Remembrance Coalition
History Revealed in “Bloody Lowndes”
Lowndes County earned the epithet “Bloody Lowndes” for its long history of extreme racial terror violence.
From Reconstruction to the 1950s, 16 lynchings were recorded here, including Elmore Bolling’s. (Though, since such killings often went unreported, it is likely we will never know just how many people were lynched in Lowndes County during the Jim Crow era.)
We formed the Lowndes County Remembrance Coalition in 2019 with the Lowndes County Friends of the Civil Rights Movement to address the county's history of violent white supremacy and foster meaningful dialogue about race and justice. Together, we erected two new markers recognizing racial terror victims and collected soil at lynching sites for the Equal Justice Initiative memorial.
“It is important to reflect on the injustice to victims of racial terror throughout Lowndes County history so we can ensure that justice is served in the future.”
— Judge Adrian Johnson
District Court, Lowndes County
Community Remembrance Coalition member
The Equal Justice Initiative calls the work to acknowledge lynchings “a necessary conversation to confront the injustice, inequality, anguish, and suffering that racial terror and violence created.”
We invite you to honor these victims and advance truth-telling by visiting the historic markers recognizing Lowndes County’s long history of racial terror violence.
Elmore Bolling: “Too Successful to be a Negro”
Location: U.S. 80 at milepost 114
Elmore Bolling started with a mule and wagon and through ingenuity and hard work became a well-to-do farmer, an entrepreneur with a fleet of trucks and a general store, and a philanthropist. He assisted Black people in Lowndes County to become self-sufficient and his trucking business earned respect from white business owners who hired him for hauling jobs, including transporting livestock long-distance and to the stockyard.
In 1947, when Elmore was 39 years old, a group of white people, enraged by Elmore’s success, conspired together and lynched him with six pistol bullets in his front and a shotgun charge in his back. His family, working at his nearby general store, heard the shots and ran to find him dead in a ditch by the side of Highway 80—a road Elmore had helped to build as a young man.
Though multiple people were eyewitnesses to the crime, there was no criminal investigation at the time, no one was indicted, and justice was never served for Mr. Bolling’s lynching.
Photo by Mark Hilton, HMdb.org
The Courthouse Lynching of Theo Calloway
Location: Hayneville Courthouse
In 1888, Theo Calloway was accused of killing a white man. Calloway insisted he acted in self-defense, but before he could get a fair trial, the local sheriff aided a white mob to abduct Calloway from jail hours before he was scheduled to appear in court.
They hanged him from a chinaberry tree on the courthouse lawn, and riddled his body with bullets.
Photo by Mark Hilton, HMdb.org
Lynching in America / Lynching in Letohatchee
Location: Rehobeth Missionary Church Cemetery, West Hickory Grove Road
Lynching in America
Inscription: Thousands of Black people were the victims of lynching and racial violence in the United States between 1877 and 1950. The lynching of African Americans during this era was a form of racial terrorism intended to intimidate black people and enforce racial hierarchy and segregation. White mobs were usually permitted to engage in racial terror and brutal violence with impunity.
Many of the names of lynching victims were not recorded and will never be known, but over 300 documented lynchings took place in Alabama alone. Lowndes County had fourteen documented lynchings – among the ten highest of all counties in the state.
Lynching in Letohatchee
In early 1900, a white mob lynched a black man in Letohatchee, Alabama, without investigation or trial, after he was accused of killing a white man.
After the lynching, a local black man named Jim Cross condemned the violence. On March 3, 1900, a mob of white men shot and killed Jim Cross in the doorway of his Letohatchee home, then entered and killed Mr. Cross’s wife, son, and daughter. No one was ever arrested for these lynchings.
Years later, on July 24, 1917, William Powell and his brother, whose first name was reported as Samuel or Jesse, were also lynched in Letohatchee, seized by a mob of 100 white men, and hung from a tree along the road between Letohatchee and Hayneville. No one was punished.
These seven people lynched in Letohatchee, Alabama, were victims of racial terrorism that aimed to restore white supremacy while denying black people the rights of citizenship and the protection of the law.
Photos by Mark Hilton, HMdb.org
Enslavement & Racial Terror / Lynching Targeting Black Sharecroppers
Location: Hopewell Church at the intersection of Snow Hill Drive & Alabama Route 21, Ft. Deposit
Enslavement & Racial Terror
Inscription: The enslavement of black people in the United States was a brutal, dehumanizing system that lasted more than 200 years. Between 1819 and 1860, Alabama's enslaved population grew from 40,000 to 435,000. According to the U.S. Census, 2 out of 3 of Lowndes County's more than 27,000 residents were enslaved black people in 1860. The county had the fifth largest enslaved population in Alabama, and the 12th largest nationwide.
Lynching Targeting Black Sharecroppers
Inscription: In Summer 1935, hundreds of black sharecroppers in Lowndes County, Alabama staged a strike to protest poor pay and mistreatment. In response, white mobs and local law enforcement arrested and attacked black leaders in a terror campaign, lynching at least three black men within two weeks to preserve white supremacy and warn the black community not to dare demand equality.
Their names were Ed Bracy, Jim Press Meriweather, and Rev. G. Smith Watkins, founders of the Lowndes County Sharecroppers Union.
Photos by Mark Hilton, HMdb.org
Viola Liuzzo Monument
Location: U.S. 80 at milepost 111
White American civil rights activist Viola Liuzzo, a young mother of five from Detroit, heeded the call from Martin Luther King Jr. and traveled to Selma, Alabama in 1965. She helped with the logistical coordination of the Selma to Montgomery March.
Just hours after the march, while driving back to Selma after shuttling fellow activists to the Montgomery airport, she was killed by shots fired from a pursuing car containing Ku Klux Klan members Collie Wilkins, William Eaton, Eugene Thomas, and Gary Thomas Rowe, an undercover FBI informant. The KKK members were acquitted in the Alabama courts, despite eyewitness testimony and ballistics evidence. But a federal grand jury found them guilty of violating Viola Liuzzo’s civil rights and sentenced them to ten years in prison.
Jonathan M. Daniels Monument
Location: Hayneville Courthouse
In August 1965, Jonathan Daniels, a 26-year-old white Episcopal seminary student from New Hampshire, and 22 others were arrested for participating in a voter rights demonstration in Fort Deposit in Lowndes County. After his release from jail in nearby Hayneville, Daniels emerged from Varner’s Cash Store with several other civil rights workers and was confronted by volunteer deputy sheriff Tom Coleman who was armed with a 12-gauge shotgun and threatened to kill them. Daniels stepped in front of the shotgun blast Coleman intended for teenage activist, Ruby Sales. The shooter, who had also turned his gun on a Catholic priest named Richard Morrisroe after shooting Daniels, was later acquitted by an all-white jury.
Daniels was at least the 22nd person killed by white supremacists in the civil rights struggle between 1963 and 1965. Sixteen of the victims were Black, and only a few of those cases received national attention.
Photo by Reggie Martell