Lowndes County and the Road to Black Power

(fabric rustling)

- Those in power, don't abdicate early easily.

It's such a

Such a sort of, satisfying thing, I guess,

to be in power.

Everybody waiting for the great person

to tell you what to do.

And they usually, the great persons usually told you to do.

If you looked around, they weren't there

when the showdown came.

- Go home or go to your church,

this march will not continue.

What I do,

- See that they disperse.

- is supposed to speak louder than what I say.

(screaming)

(screaming)

Last Sunday,

a group of negro Americans in Selma, Alabama

attempted peacefully to protest the denial of the

most basic political right of all.

The right to vote.

- People have to have faith in themselves

and they can only gain that faith by being given the

opportunity to grow.

And when people value what they can do,

they don't have to look around,

find a great leader

to do it for them.

Carrying nap sacks,

bed rolls, and air mattresses,

they stream onto Highway 80, walking briskly.

Their day's journey, 17 and a half miles.

Putting them halfway from Selma to Montgomery.

The marchers then passed from Dallas County

into Lowndes County,

where until this month

not a single negro was registered to vote.

- You always hear Selma to Montgomery.

The most mileage of the march from Selma to Montgomery,

took place in Lowndes County.

That dash in your life is,

when you were born and when you die,

but the dash will make the difference.

Lowndes County,

was one of the poorest counties in the country,

and we was right next door to Montgomery

where the capital city sits.

So it was kind of rough growing up and we didn't have

running water in our homes.

First shower that I took was in,

at Havre High School in the gym.

This was in the early sixties.

During that time

we were looking for better education.

We didn't even have library,

didn't have a lunch room,

didn't go to school half the year.

Cause we had to work at the age 3, 4, and 5.

It was cotton fields.

- My parents were sharecroppers.

We had five acres of cotton that we had to pick.

And once we finished ours, then

we had to help the land owners get their

cotton out of the field.

- Sharecropping replaced slavery.

It was another type of caste system where in order to live

on the property, one had to work the land.

And there was usually a store that was owned by the

plantation owner and whatever goods that they might need

were on credit.

- And some years, you would have a bumper crop.

A bumper crop is when you have extra,

you know just grow, grow, grow,

and you do real good,

but you never had enough

to get yourself so you could be free of debt.

- This county was around 80% Black,

but there was no Black police officers, no nothing.

The reason we're not doing anything

'cause we don't have any power.

People are scared, people lost their jobs.

People lost their family hood,

because they wanted to go and register to vote.

- I don't remember ever talking about race

growing up.

It felt like sort of the safest possible world a young child

could grow up in.

- It was a very peaceful, almost idyllic place.

The only Black people that I knew were the ones who worked

for us in our family. And we loved them.

When I was 17,

I had an experience that

kind of pulled the curtain back for me.

A girlfriend and I were riding around on country roads.

Like, that's what we did for entertainment.

I mean, there wasn't any entertainment.

There was a young Black man who tried to,

did like that,

tried to wave us down.

I didn't think anything about it,

but my friend got really upset,

thinking he was trying to stop us.

She wanted to go tell somebody about it and

he was killed that night.

I'd heard that he

lived on the land that some white people owned

and that often they would give him a ride

if he waved them down,

and that we had a car that looked like theirs.

- You know, I was a kid,

but I knew that there was a reputation of violence.

In my home, we had guns in every corner.

My father taught all of my brothers how to shoot.

And that was common in every home in Lowndes County.

- A lot of Black people came up missing.

That's why it was called Bloody Lowndes.

- Lowndes County was 80% African American.

Then at the start of 1965, had zero registered Black voters.

And that's not hyperbole, right?

I'm not saying that there were a couple

and we're just saying zero.

There were no Black people

registered to vote in Lowndes County, Alabama

out of some 5,122 who were actually eligible to vote.

- People were followed.

They would write down people's license plates.

People could lose their jobs.

Your car loan might come due in its entirety, for example,

if you were found to be trying to

register African Americans to vote.

- John Hulett is native of Lowndes County, Alabama.

After high school, graduates from Lowndes County

Training School, leaves Lowndes County, Alabama,

and heads to Birmingham.

There's a very active NAACP chapter

in Birmingham, Alabama

and John Hulett joins, becomes a part of it.

And then in the 1950s, he returns to Lowndes County.

Not because he was driven by a desire

to transform Lowndes County,

but because he had some family issues to take care of,

but he also comes back as a registered voter.

And when he comes back and he's sort of surveying the land

and taking a sense of the pulse of the community, he's like,

"You know what? We need to be doing some stuff down here too."

March 1, 1965, John Hulett, his wife,

a group of 39 others that he had been talking to decide that,

"We're gonna go down to the county courthouse and see if we

can't get registered to vote."

He goes right into the registrar's office, Carl Golson,

big old former football player, car dealer.

You know, he's one of the county registrars.

And he sees Hulett and these three other Black man

barge in, "Don't you know how to knock?"

And Hulett's like, "I didn't come here to knock,

I came here to register to vote."

I mean, that's throwing down the gauntlet.

You know, Golson can't do anything, but throw him out.

and he also says,

"If y'all are serious, y'all wanna register,

y'all wanna do this? Then leave all your names.

We wanna know who's showing up,

which of y'all have the gall to challenge white power."

They were literally putting their lives on the line.

Every single one of those folk who showed up,

they put their names on a sheet of paper and they brought it

back and they gave it to Golson and said, this is who we are.

And then two weeks later,

a slightly larger group show up again, saying,

"Look, we're back, right?

You have our names. You sent people to visit us.

We lost some loans. We lost some business, but we're back."

And then after that second meeting,

they realize, "If we're gonna do this,

then we need to be organized."

And so in late March they formed

the Lowndes County Christian Movement for Human Rights.

- We were Lowndes County Christians,

and we wanted human rights.

That's all we wanted.

27 local people came.

We met there every Sunday night and every Wednesday night.

And I became the secretary,

and as fast as they could say it, I could put it down,

and they could call it back, say,

"Ain't never seen, nobody could do that like you."

- John Hulett was the President.

The first meeting was held