Downballot: a daughter of the confederacy vs. the Klan killer’s son

OPINION:  To win Alabama’s newest congressional seat, the son of a civil rights hero faces a gerrymandered map, racial dog whistles and a wealthy descendant of slave-owning confederate Klansmen.

Editor’s note: The following article is an op-ed, and the views expressed are the author’s own. Read more opinions on theGrio.  

As the 2024 election nears, theGrio’s Downballot series explores the issues, races and individual candidates appearing on the ballots in state and local elections. 

Open on a primly dressed mom-next-door type wearing pearl earrings and a remarkably unremarkable shopping smock. In front of a slightly out-of-focus Piggly Wiggly sign, the woman strolls through a supermarket parking lot with two children in tow. She stops and begins speaking. 

“Prices keep rising, forcing Alabama families to make tough choices,” she laments as she opens the tailgate of a nondescript, stripped-down pickup truck and loads her groceries. “Growing up on a farm, we worked all day and had to stay on budget. That’s no longer possible for hardworking families.” 

Cut to an overhead shot at a second location. The same Piggly Wiggly parking lot economist pumps overpriced fuel into the 25-year-old family pickup that she probably calls “Betsy.” 

“Let’s bring down high prices and make life affordable again,” the struggling, small-town mom concludes as the screen fades to white. 

This is “Tough Choices,” the first general election campaign ad for Caroleene Dobson, the very demure, very Republican candidate competing against Democrat Shomari Figures for Alabama’s 2nd Congressional District seat in Congress. 

Since winning the GOP primary, Dobson, who is extremely conservative and white, has repeatedly cast Figures, who just may be the Blackest “Black candidate” on the 2024 ballot, as a carpetbagging “Washington insider” who stands in direct contrast to her Southern, small-town (pronounced “why-it”) upbringing. In the Dobson cinematic universe, she is a regular old country girl raised on a “small family farm” held by five generations of Alabama farmers. At the same time, Figures is an interloper from the liberal elite who doesn’t understand real Alabamians. Dobson’s dog whistles are dog whistling.

“My opponent is not just a Washington liberal … my opponent is not a Southern Democrat who is left of center or thinks for himself,” Dobson told Mobile, Ala., Republicans during a July meeting. “To assume [Figures] will prioritize the interests of people of District 2 over his career path is fantasy.”

To be fair, Dobson is not wrong to portray her opponent as the Democratic “other” from another planet. The candidates are from two entirely different places. While you might be surprised by which candidate openly acknowledges their ancestors’ ties to slavery, the confederacy and the Ku Klux Klan, this political contest is more than just about the candidates and their family background. It’s about stolen land and a gerrymandered map. It’s about Black history and whitewashed white history. 

The battle to represent one of the poorest, most gerrymandered congressional districts in Congress is also the most captivating political drama in America.

And it all begins with a map. 

Mapping values

“Extreme MAGA Republicans here in Washington, in Alabama, and throughout the country understand that they have difficulty winning elections or upholding their majority in the House without gerrymandering congressional districts illegally.” — Rep. Hakeem Jeffries. 

This is not Jeffries’ opinion. For years, Alabama legislators maintained white voting power by using a congressional map that herded Black voters into a single congressional district. When a U.S. District Court ordered the Alabama legislature to come up with a redistricting plan that “remedies racially discriminatory vote dilution,” the Supreme Court had already noted that “voting in Alabama is extremely racially polarized.” After years of legal wrangling, the Supreme Court rejected Republicans’ racist map that disenfranchised Black voters. In 2024, two of Alabama’s seven congressional districts (or 28.5% of the Congressional delegation) will have a chance to elect a candidate that represents the state’s 28.4% Black population.

Along with preserving the majority-Black 7th District, the ruling added a new congressional district with a 48.7% Black voting-age population. The redrawn 2nd District stretches across the Alabama Black Belt and contains three of the 10 poorest counties in the state. It’s probably a coincidence that the same district includes three of the 10 Blackest cities and five of the 10 Blackest counties in Alabama. Although this kinda feels like democracy, the 2nd District has two fundamentally different candidates.

Like most conservatives, Dobson touts the moral values she inherited from her country, community and, most of all, her hardworking ancestors. Her campaign site describes her as a “passionate advocate for families, farms, and faith” who aims to “preserve the bedrock values and moral backbone that have defined our nation.” After winning the Republican primary, she declared, “I was born here, and it is my Alabama roots and values that I will take to Washington to represent you.” 

Nearly every media outlet, news report and political supporter mentions Dobson’s five generations of family and her all-American background. Similarly, you can’t find a single article about Figures that doesn’t mention his famous civil rights hero father or his mother’s public service. 

“I left my community to work for my community,” Figures told theGrio. “My ancestors were enslaved here. My parents raised me with those values and taught me to fight for the people in my community and their values. I imagine my opponent feels the same way. We just see two entirely different communities with an entirely different set of principles.”

We wanted to examine the “values” and “principles” both candidates constantly attribute to their ancestors. After searching through thousands of documents covering nearly three centuries, theGrio uncovered a story that spans the entire history and geography of America and reveals the source of the candidates’ political differences as well as the true story of this country. 

But Shomari Figures and Caroleene Dobson come from two entirely different Americas.

An All-American Family

“My story is the same as most of the people in District 2,” Shomari Figures told theGrio. “This is the place where my ancestors were enslaved. It’s the place where my parents taught me to fight for our people.”

Shomari Coleman Figures was born and raised in Mobile, Ala., and attended a segregated high school (according to the National Center for Education Statistics, Leflore Magnet High School is 95% Black and only had two white students in 2023). Figures stayed in-state to attend college and law school at the University of Alabama, the school his father desegregated in 1969. Like Dobson, he left the state to work for bigwigs — first as a field organizer for a young senator named Barack Obama, then as an attorney for a big law firm called the U.S. Department of Justice. 

Shomari Figures also descended from a family of wealthy, blue-blooded slave traders.

John McCorquodale was the son of Scottish immigrants who came to America in “the dark, airless and dank hold of a ship.” Three months after the birth of his first son, Malcom, John purchased 100 acres in part of Cumberland County, N.C., catapulting his children into the “planter society which engaged in the production of cotton and corn, in abundance.” Following Andrew Jackson’s slaughter of thousands of Indigenous people in the Creek War of 1814, Malcom caught the “Alabama Fever.” The first-generation immigrant joined thousands of slaveowners who moved to the Alabama territory to claim squatters’ rights on Native American land. In 1842, 46-year-old Malcom fathered a daughter with an “unknown female slave,” one of the 27 people he enslaved in his new residence in Clarke County, Ala. Census workers listed Malcom’s enslaved daughter on the 1860 slave schedule as a “mulatto” named Emily Jane McCorquodale. After the Civil War, Emily married Joe Figures, an enslaved man from Clarke County who was forced to labor for confederate troops in Mobile, Ala. Joe returned to Clarke County, earning $325 a year as a sharecropper.

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In 1893, Clarke County’s white sharecroppers began a three-year campaign of mob violence to wrest control of politics from Clarke County’s Black voters. The Mitcham War drove many Black families out of Clarke County. The Figures landed in Mobile where, in 1947, Emily and Joe’s grandson Coleman, a janitor for International Paper Company, gave birth to Michael Anthony Figures. Michael would graduate from a segregated school, all-Black Hillsdale Academy, and attend all-Black Stillman College. He would go on to integrate the University of Alabama Law School before becoming its first Black graduate. In 1979, he became one of three Black members of the Alabama State Senate. 

Michael was just getting started. 

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. 

Shomari’s father, Michael Figures, 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. When Michael died in 1996, Shomari did not inherit a family farm or stock from a slave camp. Michael didn’t even pass down his Senate seat – his wife, Vivian Figures, won it in a 1997 race. In 2008, Vivian became the first African-American woman in Alabama to win the Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate. Her run was unsuccessful, but she eventually became the Alabama legislature’s first female party leader of any race. She is still one of four women in the Alabama Senate. 

The Klandaughter

Caroleene Dobson is a distinguished attorney, wife, mother, District 2 resident, and a lifelong advocate for conservative values. Born and raised in Beatrice, Alabama, Dobson grew up on her family’s fifth-generation cattle farm, where she learned the meaning of hard work and developed a firsthand understanding of the challenges faced by hardworking families and entrepreneurs. – “Meet Caroleene”

In many ways, Caroleene Dobson is a lot like Shomari Figures. Like her opponent, Dobson is a product of her ancestors. Her family’s origin story also contains ties to slavery, the confederacy and racial terrorism. It also begins on a North Carolina plantation and ends in Alabama with a family inheritance. Knowing her backstory explains her Alabama roots, work ethic, politics and family values. 

Caroleene Dobson attended Monroe Academy, a private, historically white segregation academy created as a loophole for white parents who didn’t want their children attending integrated schools. The 55-year-old institution hasn’t enrolled a single Black student in its entire history. Perhaps this is why Dobson supports the conservative effort to defund the Department of Education and force Black taxpayers in the state with the fourth-lowest-income and eighth-highest poverty rate to fund white schools. Dobson did not respond to theGrio’s request for an interview.

Dobson graduated from Harvard College and moved to Texas to attend Baylor University Law School. She spent the next seven years there as a commercial real estate attorney representing wealthy landowners and corporate developers. After not living in Alabama for a third of her life, it’s easy to see why she said: “I don’t want to go to Washington, but I want to fight for Alabama families because Alabama is and always will be my home.” Plus, her ancestors moved around a lot. 

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. But in 1850, only 50 people were enslaved at the Hardee family’s forced labor camp. Don’t worry; the Hardees didn’t squander the family fortune. The youngest boys were simply stricken with a disease. The Hardee boys also caught the Alabama Fever.

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. 

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. To be fair, Joel was busy building an empire. 

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.

The Hardees’ wealth and slave-owning pale in comparison to Caroleene’s husband’s family. Robert Dobson is the great-great-grandson of Richard King, who used his 825,000-acre ranch to feed confederate soldiers and fund the fledgling white supremacist nation during the Civil War. To this day, the Dobsons continue to financially benefit from the slave labor camp. According to her most recent quarterly report to the Federal Election Committee, Caroleene Dobson earns thousands of dollars every year from her family’s six-figure ownership stake in King Ranch. Her real estate holdings alone total at least $5.4 million, including her stake in Hardee Lands LTD and her share in the $1.4 million empire in Monroe County. To be clear, wealth isn’t necessarily bad. Still, it explains how little old conservative farm mom’s campaign can outspend a politically connected “Washington insider” by a 3 to 1 margin. 

But Carleene Dobson is right; this race is ultimately about “Alabama roots and values.”

Ultimately, every election is a chance to create two different Americas. The fight for Alabama’s 2nd District is no different. The race is the culmination of white history, democratic politics and Black Americans’ ongoing fight to make America great for the first time. Now that a map has given Alabama’s Black voters a semblance of political power, they get to decide which roots and values they want their children, communities and our country to inherit. 

Will they choose privilege or progress? Equality or the status quo? The options are literally Black and white. 

Tough choices. 

Michael Harriot is an economist, cultural critic and championship-level Spades player. His New York Times bestseller Black AF History: The Unwhitewashed Story of America is available everywhere books are sold.