Lowndes County is in the central part of the U.S. state of Alabama. As of the 2020 census, the county's population was 10,311. Its county seat is Hayneville. The county is named in honor of William Lowndes, a member of the United States Congress from South Carolina.
Lowndes County is part of the Montgomery, Alabama Metropolitan Statistical Area. Historically it has been considered part of the Black Belt, known for its fertile soil, cotton plantations, and a high number of African American workers, enslaved and later freed.
History
Lowndes County was formed from Montgomery, Dallas and Butler counties, by an act of the Alabama General Assembly on January 20, 1830. The county is named for South Carolina statesman William Lowndes. It is part of the Black Belt, where cotton plantations were developed in the antebellum years and agriculture continued as a dominant part of the economy into the 20th century.
During the Reconstruction era, Black people were elected to local and state offices. White Democrats regained power and control of the state legislature in 1874 and drove the remaining office holders out. They adopted the 1875 Constitution of Alabama and another in 1901 that disenfranchised most blacks and many poor whites. Requirements were added for payment of a cumulative poll tax before registering to vote, difficult for poor people to manage who often had no cash on hand; and literacy tests (with a provision for a grandfather clause to exempt illiterate white voters from being excluded.) The number of black voters on the rolls fell dramatically in the next few years, as did the number of poor white voters.
From the end of the 19th through the early decades of the 20th centuries, organized white violence increased against blacks, with 16 lynchings recorded in the county, the fourth-highest total in the state, which historically is among those in the South with the highest per capita rate of lynchings. Most victims were black men, subjected to white extra-legal efforts to maintain white supremacy by racial terrorism. Seven of these murders were committed in Letohatchee, an unincorporated community south of Montgomery; five in 1900 and two in 1917. In 1900 mobs killed a black man accused of killing a white man. When local black resident Jim Cross objected, he was killed, too, at his house, followed by his wife, son and daughter. In 1917 two black brothers were killed by a white mob for alleged "insolence" to a white farmer on the road. On July 31, 2016, a historical marker was erected at Letohatchee by the Equal Justice Initiative in coordination with the city to commemorate the people who had suffered these extrajudicial executions. the rusty buckle of Alabama's Black Belt, because of the high rate of white violence against blacks to maintain segregation. In 1965, a century after the American Civil War and decades after whites had disenfranchised blacks via the 1901 state constitution, they maintained white supremacy by intimidation and violence, suppressing black voting.
County population had fallen by more than half from its 1900 high, as both blacks and whites moved to urban areas. Blacks still outnumbered whites by a 4-to-1 ratio. Eighty-six white families owned 90 percent of the land in the county and controlled the government, as whites had since 1901. With an economy based on agriculture, black residents worked mostly in low-level rural jobs. In the civil rights era, not one black resident was registered to vote before March 1, 1965.
When in 1956 NAACP was outlawed in Alabama, local activist John Hulett joined Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights, a new organization founded by Fred Shuttlesworth. Following passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, he joined the voter-registration drive of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), becoming with John C. Larson, a preacher, the first African-Americans on the county's electoral rolls in more than six decades.
With the registration drive "swarmed" by young people, SNCC chairman Stokely Carmichael took the initiative to help form the Lowndes County Freedom Organization (LCFO), with Hulett, its first chair. The first independent black political party in the county since Reconstruction, the LCFO took as its symbol a rampant black panther, representing black "strength and dignity", which contrasted with the white rooster of the segregationist Alabama Democratic Party. (A year later, the example was followed by Bobby Seale and Huey Newton in framing the nationwide the Black Panther Party for Self Defense). The goal was to get enough black people to vote, and to stand as candidates for county office, so that they might be fully represented in local government and redirect services to black residents, 80 percent of whom lived below the poverty line.
The police continued to arrest protesters in the summer of 1965. A group of protesters were released from jail in the county seat of Hayneville on August 20, 1965. As four of them approached a small store, Thomas Coleman, an unpaid special deputy, ordered them away. When he aimed his shotgun at one of the young black women (Ruby Sales), Jonathan Myrick Daniels pushed her down and was shot, which immediately killed him. Coleman also shot Father Richard Morrisroe, a Catholic priest, in the back, then stopped. He was indicted for the murder of Daniels; and an all-white jury quickly acquitted him after his claim of self-defense, although both men were unarmed. Coleman had been appointed as special deputy by the county sheriff.
On May 3, 1966, over 900 registered black voters cast their ballots at the county seat in Hayneville as independent participants in the primary, with some driving over 25 miles to do so. One notable strategy the LCFO encouraged among black voters was to help other black voters if they needed assistance as a precaution against the fact that "the Lowndes County Freedom Organization knew that once a local white person got behind the curtain with a black person, that vote would be lost" (p. 111).
Whites refused to serve known LCFO members in stores and restaurants. Several small riots broke out over the issue. The LCFO pushed forward and continued to organize and register voters. But historians believe that black sharecroppers refrained from voting, submitting to the severe pressure put on them by the local white plantation owners, who employed most of them. After the LCFO folded into the statewide Democratic Party in 1970, African Americans have supported candidates who have won election to local offices.
The LCFO continued to fight for wider political participation. Their goal of democratic, community control of politics spread into the wider civil rights movement. After merging with the state Democratic Party in 1970, LCFO candidates began winning public offices, Hulett becoming the first black sheriff in the county to be elected since Reconstruction.
Today an Interpretive Center in the county, maintained by the National Park Service, memorializes the Tent City and LCFO efforts in political organizing.
The Alabama Department of Public Health said that it would continue working on remedial actions envisaged by the 2023 settlement "until appropriated funding expires”. The county is located in the Gulf Coastal Plain region of the state.
Major highways
- 20px Interstate 65
- 20px U.S. Highway 31
- 20px U.S. Highway 80
- 20px State Route 21
- 20px State Route 97
- 20px State Route 185
- 20px State Route 263
Adjacent counties
- Autauga County (north)
- Montgomery County (east)
- Crenshaw County (southeast)
- Butler County (south)
- Wilcox County (southwest)
- Dallas County (west)
National protected area
- Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail (part)