Plot single state choropleth map in plotly/how to index geojson

Question

I am using geojson data and would like to plot a choropleth map of a single state. To do this, I would need to extract individual states from my geojson data. Here is the geojson data from plotly's Github I'm using (county level):

import plotly.express as px
import requests
import json

r = requests.get(
    'https://raw.githubusercontent.com/plotly/datasets/master/geojson-counties-fips.json'
    )
counties = json.loads(r.text)

I have written the following code to extract all counties of Alabama:

target_states = ["01"]
al = [i for i in counties["features"] if i["properties"]["STATE"] in target_states]

This, however, breaks the structure of the json (I think) as it is now just a list of the county dictionaries. When I tried to use al to plot a choropleth map it did not work (it compiled but showed a completely blank plot). However, when I tried to index this list with al[0], the individual county I indexed was plotted correctly. I figured I could add all of the dictionaries within the list together with the following:

new = {}
for i in al:
  new.update(i)

But it didn't work as I expected and only one county was in new. However, if I run the following, all county dictionaries are printed

for i in al:
  print(i)

So, what I am trying to do is simply plot one inividual state by indexing them through the geojson data. I can index all counties from one state and can correctly plot individual counties, but I am stuck on the final step of plotting all counties of an individual state together to make up a single state plot.