Black Alabamians, who make up 40% of the voting age population according to this article, have a reasonable shot of electing their preferred representative in at least 2 districts

Small correction, Black Alabamians make up ~27% of the voting age pop. The 40% number in the article was about district 2. Based on the rest of your post, I assume you mistyped.

Here is the new map proposed by the AL legislature.

Thank you! Yeah, that is about what I thought it would be. District 7 goes from ~56% Black down to 51,32%. District 2 grows to ~40% Black, and I don’t see how it could grow higher without some very weird shapes. I was surprised that District 6 (Birmingham) didn’t become majority Black, but it seems that the cluster there is still taken by a tendril from CD-7.

Because of how racially polarized voting is in Alabama, the panel said in each of those two districts, Black Alabamians will need to make up the majority of the voting-age population or "something quite close to it."

That’s quite the conundrum. With party-lines being drawn so close to the racial divide, and with the USA’s horrible two-party system, a normal map would just lead to a tyranny of the majority, which is one of the worst outcome of democratic elections.

Changing the districts to more proportionally represent the population’s opinion (which in this case happens to coincide closely with ethnicity) sounds like a band-aid solution. It doesn’t fix the underlying problem, it seems obviously wrong on the surface of it, works really awkwardly, but it’s the best currently available method towards achieving equally in the spirit of democracy.

Thank you for the discussion/explanations. I quite enjoyed it and feel much more informed now.