Panther: Blueprint for Black Power is the story of the unexpected birthplace of the Black Panther, a site that changed the course of the nation. But it’s not where you might expect. Far from Oakland, the Black Panther and its principles came from just outside Selma, Alabama. Lowndes County, Alabama: a county where every single thing Black folks did was an act of rebellion. A county where an all-Black party made it to the ballot in the year 1966. A county that paved the way for revolution. The fourth season of the Murrow Award-winning Reckon Radio examines the first year the Voting Rights Act was put to the test, deep in the heart of the Jim Crow South. Pulitzer Prize finalist Roy S. Johnson and journalist Eunice Elliott tell the story of Lowndes County and the election that shaped politics - and activism - as we know it. Available on Apple, Spotify, Amazon or wherever you get your podcasts.
“You can be so afraid that you don’t know you’re shaking, but there comes time you say, enough is enough.” - Lillian McGill, secretary of the Lowndes County Christian Movement
What did the Lowndes County freedom movement look like? Everything Black folks did in Lowndes was an act of rebellion—from teaching and organizing, to cooking meals and cutting hair. In this episode you’ll learn how even the smallest acts could be revolutionary—and dangerous. And you’ll learn the surprising origin story of the Black Panther symbol.
Below you’ll find a full transcript of the episode.
ARCHIVAL TOWNSPERSON 1 :
On that day, which would be November the 8th, we are actually voting for the Black Panther on that date. And I imagine it would start around 8:00 so we want to be there from 8:00 until, if that’s what it takes. And we’re expecting at least eight or 900, maybe more, Negroes to be there on that date.
ROY S. JOHNSON, HOST:
It’s Election Day 1966. Mid-morning now, the polls have been open for hours, but Black voters still haven’t lost steam. It’s not going unnoticed.
REGINA MOORER, GUEST:
So by mid-morning they realize, “Oh, they’re really showing up. They’re really turning out.” So that’s when the intimidation started to increase as the day went on and they realized, “Oh, these people, they’re actually exercising their right to vote.”
There was this one Black man, I want to say his name was Andrew Jones. He was known to not be one to back down to white supremacy. So it was almost like the white establishment knew like, “He’s not going to back down so we’re not going to mess with him.” And before he could even get out his car to go pick up the voters, a mob, a white mob charged him and beating him over the head with pistols, and things of that nature. And even if you had the reputation of being the person that you don’t mess with, when the white establishment realized how high turnout was on Election Day, no one was safe.
TERRY CANNON, GUEST:
One of the major leaders of the Lowndes County Freedom Organization was in Fort Deposit at the polling place. And Fort Deposit is like the center of white power. And he’s in Fort Deposit, where they leave the lights on all night long, except when he was there picking up the ballots. And all of a sudden, all the lights went out and a gang of whites attacked him. And by the grace of whoever protects Lowndes County Freedom Organizers, suddenly the lights went back on and there was a guy with a gun at his head, and they had to back off because somebody would see them.
EUNICE ELLIOTT, HOST:
But white land owners were encouraging some Black voters to go to the polls, as long as they voted the way they were told.
VIOLA BRADFORD, GUEST:
A Negro man said that in one polling place, some white men would open the curtains with their hand and look into the booth while the Negroes were voting.
CANNON:
You’re at the polls and up comes a truck and these are people that you know who are sharecroppers and they all go in together. And they get talked to later and they said, “Yeah, he brought us in and said if we didn’t vote Democratic, he’d kick us off the land.”
ELLIOTT:
So SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and local organizers, they had their work cut out for them.
CANNON:
So we would just drive back and forth and on the back roads and the paved roads just to make sure that nobody was going to blow up the Freedom House while everybody was gone. And that was that. Nobody got killed, nobody got attacked. We made a show of force in Fort Deposit which I think was very important. I think the power structure was just basically scared silly.
JOHNSON:
This time on Panther, just what was that power structure scared silly of?
MULTIPLE VOICES:
(repeated) Black Panther.
(THEME MUSIC IN)
ARCHIVAL NEWS ANCHOR:
A long anticipated freedom march from Selma to Alabama’s capital of Montgomery finally gets underway.
MARY MAYS JACKSON, GUEST:
If I died, I didn’t care because I was dying for a purpose. We were afraid, but I guess the purpose was greater than the fear.
JOHNSON:
This is Panther: Blueprint for Black Power from Reckon Radio.
ELLIOTT:
This is the seldom told story of one of the most famous and notorious organizations in the Black Power Movement and its origins in Lowndes County, Alabama.
FANNIE LOU HAMER:
Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave?
LILLIAN MCGILL, GUEST:
The one in Oakland started out ... They heard about us.
BRADFORD:
These people wanted to vote. They wanted to pull the lever for the Black Panther and then go on home, and this is what they did.
ED MOORE KING, GUEST:
We’ve come a long ways, but we got a long ways to go.
REV. AL SHARPTON:
Politicians have been trying to roll back the franchise all across the country. Voter ID, early voting, even the number of polling sites have all come under assault.
FANNIE LOU HAMER:
Because we want to live as decent human beings in America.
(THEME MUSIC OUT)
MOORER:
There’s this idea of how do we fully realize the power of the Black vote? And we can’t do that if we align ourselves with the Democratic Party in Alabama, which is still the party of white supremacy. So the only viable alternative for voters here in Lowndes County was we’re going to start our own political party.
JOHNSON:
That’s Regina Moorer, a political science professor at Alabama State University. And that’s where we last left off in our story. SNCC has come to town and the Lowndes County Christian Movement, the LCCM is building momentum. The road to that decision was not a smooth one. As you can hear in those clips, the white power structure was not keen on change in 1966. It was dangerous, potentially deadly dangerous for these black folks to organize a new political party and do it openly. They got started by holding mass meetings where everybody came together to talk about what exactly needed to happen and how to make it happen. You heard about the first meeting in our last episode. 27 people came to that one, Lillian McGill was among them.
MCGILL:
And that Sunday night, we met at the church, the Mount Gilead Baptist Church up there. You can be so afraid that you don’t know you’re shaking, but there comes a time you say enough is enough. And that was it.
ELLIOTT:
Think about it. Even just the act of gathering was dangerous. And if your white boss found out, you could lose your job or worse. Mary Mays remembers.
JACKSON:
We would go to the mass meeting to have strategy to find out what we were going to do and also what we had to do to go get registered to vote. I attended most of all the mass meeting, and we did have an incident where somebody burned one of the churches down in Collirene. So they were afraid to have the mass meeting at their churches. But Mount Gilead was not afraid.
ELLIOTT:
Ed King was a teacher in Lowndes, and he was part of those early meetings too.
KING:
We still was a little shaky because being the first church having a type of meeting, we didn’t feel very comfortable. But we went through with it. But down the line, we were punished for it. The old deacons before our time had bought the land that that school was on, but they didn’t get any deeds for it. And they told us that we had to pay for the land in order to maintain it. So we had to pay for the land, and at that time, we got the deeds for the land after we paid again. I mean we paid a second time.
ELLIOTT:
And everybody there knew just how dangerous it was. Mary Mays can speak to how high the nerves ran.
JACKSON:
It was very scary. Sometime even at the mass meeting, if we heard a noise, everybody was jumping to make sure where Mount Gilead, before we would have the meeting, they would have somebody to go up under the church to make sure no bombs were there, or have somebody drive around the church to make sure it was safe to be there. And we would go as far as Fort Deposit to have a mass meeting.
JOHNSON:
For Lillian McGill, the threat of violence was just a fact of life. She wasn’t going to let it stop her though, not one bit.
MCGILL:
We didn’t have time for that. We had time to try to survive, for our children to survive. Those children were left here many a night while we went to the mass meeting, but they knew how to shoot a gun. And if anything come up here unexpected that didn’t supposed to be here, we left them wood to tad up. And if we didn’t make it, when they got to 18, they were supposed to go register to vote. They were always instilled with it. That’s all we would tell our children. You don’t frighten because something goes wrong the first time.
JOHNSON:
Now Eunice, this is an important time to remind ourselves of one of the most humbling aspects of this movement. These people weren’t just activists, a word that’s overused, frankly. They still lived their lives, raised their children, cooked supper, got the hair did all while fighting for their rights.
ELLIOTT:
That’s true Roy. But those everyday activities were a crucial part of the movement too. All right, take Mary May’s mother, the woman who feared for her children’s safety when they joined the marchers from Selma to Montgomery. Well, she played an integral role in the SNCC organizers day-to-day.
JACKSON:
For the young men that was involved, like Bob Mants, Stokely Carmichael, Scotty B, a lot of them came to my mama’s house. She would cook for them, and a lot of the guys would come there and eat. She loved doing that. She said, if she could help any kind of way to get the movement going on, that’s what she wanted to be a part of.
JOHNSON:
People got involved any way they could and every way they did was vital. Here’s how Regina Moorer’s grandmother contributed.
MOORER:
Her name is Maddie Lee Moorer. And so she was actively involved in some of the organizing efforts for voter registration, but in addition to that, she was a beautician. So she had a hair salon in the back of my grandparents’ home. And so that hair salon became like the beauty shop talk about what was going on. A lot of Black women came to her to get their hair done. And so while she’s doing hair, she’s using that as an opportunity to tell them, did you hear about this? Did you hear about this mass meeting? Did you hear about this particular activity? And so the beauty shop became like the spot for her to help spread the word for these efforts.
ELLIOTT:
Every facet of life was policed by the white folks in power. Black residents pushed back whenever and however they could. Here’s Ed King again.
KING:
I didn’t feel comfortable in teaching school and not being a resident or a second class citizen, that bothered me. And I was willing to do whatever I could to be sure to become a registered voter. I wasn’t afraid. They told me I was going to get fired. I said, “Well, I may get fired.” I said, “But I feel like there’s certain things that we have a right to do.” I asked the superintendent for a transfer and she told me to come to her office. I said, “Oh now, I know this is it now.” I said, “She going to fire me now.” So I went by to her office that day even when I got off work and she said, “You asked me for a transfer to the new school, which is closer to you, and I will transfer you.” I said, “I sure appreciate that.” She said, “I would’ve made you prosper with that school, but you’ve been participating in those mass meetings.”
ELLIOTT:
Age wasn’t a factor either. Viola Bradford would later go on to become a journalist. She’s the one who covered that fateful election day back in 1966. But even when she was still in high school, she would make sure a word of what went on at the mass meetings got around to those who couldn’t go.
BRADFORD:
Nobody at my school, counselors, teachers, nobody was helping me get into college. Here I’m an honor student of perfect attendance. Nobody was helping me because I was going to mass meetings every Monday night as a freedom singer and still doing my work. And I was very into the community doing a whole lot of stuff, newspaper voter registration. And I know the teachers would ask me on Tuesday morning, “What happened at the mass meeting last night?” They put me out in the hallway and I would say, “You should have been there.” But teachers wouldn’t go. They thought they’d lose their jobs. So I ended up going to the mass meetings and all of that. And so I said, okay, I’m going to be a journalism major when I finish.
JOHNSON:
All those SNCC organizers needed a place to lay their heads. Pattie Mae McDonald and her family offered up a house for them to stay in. Around town, Black folks called it the Freedom House. Willie James, one of Pattie Mae’s kids was just a child back then.
WILLIE JAMES, SON OF PATTIE MAE MCDONALD:
And my mom said she was renting the house to Stokely Carmichael and the rest of them. She wasn’t, they never paid for a dime. That wasn’t... A grace were like, so the house that the Stoke was, they were staying in, we made the living room our library, and I think I was 10. And so I had a piece of scrap wood and some paint, so I put free the library on it.
JOHNSON:
But that generosity put the McDonald family in danger, like real danger. Here’s Shirley, another one of Pattie Mae’s kids.
SHIRLEY, DAUGHTER OF PATTIE MAE MCDONALD:
I was five when they shot into our home. I remember pointing at the bullet holes and I remember hearing the gunshots that night, but that’s all I can remember. I remember hearing the gunshots. And I remember my mom standing looking at me with her arm fold with her hand up on her chin. And I was putting at one of the bullet holes. And if I’m not mistaken, the FBIs came out of New York down here because wouldn’t nobody here do nothing
JOHNSON:
Just for giving these college aged kids a place to sleep, the McDonald’s got their home shot up. Mary May’s family saw bullets too.
JACKSON:
The white men guys would ride around with guns in the back of their trucks, and then sometimes they would just come on 23 just shooting. So sometimes we would hear the gunfires and my mama would tell us to get out of bed, and we would have to lay on the floor until they stopped shooting because they wanted to scare us. We would just hear the gunshots and we ran for cover. Get up under the bed, get out of bed and get under the bed so the bullet wouldn’t hit you.
ELLIOTT:
And just for trying to register to vote, other Lowndes County families got kicked out of Hearth and Home.
JACKSON:
We had a lot of people here in Lowndes County that were sharecroppers. And when they decided that they want to walk with Dr. King or they were going to stand up for their rights, the white people told them if they were going to be a part of that, they had to get off their land.
Most of these people were sharecroppers. So those who registered the vote ended up being thrown off the land. And that’s how they came up with Tent City. They were just tents on this land, and that’s it. As far as the eye could see, there was just a lot of tents on this land and families living in these tents.
JOHNSON:
That’s right, tents. White landlords held people’s homes hostage. Registered to vote, you can’t live here anymore. But that didn’t stop the movement either. It didn’t stop Black folks in Lowndes County. That’s where Tent City came in. Here’s Mary Mays again.
JACKSON:
Tent City played a vital part. And it was even talked about in Washington how the sharecroppers were thrown off their land because they voted. And they had nowhere to go, but Ms. Viola Smith volunteered to let them use her land. And some of them stayed on there as long as two to three years until they acquired an acre of land. But she never charged rent. She did that out of the goodness of her heart. And we had a few older ladies during that time that was very brave and they stood up too for the movement. Because I know you’ve probably seen a landmark on 80 down the street that her name was Ms. Rosie Steel. And she should have been in her eighties by then. But she was feisty. And I mean, she said, you all can stay on my land. She was not afraid of getting hurt.
ARCHIVAL TOWNSPERSON 2:
Put that big piece down, put that... You didn’t want to move your feet.
JACKSON:
It was interesting. It was almost unbelievable because I couldn’t imagine a tent having a stove in it. And then the ground, it had even flooring. It was built like a room. They had beds in there. It was comfortable just like a house. And that’s what was most amazing to me. But yeah, I had friends over there. We would go visit them and we would stay outside and play.
BRADFORD:
So I went there Christmas Eve and it was a woman. I knew she had at least five kids, and it was just a tent.
JACKSON:
Dirt was the floor. And what I remember after talking to her, she was very happy because she was just with her children. I don’t think she could buy them anything. And that was sad. The oldest boy, he went out and got a twig from somewhere and had a little red ribbon, and he tied a bow and he told me that this is their Christmas tree. And I’ll never forget that. But I spent the evening there and we were talking and the kids were happy. So that’s what I remember about Tent City more than anything else.
ELLIOTT:
Those kids might have been happy, but Tent City was no place to make a life. And SNCC was well aware of the consequences of what they were advocating for, registering Black folks in Lowndes County to vote. And that helped to inform just how everybody made decisions. It was anything but top down. These difficult choices started and ended with the people of Lowndes. Here’s Joann Mants again.
JOANN MANTS, GUEST:
So the choices of making decisions and SNCC becoming SNCC. SNCC said that we will stay with communities and let the communities decide what issues they would want to change within their community. And when they make the decision, we will stand with that decision that they make. Now, a lot of times it meant some of them would not make it home alive or make it out. Some of them would be jailed. You never knew exactly the end results of some of the things that would happen as a result of you making a commitment.
MCGILL:
They were young people, energetic. Some of them was over enthusiastic and some was exciting. The [inaudible 00:19:08] to them because some had more mouth than they had sense and some had more sense than they had mouth. They were other people children, but we became family to them. They didn’t take no adjustment. They knew what they were doing. And we were trying to find out what we were doing. And we had some know-how and all of us had a little education that was working with it. Some didn’t have degrees, but they had common sense. And some had their own businesses, so they was running it. But they didn’t operate for us, we operated and they operated alongside us. And if we needed something, there was always somebody who knew somebody they could get it from.
ELLIOTT:
Living conditions were abysmal. White threats of violence ran rampant. But SNCC and the Lowndes County Christian Movement, they found a way to chart a path forward. We’ll be right back.
JOHNSON:
So by now, maybe you can visualize the bleakness of Black political representation in Lowndes County where we remind you 80% of residents are Black.
MCGILL:
You didn’t have any Black officers, you didn’t have any Black positions in the county except school teachers. And they had a white superintendent education.
CANNON:
The thing I learned, particularly out of Lowndes County was there was no demonstrating. You’d take your life in your hands if you demonstrated. There was no appealing to the local authorities. There was no appealing to the federal government. And as Stokely Carmichael said, “We have to go for power.”
ELLIOTT:
That’s Terry Cannon. And you heard from him earlier talking about election day. Terry was one of the few white organizers in Lowndes. He worked as a SNCC field secretary during the 1966 election, but he was also Stokely’s bodyguard on that day of the revolutionary change.
JOHNSON:
Pastor Aaron McCall was born and raised in Lowndes County. He remembers this shift in thought pretty well. It would be the birth of Black Power.
PASTOR AARON MCCALL, GUEST:
We’re talking about minority rule. The power and the seat of power was being handled by the few whites that was here. And Blacks were kept out of the political process. But when Stokely started talking about Black Power, and he was talking about the power of the ballot, the power of the vote, that we outnumbered them. And I remember him telling in a mass meeting once, he said that they ain’t got no business or a bid in any office. If we would get our people registered and our people out to vote, and none of them should be in any office because we’ve got enough votes among our people that we could always keep them voted out of office unless we just wanted to put them in there. Something like that.
ELLIOTT:
Slowly but surely, this new idea for change, it really started to sink in with the Black residents of Lowndes. And the possibilities started to materialize, and the movement started to mobilize.
MOORER:
And they started to slowly listen and get on board. While not every resident was on board, because there was still this fear. People knew when I try to register to vote, I may get evicted. If I was lucky enough to have a college education and be a school teacher and have a job, then there was the possibility of me losing my job because the superintendent was white, the school board was all white. But then SNCC organizers, Carmichael and Bob Man started to tell residents that, you could take over the school board, you could be the superintendent, and then you won’t have this fear about losing your job because you’re exercising and standing in your full political potential. So that message started to slowly resonate with the residents here in Lowndes County. And so they realized maybe we should run for office. Maybe we should get registered to vote. Maybe we should have our own nominating convention to pick our own slate of candidates. But they also realized, well, we can’t do that as Democrats.
CANNON:
As Stokely Carmichael said, “We’re going to take over this county,” so we’re not going for anything less. We intend to seize power. And that was essentially the first important project that embodied the concept of Black Power.
JOHNSON:
Seize power, Black Power. That was the goal of SNCC and the Black residents of Lowndes.
CANNON:
People had no one to vote for. Okay, we’re going to vote for... Then you have to vote for the racist Democrats. But the SNCC researcher, Jack Minnis, discovered this law in Alabama that said you could start a third party.
JOHNSON:
Jack Minnis, SNCCs head of research found a law tucked away in the annals of Alabama’s legislative history that allowed the formation of a new party at the county level. This gave Blacks in Lowndes a chance to form their own party, and more crucially, run their own primary.
ELLIOTT:
Okay, Roy, we’ll get into all that, but I have to tell you about another party of this law. It actually said that each party had to have a mascot.
MOORER:
And then there was this idea, well, if we are going to have our own political party, because every political party has to have a logo because of the illiteracy rates in the state, so that people who could not read could at least identify the symbol, then it’s like, what will our symbol be? The Democratic Party in Alabama at the time was still the party of white supremacy. They still had a white rooster as their political logo.
MCCALL:
The Republicans had the elephant and they were looking for something, I guess, another animal or something to go along with it, to put on as a political mascot.
JOHNSON:
I can’t stop laughing, Eunice, every time I think about that Chicken Democrat. This new political party helped give rise to the idea of Black Power. Now if you’re going to have a mascot, it might as well be one that would well eat all the other mascots alive.
MULTIPLE VOICES:
(repeated) Black Panther.
MCCALL:
I know you’ve heard about the Black Panther, and this is our story. The Black Panthers movement, the name and all was constituted right here at First Baptist Church. The Lowndes County Freedom Party, they needed a mascot. And there was a man by the name of Andrew Jones who lived in Calhoun. And he and his wife was at the meeting, and Mr. Jones fell off and went to sleep. And that was the meeting had dragged on. They used to meet around five o’clock in the afternoon. And the meeting just dragged on and dragged on, and he went to sleep. And when he went to sleep, he started to snoring and he took a real deep breath.
And when he came out, he just [inaudible 00:26:28]. And his wife punched him in the side to wake him up and said, “Wake up over here [inaudible 00:26:33] breathing like an old panther.” And when she said breathing like an old panther, when she said that, Stokely Carmichael said, “That’s it. That’s it, that’s it, that’s it.” And they chose the name Black Panther. And of course, Mr. Jones, if you ever got to meet him, he was a very dark, a very dark man. Well, they chose the name Black Panther. And of course, the rest is history.
ELLIOTT:
Now for the record, they chose the Black Panther for more reasons than Andrew Jones mighty snore. And that choice would ripple throughout the movement, clear to the other side of the country.
MCCALL:
Think about what the panther represents. Number one, he is sleek, precision. He’s strong and he’s fierce. And then he was Black and we Black, and he represented us. For us, it represented freedom. It represented freedom. And it went, like I said, from here to California, all over.
MOORER:
John Hulett, he’s quoted as saying that they thought about a symbol and they picked the symbol of the Black Panther because he said that the panther is not necessarily an aggressive animal, but when backed into a corner, it’s going to come out fighting. And he said that as Black people in Lowndes County, they had been back into a corner long enough and now this was their chance to come out fighting. So they picked that symbol, and then they had their own nominating convention in May of 1966. And by November of 1966, they had their slate of candidates who were ready to run for office.
JOHNSON:
The nominating convention, the campaigning, and the election day results. That’s next time on Panther.
MCCALL:
And every time one of them voted, and that was their first time voting. And every time one would vote, they would do like a kind of little dance, a little jig, or throw their hands up or something. I did. I’ve done it, I participated. I’m a real citizen kind of thing. It was, like I said, it was a very, very prideful day.
(THEME MUSIC IN)
JOHNSON:
Panther is produced by Reckon Radio in partnership with Pod People. It’s hosted by me, Roy S. Johnson.
ELLIOTT:
And me, Eunice Elliott. Our executive producer is John Hammontree with additional writing, reporting, and production for Reckon by Isaiah Murtaugh, Sarah Whites-Koditshek, and R.L. Nave. Special thanks to Kelly Scott, Katie Johnson, Minda Honey, Abby Crain and Tom Bates.
JOHNSON:
And at Pod People, Anne Feuss, Alex Vikmanis, Matt Sav, Aimee Machado, Ashton Carter, Rebecca Chaisson, John Asante, and Carter Wogahn. Our theme music is composed by Jelani Akil Bauman.
ELLIOTT:
Head to Reckon.news to learn more about the events featured in today’s episode, and please make sure to rate, review, and subscribe to our show wherever you get your podcast.
(THEME MUSIC OUT)
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