Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama's Black Belt

Bloody Lowndes is the true story of the people of rural Lowndes County, Alabama, who organized a radical experiment in democratic politics in 1966.

Winner of the 2010 Clinton Jackson Coley Award for the Best Book on local history from the Alabama Historical Association Early in 1966, African Americans in Lowndes County, Alabama, aided by activists from the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), established an all-black, independent political party called the Lowndes County Freedom Organization (LCFO). The group, whose ballot symbol was a snarling black panther, was formed in part to protest the barriers to black enfranchisement that had for decades kept every single African American of voting age off the county’s registration books. Even after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, most African Americans in this overwhelmingly black county feared violent retaliation from whites if they dared register. Amid this intimidating environment, the LCFO’s experiment in democratic politics inspired black people throughout the country to fight for civil and human rights in new and more radical ways, from SNCC organizer Stokely Carmichael, who used the county’s program as the blueprint for Black Power, to California activists Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton, who adopted the panther as the namesake for their new, grassroots organization: the Black Panther Party for Self Defense, which became the national organization of black militancy in the 1960s and 1970s. Drawing on an impressive array of sources ranging from government documents to personal interviews with Lowndes County residents and SNCC activists, history professor Hasan Kwame Jeffries reveals the remarkable full story of the Lowndes County freedom struggle and its contribution to the larger civil rights movement.

© 2023 NYU Press (E-bog): 9780814743065

Release date

E-bog: 21. november 2023