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Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama's Black Belt Kindle Edition

5.0 5.0 out of 5 stars 8 ratings

Bloody Lowndes is the true story of the people of rural Lowndes County, Alabama, who organized a radical experiment in democratic politics in 1966.

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 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 feared violent retaliation from whites if they dared register.
 
Amid this intimidating environment, the LCFO’s experiment in democratic politics inspired black people throughout the country to fight for civil and human rights in new and more radical ways, from SNCC organizer Stokely Carmichael, who used the county’s program as the blueprint for Black Power, to California activists Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton, who adopted the panther as the namesake for their new, grassroots organization: the Black Panther Party for Self Defense, which became the national organization of black militancy in the 1960s and 1970s.
 
Drawing on an impressive array of sources ranging from government documents to personal interviews with Lowndes County residents and SNCC activists, history professor Hasan Kwame Jeffries reveals the remarkable full story of the Lowndes County freedom struggle and its contribution to the larger civil rights movement.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Jeffriess Bloody Lowndes is an important contribution to the literature of the African American freedom struggle. Jeffries reveals the deep historical roots of black struggles against racial and economic oppression in the Black Belt. He makes clear that the civil rights reforms of the 1960s were insufficient responses to the & freedom politics that spawned the Lowndes County Freedom Organizationthe first Black Panther Party." -- Clayborne Carson,author of In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s

"Jeffries' book sets a new standard for the political history of African Americans in the rural South by refocusing on the mechanics of power taken, used, lost, and retaken between blacks and whites, rather than the larger fabric of social and cultural politics. Given the stark and still unrelieved inequalities of the black belt, thisis a salutary stance." -- Van Gosse ―
Journal of Southern History

"Excellent scholarship, important history, and an invaluable contribution to understanding current and future conversations on race and politics in a dynamically changing political environment." -- Charles V. Hamilton,co-author of Black Power: The Politics of Liberation

"Bloody Lowndes is an important book. The authors careful analysis of the 1966 election is both readable and quite useful to understanding the importance of the moment." ―
EverythingAlabama.com

"Hasan Kwame Jeffries Bloody Lowndesprovides a nuanced portrait of the marriage between federal policy initiatives and local activism in the battle to dismantle Jim Crow, focusing on the months from March 1965 through November 1966 when SNCC workers, led by Stokely Carmichael, were active in Lowndes County, Alabama." ―
American Studies

"An extensively researched, well-written, and extremely important book that will make a tremendous contribution to the historiography of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements." -- Emilye Crosby,author of A Little Taste of Freedom: The Black Freedom Struggle in Claiborne County, Mississippi

"Jeffries has written the book historians of the black freedom movement have been waiting for. His beautifully written account rescues Lowndes County from its role as merely a backdrop to & Black Power, to being one of the key battlegrounds for democracy in the United States. Here are local people whose local struggles have contributed mightily to the kind of politics we desperately need in the Obama agethe politics of ‘freedom democracy,’ a politics born in Reconstruction, rooted in social justice and human rights, and honed in the Alabama cotton belt." -- Robin D. G. Kelley,author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination

"Jeffries is at the top of a very short list of ‘young lions’ paving the way for a new interpretation of the history of the Civil Rights-Black Power movement. His work on the legendary Lowndes County Freedom Organization is outstanding in terms of the breadth and carefulness of research, depth and clarity of conceptualization, organization and presentation of material, and the originality and the wealth of the results." -- Komozi Woodard,author of A Nation Within a Nation: Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and Black Power Politics

"Without succumbing to the temptation to paint the struggle for black equality in broad strokes, Jeffries isolates the locus of the issues that framed the movement and uses these to explain how, through a variety of social networks, the movement spread regionally and ultimately nationally... is an exceptional piece of scholarship. Jeffries has produced an important work that will unquestionably reshape the debate over the origins and legacy of the civil rights and black power movements for years to come." ―
Journal of American History

"Jeffries examines the topic more thoroughly and in greater depth than any previous study, pressing the narrative back to Reconstruction but focusing most of his narrative and analysis on the mid-1960s and 1970s. The research is wide-ranging and in great depth, both in archival and oral history sources. . .this book is a needed and important addition to the historiography of the Civil Rights Movement." ―
CHOICE

About the Author

Hasan Kwame Jeffries is Associate Professor of History at The Ohio State University, where he holds a joint appointment at the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity.

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B010THGA5M
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ NYU Press (July 1, 2009)
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ July 1, 2009
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 2836 KB
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 369 pages
  • Customer Reviews:
    5.0 5.0 out of 5 stars 8 ratings

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Hasan Kwame Jeffries
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5 out of 5 stars
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Top reviews from the United States

  • Reviewed in the United States on December 15, 2020
    Brings to light the enormous courage of the everyday people in Lowndes county and the struggle they went through and continue to go through to fight for civil rights

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