When I became aware of the Black Panther Party in the late 1960s, I heard that the Party adopted the black panther symbol from another organization. Over the years I picked up more pieces of the story — Stokely Carmichael’s name came up, as did the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). But I didn’t try to put the pieces together. Of course, those pieces were part of one of the most important struggles of the civil rights movement, one which attracted national attention at the time, but which today is almost unknown.
Peacock is streaming a documentary about the struggle: “Lowndes County and the Road to Black Power.” It is a stirring account, told in the first person by the people who were there.
In Lowndes County, Alabama in 1965, Black people were 80% of the population, but not one Black person was registered to vote. On March 1, 1965, John Hulett gathered together a few dozen people and marched into the county registrar’s office demanding to register. That was the beginning of the struggle for the right to vote, which took more than five years to come to fruition.
Residents asked the Southern Christian Leadership Council for help but, the interviewees said, the SCLC decided not to establish a presence in the county. However, SNCC leaders, including Stokely Carmichael, came in shortly thereafter and asked if they could help. SNCC brought with them their experience of organizing in Mississippi in 1964 for Freedom Summer and the establishment of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. Fannie Lou Hamer was the outspoken leader of that struggle.
SNCC organizers were trained by the extraordinary Ella Mae Baker, who shunned the limelight of the civil rights movement but who was critical to grassroots organizing efforts in many places. She explained her organizing philosophy in the film:
Everybody [is] waiting for the great person to tell you what to do. And they usually, the great person usually told you what to do. If you looked around, they weren’t there when the showdown came. 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 and find a great leader to do it for them.
This was dangerous work. The county was known as “Bloody Lowndes.” Carmichael explains:
Non-violence as a tactic in a public demonstration is at this point effective. But if you’re an organizer, you’re talking about being on the road to 3, 4, 5 o’clock in the morning, sneaking on a plantation with the Ku Klux Klan laying in wait for you. The tactical name of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee stayed there. But most organizers in the deep South who worked for SNCC were carrying guns. And these contradictions were clear.
Black residents who tried to register were evicted from shacks on white-owned land, so residents set up a tent encampment for their homeless neighbors. Whites “used the tent city for target practice,” said one historian, so Black people organized an armed defense.
After the experience at the 1964 Democratic Convention, where the Democratic Party refused to seat the MFDP, organizers in Lowndes County came to realize that they could form a political organization independent of the Republican and Democratic parties to contest elections. That led to the formation of the Lowndes County Freedom Organization.
Because the literacy rate in the county was so low, political organizations used symbols so that voters would recognize whom to vote for. The white Democratic Party symbol was a white rooster and the slogan “White supremacy for the right.” The LCFO decided on a black panther. “It frightened the devil out of a lot of white people,” said Lillian McGill, a Lowndes resident, “and some Black ones too, I suppose.”
SNCC organizer Courtland Cox said,
All of the establishment, the white establishment, the newspapers, the Washington Post, The New York Times, were saying that what we were doing in Lowndes County was reverse racism. That our desire to have Black people, not only vote, but being in control, was something they saw as a fundamental threat. We saw it as a fundamental necessity.
From the white liberal point of view, giving Black people the right to vote was supposed to be the end of the struggle; then Black people should use their vote to elect white Democrats. Demanding that the 80% Black majority should have political power — Black Power — was anti-white discrimination. White people are entitled to political power; Black people are entitled to vote for them.
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The candidates of the LCFO lost in 1966. The white power structure pulled every trick in the book — absentee balloting, dead-people voting, ballot trashing, voter intimidation.
Things didn’t change much for Black people in Lowndes County, even when John Hulett and other Black leaders were elected in the 1970s.
The experience of Black people in Lowndes County was repeated around the country: the number of Black elected officials nationally increased from 1,469 in 1970, to 4,890 in 1980, to 7,335 in 1990, to 9,001 in 2000. This period coincided with the imposition of neoliberal deindustrialization and disinvestment policies that decimated the economies of major urban areas, especially those with large Black communities. Black mayors in Chicago, Atlanta, Cleveland, and other cities, who were elected on waves of excitement and hope, inherited rising unemployment, homelessness, and police brutality, problems that could not be solved city by city.
In the face of rising poverty and resistance, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan blamed single Black mothers, President Ronald Reagan blamed “welfare queens,” President Richard Nixon blamed drugs, President George H.W. Bush blamed “Willie Horton,” and Hillary and President Bill Clinton blamed “superpredators” and Sista Soulja.
President Richard Nixon promoted “Black capitalism” as a solution. The growing, if limited, access to political and economic power created a Black elite that became increasingly distant from and antagonistic to demands for fundamental change. This elite was at the forefront of Bill Clinton’s draconian “crime policy,” which sparked a staggering rise in mass incarceration of Black people, other people of color, and poor people.
The film ends with cautionary words by Ruby Sales, one of the leaders of Lowndes County SNCC:
We had not asked the fundamental question: what does it mean to be free? We thought that freedom meant the right to live like white people and we did not seriously consider — what did it mean to integrate into a burning house?
But the struggle lives on in the people who fought it, in their children, and in the people touched by those difficult years.
The fundamental problem, not much stated in the article, is that local organizing, like in Lowndes County, and communism organizing, in places like Newark and the Lower East Side of New York, FAILED.