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

T H E A L A B A M A R E V I E W 68 sense of purpose in the summer of 1965 had all but evaporated by the spring of 1968” after a series of “abortive advances and disorganized retreats ” on civil rights (pp. 238, 243). Carter’s discussion includes attention to selected grassroots efforts and civil rights organizations, but it focuses mainly in the policy discussions within the executive branch as “policy drift threatened to become policy paralysis, and concrete White House initiatives dwindled” (p. 244). In addition to the papers of the administration, Carter depends, perhaps too heavily, on more than 130 oral histories, six of which he conducted. Although his narrative often suffers from a confusing tendency to depart from a chronological presentation, it provides an important supplement to the works of Steven F. Lawson, Susan Youngblood Ashmore, Gareth Davies, Hugh Davis Graham, and Taylor Branch. CHARLES W. EAGLES University of Mississippi Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama’s Black Belt. By Hasan Kwame Jeffries. New York: New York University Press. 2009. xviii, 348 pp. $39.00. ISBN 978-0-8147-4305-8. In 1906 the venerable scholar and civil rights activist W. E. B. Du Bois wrote about his experience living in Lowndes County and the brutally corrupt forces of racism there: “I do not think that it would be easy to find a place where conditions were on the whole more unfavorable to the rise of the Negro” (p. 9). Half a century later, during the modern Civil Rights movement, the moniker “bloody Lowndes” referred to the well-earned reputation for dramatic acts of violent repression of any effort to expand democracy in the county. Indeed, a hundred years after the abolition of slavery, local whites erected such a brutal system of white supremacy that no black person was registered to vote in a county that was over 70 percent black. Yet, as historian Hasan K. Jeffries reveals in this excellent study, local people mustered the temerity to organize for new freedoms in the face of great risk. Since the end of Reconstruction, terrorist attacks against blacks who protested injustice created a climate where resistance seemed futile. Local, state, and federal indifference ensured that white supremacy would not be effectively challenged in the county. By detailing the various methods used to maintain white domination, Jeffries illustrates that, in many respects, Lowndes was no different from most parts of the South J A N U A R Y 2 0 1 1 69 for most of its history. By the mid-1960s, however, as many areas achieved some erosion of white supremacy’s codified structure, virtually nothing had changed in Lowndes. Using impressive original sources, interviews, and government documents, Jeffries describes the development of local activism, which pulled resources and support from the Lowndes diaspora , extending as far away as Detroit. In 1965 locals formed the Lowndes County Christian Movement for Human Rights and organized for voter registration. With the help of seasoned activists from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) such as Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture), locals eventually created the Lowndes County Freedom Party (LCFP) to challenge the local Democratic Party, which was completely controlled by white supremacists. The LCFP’s adoption of the black panther as a party mascot in 1966 inspired black militants across the country. And while they had no formal connections with the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in Oakland, California, LCFP’s activists shared the belief in armed self-defense. The ambitious third-party “black panther” candidates did not win elections, despite a huge black majority. Voting fraud and intimidation continued after the Voting Rights Act of 1965 opened the way to greater black suffrage . Merging with the National Democratic Party of Alabama, the local black leadership, under veteran activist John Hulett, began a series of compromises that ultimately ended the viability of third-party politics by 1972, but not before blacks were elected into important offices in the county, including Hulett as sheriff. Blacks moved into the Democratic Party leadership as whites migrated into the Alabama Conservative Party and eventually into the Republican Party. Jeffries makes an important contribution to...