Preserving the legacy of Elmore Bolling, who was lynched in 1947, by telling the full history of Lowndes County, Alabama, and empowering today’s citizens.
As the child of a Jim Crow South lynching victim speaking in America today, Jo is a national treasure who dedicates her life to addressing America’s history of lynching and the racial caste system that made it possible. Our weekend of tours and events is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to meet Jo and spend time with her and other history makers on the ground in Montgomery and Lowndes County, Alabama.
The weekend begins on Friday, October 21 with an opportunity to tour historic sites in Montgomery, including the EJI Memorial and Museum, theMothers of Gynecology Memorial, during the day and a Gala celebration in the evening featuring Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and MSNBC correspondent, Trymaine Lee, who wrote the chapter about the Bolling Family in The 1619 Project. Saturday and Sunday will include a special event honoring the Women of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee or SNCC, who played a central role in expanding the Civil Rights movement throughout the South in the 1960s, and a tour of Lowndes County, offered exclusively by The Elmore Bolling Initiative, to make a pilgrimage to the county where Elmore and Bertha Mae Bolling raised their family and built a network of farming and transport businesses that lifted up Black people with jobs and services, and where Ku Klux Klan members lynched Elmore in 1947. We will also visit important sites in the fight for voting rights in ‘Bloody Lowndes.” Elmore Bolling’s daughter and Lowndes County native, Jo McCall will lead along with renowned local tour leader, Michelle Browder, one of USA Today’s Women of the Year.
We are celebrating Jo for her dedication to truth-telling in the place where her father, Elmore Bolling, was lynched in 1947, and also for being a community leader (like her father) who empowers citizens in Lowndes County. Reserve your place at the gala and our other special events here.
Whether you will be attending our celebration or not, please support The Elmore Bolling Initiative with a donation or sponsorship.
HISTORY REVEALED AT THE
LOWNDESBORO SCHOOL
TEBI’s project to preserve and develop the Lowndesboro School into a museum and historic site received a $236,000 National Park Service grant in 2021. Now the project has been awarded a $25,000 planning grant from the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s Telling the Full History, Preservation Fund. This program supports organizations that use historic places as catalysts for a more just and equitable society.
The Lowndesboro School has also been selected as one of the first five recipients of the Alabama Historical Association’s History Revealed markers program. The Association will bear the full cost of producing markers documenting underrepresented aspects of Alabama history, including how the school was founded by Black people who placed such a high value on education that they raised the funds to build our school within just three years of being freed from slavery.
EDUCATION ESSENTIALS SUPPORTS LOWNDES STUDENTS
Book Buddies from Ft. Deposit Elementary School
TEBI’s Book Buddy program supports a love of reading for students in Lowndes County. The program pairs selected students with adult volunteers in the Boston, MA area who send a book every month to a student and read it with them over the phone. As broadband access expands in the county, participants aim to transition to reading together via virtual video meetings. Massachusetts volunteers were inspired to get involved after hearing Mrs. McCall’s presentations at Old South Church in Boston and Union Church of Waban in March 2020.
COLLEGE TEST PREP IN LOWNDES COUNTY
For the second year and the first time in-person, TEBI partnered with the Lowndes County Board of Education to provide college entrance test preparation for juniors at Calhoun and Central high schools in Lowndes County. Forty students met with TEBI consultant Carolyn Thomas twice a week throughout the 2021-2022 school year. Math was the primary focus, including algebra through algebra 2 and geometry. Students also reviewed English grammar and science. The Miles Blackwell Foundation sponsored celebration luncheons for students who completed the course and provided financial incentives for the students who achieved the highest scores on the ACT from each high school.
TEBI'S ANNUAL COLLEGE SCHOLARSHIP
Jocelyn McCall is the 2022 recipient of the TEBI scholarship. (Jocelyn is no relation to TEBI founder, Josephine McCall.) “The rich history of Lowndes County encourages me to be great. I want to be able to say yes, I am from Lowndes County, the birthplace of many greats, and yes, I am destined for greatness,” says Jocelyn. She will receive a $1,000 scholarship and a Chromebook from TEBI and will attend Trenholm State Community College in the fall.
“Each year, we provide a scholarship for a Lowndes County high school senior to ease their financial burden,” said Dr. Regina Moorer, TEBI scholarship committee chair and Assistant Professor of Political Science at Alabama State University.
In April, theEqual Justice Initiative commemorated organizations that educate people about the forgotten — or ignored — history of the places they call home, including TEBI which led the Lowndes County Remembrance Coalition. TEBI President Jo McCall says she saw the direct impact of the local coalition’s efforts in the fall of 2020 when a white couple in Lowndesboro volunteered to pay a $25,000 state fine after the county removed its Confederate monument in Hayneville. The EJI sculpture (above) memorializing people who promote acknowledgment of the history of lynchings includes six figures modeled by descendants of lynching victims. Caleb Robinson, the great-nephew of Elmore Bolling, modeled for the kneeling figure.
L-R LaShaun Carroll (T-Mobile), Kathy Feingold & Christa Vinson from Rural LISC, Jo, and
Scott Woods from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration gathered in the Historic Lowndes County Courthouse.
The “Digital Divide” prevents people living in poor, rural counties like Lowndes from accessing workforce and educational opportunities and connecting with health practitioners. The pandemic revealed how much this gap disadvantages people who live in areas plagued by persistent poverty and neglect. Now, TEBI has been awarded a $156k Rural Local Initiatives Support Corporation grant to improve broadband infrastructure and access in Lowndes and the other 16 Black Belt counties. The grant will help develop a Regional Community Technology Center in partnership with the South Central Alabama Broadband Cooperative District to bring information technology and related training to rural residents.
NEWTON FOUNDATION LEADERS
MEET WITH JO MCCALL
The leadership of the National Parks Conservation Association and theDr. Huey P. Newton Foundation traveled to Alabama in May where they spent a day in meetings with TEBI President, Jo McCall.
In the early 1960s, the population of Lowndes County was 80 percent African American, but, even after the Voting Rights Act passed, registering to vote was unthinkable for black people in Lowndes County. Elmore Bolling had been lynched less than 20 years ago and white people continued to routinely follow, intimidate, and threaten any black person they perceived to be out of line, including those attempting to register to vote.
In 1965, Stokley Carmichael and John Hulett founded the Lowndes County Freedom Organization, an independent political party. Alabama election laws required political parties to have an emblem, so the new party chose a crouching black panther which Huey Newton later adopted for the Oakland, California-based Black Panther Party in 1966.
