Bloody Lowndes

Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama's Black Belt

Hasan Kwame Jeffries

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780814743065
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia de Norteamérica

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 rural 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 remained too scared even to try to register. Their fear stemmed from the county's long, bloody history of whites retaliating against blacks who strove to exert the freedom granted to them after the Civil War.

Amid this environment of intimidation and disempowerment, African Americans in Lowndes County viewed the LCFO as the best vehicle for concrete change. Their radical experiment in democratic politics inspired black people throughout the country, from SNCC organizer Stokely Carmichael who used the Lowndes County program as the blueprint for Black Power, to California-based activists Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton, who adopted the LCFO panther as the namesake for their new, grassroots organization: the Black Panther Party for Self Defense. This party and its adopted symbol went on to become the national organization of black militancy in the 1960s and 1970s, yet long-obscured is the crucial role that Lowndes County“historically a bastion of white supremacy”played in spurring black activists nationwide to fight for civil and human rights in new and more radical ways.

Drawing on an impressive array of sources ranging from government documents to personal interviews with Lowndes County residents and SNCC activists, Hasan Kwame Jeffries tells, for the first time, the remarkable full story of the Lowndes County freedom struggle and its contribution to the larger civil rights movement. Bridging the gaping hole in the literature between civil rights organizing and Black Power politics, Bloody Lowndes offers a new paradigm for understanding the civil rights movement.

1

Conditions Unfavorable to the Rise of the Negro
The Pursuit of Freedom Rights before the Civil Rights Era

A stranger wearing a blue coat reminiscent of Union Army attire passed through southeastern Lowndes County in April 1882 heralding news that African Americans wanted to hear since the day of jubilee. According to the visitor, the federal government planned to implement a bold plan for redistributing plantation land. In two weeks, someone from Washington would arrive by rail and divide among them the land they had worked as slaves and sharecroppers. Word of the announcement spread rapidly throughout that corner of the county. Some people, though, doubted the veracity of the rumor because they lacked faith in the mysterious messenger. Others questioned what they heard because they distrusted a government that had turned a blind eye and a deaf ear toward their plight. Nonetheless, nearly two hundred black men and women laid down their hoes and camped out at the Letohatchee railroad station on the day that the federal agent was due to arrive. When the regularly scheduled locomotive pulled into the station without the emissary, disappointment crept over the crowd, but despair gave way to hope when word spread that the envoy would arrive the following week. Apparently, there had been some confusion regarding his itinerary. Encouraged, the crowd dispersed, but when they reassembled one week later, the official once again failed to show.¹

Local whites mocked the behavior of their black workers. “They flocked to the station, and there they stood on the tiptoe of expectancy all the live long day,” began an editorial entitled “Negro Credulity” that appeared in the Hayneville Examiner, the county weekly. Whites also scoffed at the idea that those whom they blamed for causing the Civil War should receive some recompense for their suffering during slavery. According to the editorialist, “The great trains came thundering by, bearing the bread and the meat produced by the thrift of the Northern white man, and brought to feed the stupid and credulous beings who stood listlessly there awaiting the further bounty of those who had shed a river of blood and wasted billons of money in a struggle which had its origins in the black man.” The author added that African Americans were so naive that the stranger who had started the rumors “could return among these simple people, tell them some other foolish tale [and it] would pass as current as the story he has already told.” He also suggested a reason for their gullibility: “Nothing is more readily believed by the blacks than some tale which promises them a lift on top of buckra, and they will be the victims of idle rascals as long as they are taught by the foes of the South that a natural hatred should exist in their hearts against the whites.” Although scorn and disdain filled the editorial, the opinion piece hinted at a truth that whites completely misunderstood. The return of the interloper would have indeed prompted African Americans to flock once again to the Letohatchee station, but not because of a natural proclivity for foolishness. On the contrary, they would have returned because of their hunger to fulfill their dream of owning land and becoming economically independent.²

The eagerness that African Americans displayed for land redistribution derived from their experiences as slaves. At the moment of emancipation, they reflected on their enslavement and identified their freedom rights, or those civil and human rights that slaveholders denied them. These rights included those enumerated in the U.S. Constitution and in various state constitutions, such as freedom of speech, religion, and assembly, and the right to due process, keep and bear arms, and vote. They also included rights that everyone is born entitled to, such as the right to own property, choose employment, enjoy economic security, marry and start a family, move without restriction, and receive an education. African Americans recognized the importance of freedom rights during slavery. Their bondage made clear that freedom rights were not only essential to living meaningful lives, but also the key to power within society. The violence of slavery, however, circumscribed their efforts to secure these rights. Only after emancipation were they able to claim them publicly. Unencumbered by the shackles of the Peculiar Institution, they insisted on a decent standard of living, pushed for social autonomy, pursued basic literacy, fought for political power, and sought protection from white violence. Even after the euphoria surrounding the jubilee subsided, their primary focus remained the guarantee of freedom rights.

The racial animus expressed by the editorialist reflected the persistence of a slaveholder mentality among Lowndes County whites. Although whites realized that slavery was dead, they felt no compulsion to abandon their sense of entitlement to black labor or obligation to relinquish their belief in using violence to control black workers. Their refusal to adjust their antebellum mind-set stemmed from their deeply rooted belief in white supremacy. Their antebellum way of thinking also helped shape the environment in which African Americans lived, labored, and strived for equality by dictating the terms of white interaction across the color line.³

No one understood the context in which the local fight for freedom rights occurred better than Atlanta University professor W. E. B. Du Bois, who lived in Lowndes County in 1906 while collecting data on local life for a book project commissioned by the U.S. Department of Labor.⁴ Drawing on this field research, the thirty-eight-year-old scholar offered a startling appraisal of the fortunes of local people at the dawn of the new century. “I know something of the South from ten years’ residence and study,” he said, “and outside of some sections of the Mississippi and Red River valley, I do not think it would be easy to find a place where conditions were on the whole more unfavorable to the rise of the Negro.”⁵

Du Bois’s bleak assessment reflected the trying conditions in Lowndes County. Nearly fifty years after emancipation, African Americans had made very few gains beyond those achieved during the first few years of freedom. At the time of Du Bois’s visit, hardly any African Americans attended school for more than a few weeks a year, most lived in abject poverty, and practically none participated in electoral politics. In addition, every man, woman, and child was a potential target of racial violence. “The white element was lawless,” explained Du Bois, “and up until recent times the body of a dead Negro did not even call for an arrest.”⁶

The dreadful conditions that Du Bois encountered stretched backward to emancipation and forward beyond the New Deal. Thus, the obstacles that African Americans sought to overcome during the civil rights era were neither new nor short-lived. These harsh restrictions, however, failed to extinguish the desire of African Americans to live autonomous lives. Although the limitations that whites imposed on African Americans influenced the timing, tactics, and goals of the Lowndes movement, they were not solely responsible for shaping its contours. Equally important was the unique understanding of freedom that African Americans developed during slavery, which served as the basis of their post-emancipation political agenda.

• • •

After the Civil War, Lowndes County whites moved quickly to reestablish the exploitative labor arrangements that undergirded slavery. Very often, they set aside the annual labor contracts that the federal government, in the interest of fair play, insisted they sign. Planter William Bonnell Hall, for example, refused to pay former slaves Frank, Pfeaster, Abner, Ann, and Cicily at the end of 1865, as agreed to in contracts he signed earlier that year.⁷ Whites also withheld significant portions of freedmen’s monthly wages until the end of the year, a practice that forced their workers to stay put until after the harvest. In addition, they regularly charged workers for goods they never purchased and for time lost that had been spent at work. So many and so much were these deductions that quite a few planters paid their workers no year-end wages at all, but instead handed them a bill of debt that tied them to their land for another year. Large landowners also colluded with one another to reduce the bargaining power of their workers. One group of Lowndes County planters agreed not to hire African Americans within ten miles of their homes, hoping to secure a monopoly over the labor of their former slaves. Others organized vigilance committees that, together with the county militia and the sheriff’s posse, terrorized African Americans traveling the roadways. These groups raided freedmen’s cabins under the auspices of searching for signs of plotting; after beating the occupants, they seized firearms and stole what little cash and coin they found. “The Negro does not know whether to leave the plantation and be harassed or remain on the plantation and be brutalized,” reported W. A. Poillon, a Freedman’s Bureau agent stationed nearby in Mobile.⁸

African Americans responded to white efforts to deny them their freedom rights by mobilizing their resources, but upon emancipation most African Americans possessed little more than their social ties. Instead of money, they had marriage; rather than land, they had laughter and love; and in lieu of military protection, they had family and community. The value of the capital they invested in one another, however, was priceless. Bonds among real and fictive kin enabled black families and communities to survive the horrors of slavery, including forced separation. In the aftermath of emancipation, social networks based on these personal relationships provided African Americans with an organizing infrastructure through which they mobilized their scarce resources.

Emancipated African Americans understood the value of personal relationships, especially the importance of marriages. Unions between men and women were the building blocks of families and communities, but during slavery, African American marriages existed on the precipice of perpetual dissolution because law and custom did not recognize their legitimacy. Therefore, freedmen and -women acted quickly to stabilize and strengthen the bonds between them by obtaining legal recognition of their marriages. Samuel Jackson and Louisa Emerson, for example, marched into the Lowndes County courthouse on August 12, 1865, and made their mark in the Book of Marriage Licenses for Colored Persons. Others scoured the countryside searching determinedly for forcibly separated spouses, siblings, children, and extended kin. At least a few left Lowndes County altogether in order to search for lost family. One mother walked as far as Charleston, South Carolina, in a quest to find her five sons.⁹ Unfortunately, separation in slavery too often proved permanent in freedom, leading the overwhelming majority of African Americans to take up residence on the plantations of their enslavement, where they had some kinfolk. By documenting their marriages for white people to see, reuniting with separated loved ones, and remaining on plantations, African Americans guaranteed that the social networks they forged in slavery would survive the turbulent transition to freedom. Their efforts were not enough, however, to preserve these networks indefinitely. For antebellum social networks to endure they had to be institutionalized, and soon after the Civil War they found a permanent home in black churches.

Before the war, Emma Howard had no choice but to attend Hope Hull Baptist Church with her master and mistress, William and Georgiana Shepherd. Sitting in the segregated section of Hope Hull’s sanctuary, she suffered through countless sermons counseling hard work and blind obedience to her master’s will. Her desire to worship as she pleased, however, led her to exploit opportunities to do so, and she was not alone.¹⁰ During the war, African Americans across the county began testing the limits of slaveholder authority in white churches. A local history of Bethany Baptist Church in Collirene records that “with the outbreak of hostilities the church began having trouble … especially with the colored members.” Yet, for several years after the end of the conflict, African Americans from various plantations continued to attend Bethany. As the majority of the church membership, they viewed Sunday service as an important socializing opportunity. The hypocrisy of the white clergy and white parishioners, however, eventually led them to break away. In 1871, they elected their own pastor and deacon board and conducted a grand baptismal service. Their assertiveness led Bethany’s white members to capitulate to complete racial separation, and in 1872 white parishioner Josiah Todd gave five acres to the black congregants, which they used to build Bethel Baptist Church. The founders of Bethel were among the last African Americans to gain religious autonomy. The minutes of a meeting that took place at the all-white Lowndesboro Presbyterian Church one year earlier testify to the completeness of the break with white churches. “Our relations with the colored people remain unchanged,” noted the official proceedings. “They have churches and preachers of their own, and seem determined to maintain a separate organization.”¹¹

Black churches were rarely more than simple, clapboard, one-room structures covered in thin coats of white paint with a dozen or so roughly hewn wooden benches masquerading as pews. But these unpretentious buildings quickly emerged as centerpieces of African American social life. Sunday services brought family and friends together for all-day fellowship. At Fort Deposit’s African Methodist Episcopal Zion (AMEZ) church, children’s Bible school met at 9:30 a.m., the morning worship convened at 11:00 a.m., the choir practiced at 1:00 p.m., the adult Bible school started at 4:00 p.m., and the evening worship began at 8:30 p.m. Annual revivals brought the members of different congregations together. On revival Sunday, African Americans gathered in the early afternoon and remained late into the night. As the preaching, singing, and shouting bellowed from the packed sanctuary, nonchurchgoers fellowshipped outside over cards and dice. Their numbers swelled throughout the day as churchgoing men slipped away from their families to join them. The sinners shared these Sundays with the saints. “They did as much preparing for the holiday as the deacons, the sisters or the preachers of the church,” recalled a local resident. “It was a chance for everybody to socialize.”¹²

Sabbath activities provided African Americans with the time and space to strengthen the personal relationships that resided at the heart of social networks. Church-based groups, however, were principally responsible for institutionalizing these networks. Mixed-sex benevolent associations, which provided vital community services, ranging from helping the sick and the shut-in to paying for funeral expenses, met at black churches. The Rising Star Benevolent Society, for instance, was a fixture at Fort Deposit’s AMEZ church. By obligating people to help one another, these groups made the custom of communalism a formal practice. Masonic orders also met at black churches. Scattered across the county were chapters of the Knights of Wise Men, the Knights of Pythias, and the Odd Fellows, and branches of their female counterparts, the Messiah Household of Ruth and the Knights of Tabor. These highly ritualized secret societies provided services similar to those offered by benevolent groups, but because they relied heavily on ceremony, they played an even greater role in institutionalizing social networks. Once established, these formal networks became a permanent presence in the black community.¹³

With an organizing infrastructure in place, African Americans marshaled the human and material resources essential to fighting effectively for freedom rights, but they did not pursue their goals with equal vigor. Instead, they carefully assessed the risks and rewards associated with each and focused on obtaining social autonomy, as evidenced by their wholesale withdrawal from white churches; controlling their own labor, as demonstrated by their refusal to work in gangs and the departure of women from the cotton fields; and acquiring the basics of reading and writing, as made clear by their high rates of attendance at the handful of grossly overcrowded and understaffed public schools.¹⁴ In the first few years of freedom, though, they did not expend muc...