on the backs of Black slaves and displaced Native Americans. And of course, Dobson doesn’t have the ability to grapple with her inherent privilege.
But it wasn’t enough for her family to enslave some and pilfer the land from expelled Native Americans. They also worked hard to enforce a system of inherent bigotry, racism, and oppression. As Harriot explains:
After the Civil War, Joel’s uncle, William Hardee, joined the Hardees in nearby Selma and became a “well-known member” of the Ku Klux Klan. Joel served 50 years as justice of the peace while William used his confederate hero status to terrorize Black Alabamians. Aside from Jefferson County (home to Alabama’s Blackest city), no county in Alabama had more lynchings than the two counties (Selma and Monroe) where the Hardee brothers dispensed their brand of justice.
Dobson’s forefathers literally ran one of the most brutal outposts of the KKK. And despite slavery being outlawed, they weren’t done oppressing Black people.
Although the 1850 Census listed Joel as a “farmer,” there is no evidence that he ever farmed a single plant or ranched a single cattle. After the 13th Amendment outlawed slavery, Joel negotiated sharecropping contracts with formerly enslaved men Mitchell Chapman, Cyrus Boatwright and Isaac Bulloch to exploit their labor (and their children’s labor) for less than 34 cents per day, a pair of shoes and three outfits a year. If you lost count, this is Coleene Dobson’s “fifth generation cattle farm.” And since sharecroppers are technically entrepreneurs, Dobson’s campaign bio was not technically lying when it says her family’s reappropriated land is “where she learned the meaning of hard work and developed a firsthand understanding of the challenges faced by hardworking families and entrepreneurs.”
She never said it was her family doing all that hard work.
Again, it’s not Dobson’s fault her ancestors were brutal slave owners and stole tribal lands. It is her fault that she brags about it as “Alabama roots and values” and has zero introspection as to what those words actually mean in her instance.
2nd Congressional District Republican candidate Caroleene Dobson
Her wealth was literally built on the backs of others. And she is now a member of the one political party in the United States dedicated to whitewashing that history and exacerbating the economic and societal legacy of our nation’s darkest shames.
Dobson is quite possibly the polar opposite of Figures. For one, he is Black. But his family is also of great consequence to the racial history of Mobile, Alabama.
Figures’ father, Michael Figures, the son of a janitor, was Alabama Law School’s first Black graduate after integrating the formerly segregated school in 1969. In 1979 he was elected to the Alabama state Senate, one of just three Black members, Harriot reported. And then …
On March 21, 1981, police in Mobile, Ala., called Sen. Figures to the scene where someone had kidnapped 19-year-old Michael Donald, beaten him with a tree limb and strangled him with a rope before slitting his throat. A police investigation and a federal inquiry yielded no suspects and investigators eventually closed the case. Michael, who represented Mobile, pleaded with the federal authorities to reopen the cold case. After Mobile’s first Black district attorney had just got a job as assistant U.S. attorney in Mobile, he agreed to resume the investigation, eventually arresting and convicting four members of the United Klans of America for the murder. You may know him as the person whom former Jeff Sessions told: “I thought the KKK was OK until I learned they smoked pot.”
His name is Thomas Figures, the older brother of Michael Figures.
This is one hell of an impressive, groundbreaking family.
Shomari’s father ... eventually filed a civil suit on behalf of Donald’s mother that bankrupted the United Klans of America, the organization responsible for the 16th Street Church Bombing, the murder of Viola Luizzo and a half-century of racial terrorism.
After his father died in 1996, Figures’ mother Vivian won his seat, and in 2008 was the Democratic nominee for Alabama’s Senate race, the first Black woman to accomplish that. She was also the first woman to head either party in the Alabama legislature, and continues to serve today.
Figures himself graduated from Alabama Law School, served in the Obama White House and Justice Department, as Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown’s legal counsel, and returned home when the seat was first drawn. It’s unsurprising that, given his family stature and his own impressive credentials, he sailed through a crowded Democratic primary.
Under the new congressional lines, President Joe Biden would have won this district in 2020 by a 56-43 margin, so Figures would normally sail to a relatively easy victory. But no one is taking the race for granted. Dobson has all the money, and younger Black voters vote at a disproportionately lower rate than the general electorate.
And Democratic fundraising is difficult in this economically disadvantaged district. As of the end of June, Figures had raised nearly $900,000 to Dobson’s $2.2 million (though she did loan nearly $1.4 million to her campaign). But Figures was also the beneficiary of $2.6 million in outside spending by the Protect Progress PAC, a super PAC that supports the cryptocurrency industry, according to AL.com. This dramatically outpaces anything on the Republican side.
I’m also told he raised $1.2 million this past quarter, so his fundraising has certainly picked up. The district is served by three cheap media markets, so that money can go far.
I highly recommend reading Harriot’s story, as I left out a lot of details. It is absolutely a fascinating look at how different “Alabama roots and values” can look from two different lenses. This district has a chance to elect the version that serves the people, and not the family of former slave owners and land stealers who continue, to this day, to fight to maintain a system that benefits the wealthiest and most powerful at the expense of everyone else.
One last note—I had the pleasure of meeting Figures recently, and he is indeed an impressive individual. It’s rare to sit with a candidate who knows his district’s numbers, can delve deeply into Supreme Court jurisprudence, and communicate the importance and relevance of policy in people’s lives.
If you didn’t catch his Democratic National Convention speech, you can see what a dynamic speaker he is:
Figures isn’t a future backbencher. He is destined for leadership and could very well be running things someday, if not leading a Democratic revival in what is, for now, a solidly politically segregated and Republican state.
You can learn more about Shomari Figures at his campaign website.
