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.
Election Day for the Lowndes County Freedom Organization’s candidates didn’t go the way they wanted. But their party’s work - and its mascot the Black Panther - has rippled down through the years and across the country. To show what the Lowndes County Freedom Organization means today, journalists Eunice Elliott and Roy S. Johnson go back to the very origins of the Voting Rights Act, and the ways its opponents have tried to tear it down.
Below you’ll find a full transcript of the episode.
ARCHIVAL VOTER 1:
There’s various ways that governments are now trying to suppress the vote, and one of them is a long line keeping people from voting.
GEORGIA POLLS REPRESENTATIVE:
We’re trying to make sure that every ballot is counted and we expect to be here. We’re bringing in some more fresh people, because we’ve had people here all day, we expect this to go probably until midnight or more.
STACEY ABRAMS, ARCHIVAL FOOTAGE:
It’s about our voices. Say our voices.
CROWD:
Our voices!
STACEY ABRAMS:
It’s about our votes. Say our votes.
CROWD:
Our votes!
STACEY ABRAMS:
It’s about our time. Say our time.
CROWD:
Our time!
ARCHIVAL VOTER 2:
There’s too many efforts here to take away our rights and to take history backwards, and I’m angered by it.
(THEME MUSIC IN)
ROY S. JOHNSON, HOST:
I’m Roy S. Johnson.
EUNICE ELLIOTT, HOST:
And I’m Eunice Elliott, and this is Panther.
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 Rec and 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?
ELLIOTT:
The one in Oakland started out wanting, they heard about us.
VIOLA BRADFORD, GUEST:
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 come a long ways, but we got a long ways to go.
REVEREND 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)
ARCHIVAL TOWNSPERSON:
I believe in maybe some years to come that this thing will work out, but at the present time, I don’t believe it’ll work, right now.
JOHNSON:
The Lowndes County Freedom Organization fielded seven candidates in 1966. All seven, however, lost to their white opponent.
ELLIOTT:
But we are still talking about them today, almost 60 years later. And there’s a whole lot of reasons for that. But part of it is that there could not have been a better test of the Voting Race Act than an all Black political party, in rural Alabama.
JOHNSON:
When those federal registrars came down to enforce the law to force white racists to allow Black voters to register and vote, that proved the V.R.A had teeth.
ELLIOTT:
Not enough though to keep white landowners from threatening Black tenants and busing them to the polls to vote for the white candidates.
JOHNSON:
Even still, black voters in Lowndes would not be silenced, even in the face of these election results. Just four years later in 1970, there was a major L.C.F.O victory. John Hulett was elected as Lowndes County’s very first black sheriff. Regina Moorer maintains that his victory was in no small part because he understood and embraced the true source of his power, the people.
REGINA MOORER, GUEST:
There was ideas about politics being grassroots. Bottom up, not top down. I do think that there was this idea of realizing that your power comes from the people that you want to vote for you and not the other way around. And I do think that those principles carried on for several generations. Even after the Lowndes County Freedom Party was no longer a political party.
ELLIOTT:
Black folks in Lowes fought generations of voter suppression in the very space white folks tried to exclude them from, the voting booth and they proved their power. The power of the black vote in 1966, even in defeat.
MOORER:
And even though that party did not necessarily win in November of 1966, I think some of the biggest gains they did win was they sent a message to the white establishment in Lowndes County that said that we are an empowered voting block. And so I think the white establishment recognized that, yeah, we’re going to have to eventually make room for these candidates within a Democratic Party because if we don’t, we’re going to give them a few election cycles, and the Democratic Party in Lowndes County will be virtually non-existent. So it was almost like, do we make room or do we continue to shut them out and run the risk of not a single Democrat holding elected office in Lowndes County.
JOHNSON:
And that wave of black power rippled out of Lowndes County, changing the politics in places like Oakland, Chicago, Detroit, and beyond, and changing the tactics of the two major political parties. In the 1970s, Democrats painted themselves as the party of the Civil Rights movement, of social change. Meanwhile, Republicans headed by Richard M. Nixon went all in on a southern strategy to leverage the anger of white Southerners. Angry at black folks gaining power.
ELLIOTT:
In time, that realignment changed the parties in places like Alabama too.
MOORER:
There was this realization that maybe if we brand ourselves as Democrats, we could get more people, and even those people who are reluctant to vote for a party that has a black panther as its symbol, but we can still embody those same ideals, and those same goals, and those same platforms, but we’re just going to brand ourselves under a different political party. So I do think that the political realignment that we were seeing across the south after the Voting Rights Act, I think all of that played a part in the candidates in Lowndes County, sort of abandoning the Lowndes County Freedom Party or the banner of the Lowndes County Freedom Party.
LILLIAN MCGILL, GUEST:
Republicans couldn’t even bridge to get enough people to buy a bar soap at that time. The South was democratic.
ELLIOTT:
And in some ways, the power of the black voter is stronger than ever in the Democratic Party. Black voters in South Carolina delivered the nomination for Joe Biden in 2020. And looking ahead in 2024, they’ve moved to the front of the line for state primaries, but flocking under a single banner, the Democratic banner. It has its own downsides. Nowadays, it’s a pretty widespread belief among democratic candidates that black voters can be counted on, or let’s just call it what it is. Black voters are taken for granted.
MOORER:
Usually after at the elections, particularly after what we saw happen in Georgia, when Georgia turned blue. You saw people on social media and even in the media saying, thank black women, thank black voters, thank Stacey Abrams, thank people like Natasha Brown and the Black Voters Matters organizers. So you want to thank all these black people, but my position is don’t thank me, elect me.
When it comes to public policy, it’s almost like we’re told, well, we don’t want to have an all black agenda, so your issues, they need to wait. And so I often wonder what it would look like on a national level if the Democratic Party actually valued black voters. Because I often critique candidates, particularly at the state level here in Alabama, when they show up to black communities last. Because it is almost the assumption that you’re going to vote for me anyway. So I need to pour my resources and my mobilizing efforts into these other communities because I know you’re going to be there. So I often wonder what it would look like if we had a replication of the Lowndes County Freedom Organization at a national level. Where if you’re running for office and you want my vote, you actually work for it. But also that you have a political platform that is bottom up and not top down.
JOHNSON:
Speaking of 1966, let’s circle back to the Voting Rights Act. That election was the one that proved the V.R.A had teeth. It wasn’t a beast, but it did give organizers something to fight with, to fight back with. Here’s Ed King. He was a teacher in Lowndes back in the 1960s.
KING:
What helped the thing was when Kennedy got killed. And he had, I think, had joined up that bill and it was passed on, the Linda Johnson became president behind him. And he passed the bill that everybody could become a registered voter, whether they could read or write or not, if they couldn’t do anything but make a X. And that’s when we start getting a larger number of people registered.
ELLIOTT:
And once black folks wielded the power of the vote, that meant whites in power could be held accountable. It could be voted out, at least in theory. The V.R.A might’ve been a historic nation changing piece of legislation, but it was anything but popular with white folks in the South, and pretty much all across the country. Particularly, in light of the waves of black voter registration it ignited. These days some people have been working to dismantle it. To systematically eliminate its protections.
JOHNSON:
And not just protections for black voters units for immigrants who’ve earned the right to vote. For young people who’ve owned the right to vote. Some want to make it harder to do what citizens have every right to do. That systematic breakdown has happened in statehouses and courthouses all across the nation. The most devastating blow came from the U.S Supreme Court in 2013. The people of Lowndes County proved the V.R.A’s power, but people elsewhere in Alabama, well, they were looking for ways to neutralize it. And in 2013, the people in Shelby County, just a little over an hour north of Lowndes County, found a way.
ARCHIVAL NEWS REPORTER:
And the Supreme Court invalidated a critical section of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the Landmark Voting Rights Act. And what they did basically is throw out the part of the Voting Rights Act, it’s called Section four that determined which states in this country with a history of discrimination, had to be granted Justice Department or court approval before they made any changes in their voting laws. That’s called pre-clearance.
ELLIOTT:
In its 2013 ruling in Shelby County versus Holder, the Supreme Court effectively did away with pre-clearance. A number of states have been under, to put it simply, adult supervision for any new laws they wanted to pass that had to do with voting. While after the Shelby case, those states could legislate as they wished, no approvals or double checking needed.
JOHNSON:
Not a single parent in the room. No parental supervision, Eunice!
ELLIOTT:
Zero. To go a bit into the weeds with this. The court didn’t say the supervision, the pre-clearance was wrong. It said the law that determined which states were covered, was wrong. But in fact is just the same difference. Congress could come up with a new formula to say which states needed the watchful eye, but here we are 10 years later, still waiting.
JOHNSON:
Suddenly areas covered by that pre-clearance requirement were free to do anything they wanted. Those areas could be as small as a county, but the entirety of nine states was also subject to pre-clearance. These days, after the Shelby ruling, state legislators get carte blanche. Before that, they needed to at least prove what benefit a law could give voters and how that law was not discriminatory, before they could even put it into practice. Now, a discriminatory law may pass, well, let’s just say quickly. Proving discrimination has to come later.
ELLIOTT:
We’re talking about the slate of voter ID laws, absentee ballot rule shifts, and polling places nationwide being shut down. Thank you, Shelby County. And Alabama had another trick up its sleeve. At the end of 2021, a map of new voting districts was released. This was a map where black voting power was corralled and diluted to the extreme. But black Alabamians, they wouldn’t let that ride. They sued the state with Evan Milligan as the name plaintiff.
EVAN MILLIGAN, GUEST:
Despite our best efforts to present alternative maps that we were saying would comply with our section two of the Voting Rights Act, they still chose a map that diluted black voting strength with no real justification. And so that’s the sort of thing that you litigate on when it’s in clear violation of the law.
JOHNSON:
In October of 2022, Evans argument made it all the way to the Supreme Court. The case was aimed at that part of the Voting Rights Act. Evan just mentioned, section two. It’s the part that makes diluting minority votes, drawing districts to hedge against the black majority illegal.
ELLIOTT:
Now, you should know Evan’s family roots, they run deep in Lowndes County. And he pulled from that history when he thought about how to make his case.
MILLIGAN:
Those activists back then and the artists and the ministers, the labor organizers, they understood how to talk through those distances. And so with the Freedom Party, they were able to use art and use really simple bullets around what their priorities are. But that initial limiting what the hierarchy of needs are and being able to articulate it in languages, school children were understanding it. That started in Lowndes County.
You know, look back at Stokely Carmichael. Just seeing pictures of him interacting with people in Lowndes, kind of like it is his whole self. It’s his humor, it’s his cheekiness, it’s his bad boy thing. So when we saw our case kind of picking up steam, we thought about, well, how do we use our personalities as people from this actual culture, and then tell our stories and invite people in based on that? So we tried to do that with our approach to public outreach, our website, we wrote some music that kind of says different things about the case, but it felt like the idea of it is not new. It goes back to what they were doing with the party, SNCC Freedom Singers, Fisk Jubilee Singers. It’s an old thing of incorporating that culture into our political outreach, and we just tried to do it in our own way for the case.
JOHNSON:
And in a somewhat surprising turn of events for this Supreme Court, it actually worked. In June of 2023, the court ruled that Alabama’s map was in fact unconstitutional. But that doesn’t mean the work is done not by any stretch.
ELLIOTT:
Right now in Alabama, only one African-American representative Terri Sewell represents Alabamians. Now that’s out of seven elected to serve the state in Congress. Just one, in a state where black folks make up nearly a third of the population?
MILLIGAN:
Long term, from there is between now and 2031, doing as much work as we can to help more people understand the importance of participating in the census and participating in redistricting once that census that is released. And so we have that time to do training on how census numbers impact political districts, how maps that house the political districts, how that impacts certainly elections, but also federal grants that are drawn down and dollars distributed to communities based on census information. So even people that don’t necessarily find an interest in voting or care much about the voting rights movement work, money is being made based on their presence.
JOHNSON:
But to Evan winning this case, protecting the Voting Rights Act in the courts just doesn’t quite cut it. He wants a more permanent solution.
MILLIGAN:
Then the longer term strategy beyond those is we need an amendment to the U.S Constitution. That one establishes that, American citizens of voting age have a right to vote, and have a right to have that vote counted. That we don’t have an amendment now that says that. There’s all kind of reasons why that wouldn’t have been there, but where we are right now as a country, we can’t continue to function where every few years we have this Supreme Court case or a conversation, “is Congress going to renew the Voting Rights Act?” So having a constitutional amendment that takes some of that questioning off the table, I think can push some of our organizing and our litigation into the direction where we can then start addressing some of the policy questions that we really want to tackle.
JOHNSON:
That work that got started in Lowndes back in the 1960s still needs to be done today. That’s where that constitutional amendment that Evan talked about, the one to protect every citizen’s right to have their vote counted. Well, that’s where that would come in, because people in power today are still trying to kick folks out of the ballot box. And folks from Lowndes, the ones who fought this fight the first go round, well, they’re just fed up with it.
CHARLES MAYS GILLARD, GUEST:
You know, can’t go and pick which states you going to help, when they call for federal help. You are the United States. But the thing over in Georgia and even down in Florida, see, they trying to do stuff to hurt, but you can’t hurt me without hurting your own folks. So that’s what a lot of people kept on realizing.
KING:
That’s ridiculous. They trying to suppress they to turn things back. It didn’t make me feel good. I don’t feel good behind that. I think every person should have the right to vote and they shouldn’t be intimidated. We thought we had to overcome some of them things, but to look like they trying to repeat themselves.
BRADFORD:
Now they’re rolling back voting registration, suppression again. How many years later? 50, 60 years later. It’s crazy. That’s still an issue today, even more so. I hope people of color and poor people realize the importance of voting, like never before. They don’t understand how voting political participation makes a difference. I’m a stickler for that voter rights. One man, one vote, less money in the system and our mobilizing at the grassroots level. That’s the thing from the sixties, and I’m going to stick with that.
JOHNSON:
Regina Moorer sees a clear parallel between the days of the L.C.F.O and now.
MOORER:
It’s almost like we’re seeing history repeat itself. The white residents in Lowndes County at the time, they didn’t think that these people had overcome the fear. They thought that the fear was so deeply entrenched that even if they registered to vote, and there were hundreds of people who did register to vote and still did not show up, right. But for the ones that did, they didn’t expect the turnout numbers to be that great. And so when we see what’s happening in Georgia, once again, I think that the establishment or the Republicans did not expect enough people to turn out to flip Georgia, blue. And so what we see, just like what we saw in Lowndes County, the reaction is that once you stand in your truth and own your power, then those in power, those who seek to maintain a level of power over you, then they’re going to escalate their attempts to keep you in your place or to maintain the status quo.
JOHNSON:
But back in Lowndes County in 1966, life went on. That’s when Panther returns.
ELLIOTT:
As for what happened after the election, a lot of the SNCC folks had it out, to start organizing elsewhere.
MCGILL:
They would come in and out. They wasn’t staying here then anymore. Everybody had lives. Some of those people had master’s degrees and things. They went off to get themselves a job or they went into other areas. You see, they didn’t come here to live. Some stayed for months at the time. Some came in occasionally. Now Stokely came and stayed a while, and then he left. Bob Mants stayed in here for a long time. Then he moved back to Albany, Georgia and got him a house and worked down there, got married and had a family. But he later came back and moved in here and built him a house right up there. And he was here when he died.
ELLIOTT:
Here’s his wife, Joanne.
JOANNE MANTS, GUEST:
Now I have letters that I saved of his. I thought they were love letters, but they were love letters from him about this county. And he was real sweet. He would always say, “dear wife” and that sort of thing. And I was so in love. I thought they were just love letters just for me. But it was love letters for this county. He truly loved this county long before we got here.
JOHNSON:
Something Bob Mants and all the folks who worked with SNCC and the L.C.F.O knew, the work is never ever done.
MCGILL:
There will always be work to be done because there are people who not going to move any further than you move them. Then there are people who wait for you to move the plate in front of them. And then if they don’t be careful, they want you to bring the spoon to the mouth. But wait till they look up and see pie run and they can grab all the crumbs.
JOHNSON:
But even so, the crumbs here were nothing to sniff at. The L.C.F.O made real world impact, back then and now too.
MCGILL:
It helped to create pride in a lot of people. It was able to get people out of Shanice where they were seeing chickens under the house, and get into a home with running water in it. A lot of them were able to buy land.
ELLIOTT:
That legacy is something Regina Morris saw front and center through the eyes of her grandmother.
MOORER:
I was never socialized and introduced to politics as it being like Democrat or Republican. I was never taught to be either one of those, but to be more of an independent thinker when it comes to politics. And when you think about the Lowndes County Freedom Organization, that’s what it was. It was an independent political party. So I think it’s no surprise that my family taught me to think independently about politics, but also to think in terms of community when you think about politics. And to not think about political aims and political ambitions in a selfish way, but think about it in a holistic community way.
JOHNSON:
Others paid attention to the L.C.F.O’s principles too. Back then, and today.
CATHERINE COLEMAN FLOWERS, GUEST:
I was just a child. I had no idea who these people were. I found out later because I became a history teacher. So to me, they were like the Paul Reveres of their time. They were the ones who made freedom more of a reality than it was.
JOHNSON:
That’s Catherine Coleman Flowers, the Environmental Justice activist from Lowndes. She’s dedicated her life to shedding light on injustice and inequality. In one of the most vital, yet least glamorous areas of life, water and sanitation. When she started organizing in Lowndes, she stepped right into SNCC’S shoes.
FLOWERS:
When I look back at everything that has happened in terms of my work around sanitation, I have to give credit to the organizers and SNCC, who came to Lowndes County well before me and kind of laid the pattern. When we first start organizing and we had town hall meetings. And we set the town hall meetings up at the five churches, in the same order in which they opened their churches up for SNCC to meet in the 1960s. Because of the years of their family’s legacy of working in the community, people trusted them. And that’s how we were able to uncover what we uncover about the sanitation problem. That it wasn’t just that people could not afford wastewater treatment, that these systems are also failing and this is what failure looks like. And they trusted us to tell us this. And I think that’s largely because of the SNCC legacy and our way of doing things.
Even now when I’m in these academic halls and talking to people about research and how we should learn to listen to people in the community. I mean, when we talk about the principles of environmental justice, you talking about SNCC. That’s community engagement. The people have to be sitting at the table that are in the community. They should be the ones leading.
ELLIOTT:
Her fundamental takeaway from SNCC and the L.C.F.O’s work, education.
FLOWERS:
We need to get back to helping people to discern something as simple as the difference between a fact and an opinion. They don’t know. And the way we can get at that is by, I think teaching people what it means to be a citizen. And being a citizen means learning about all these documents that are the foundation for our laws.
JOHNSON:
Education is vital. That’s why we’re here. To ensure everyone knows just what it was that Stokely Carmichael, SNCC and the Lowndes County Freedom Organization pulled off not so far back in the day. To honor it. It was no small feat for anyone, anywhere, but especially for the black folks in rural Lowndes County, Alabama. Forget specific election outcomes. The L.C.F.O caused ripples that span the nation, and through time. Just look at the other Black Panther Party, the one out in Oakland. Its founders were so inspired directly by the work of the L.C.F.O that they decided to take the very same mascot.
ELLIOTT:
An idea arose in Stokley’s mind in Alabama that led to a speech in Berkeley, that gave birth to a movement. A movement for black power. A movement that’s still going, still evolving today.
MOORER:
And so we know that the aim for SNCC was to replicate the Lowndes County Freedom Organization with the Lowndes project throughout the South. So Lowndes County helped to shape the path in the movement of SNCC even after that 1966 election.
BRADFORD:
And you look at it like Lowndes County, during that time, the South had more black elected officials than anybody, in the country. And was based on the fact that they did it from pure grassroots. From the bottom up, one man, one vote, organizing, mobilizing, getting people and this stuff. But you got to work at it and not just throw money.
ELLIOTT:
This is the legacy of the L.C.F.O. The strategy, the principles, and also the results. Bringing disenfranchised voters into the fold and offering them the chance to vote for someone whose life looks like theirs.
MOORER:
Whether or not we actually see it realized in every black candidate that runs for office here. I do think that that spirit still lives on in terms of the way that people approach politics here.
JACKSON:
People lost their lives. So we can do it. And I think it’s very important to this day that we vote.
KING:
Some folks say the vote won’t make no difference, but it does. That’ll be a part of me as long as I live.
ELLIOTT:
You heard them. The work of the L.C.F.O is and always will be a part of them. And in many ways, that’s true for a lot of people, a lot more than you think.
JOHNSON:
This podcast is called Panther: Blueprint for Black Power for a very good reason. The L.C.F.O’s organizing laid the groundwork, not just for the Black Panther Party that lifted us in the 1970s and beyond, but also for new generations of organizers and activists. Those working in elections and beyond. And in turn, the Black Panther Party that emerged in Oakland influenced movements all around the country, even in the rural South. These movements were in constant conversation with one another, learning from one another, building on one another.
ELLIOTT:
The work of SNCC and the L.C.F.O is thriving today, whether you know it or not. In our next episode, you’ll hear from a few folks who are putting these lessons from Lowndes to good use. Who are still fighting some of these same fights. For the right to vote.
JOHNSON:
For black power.
ELLIOTT:
Next time on Panther.
DEJUANA THOMPSON, GUEST:
And I think that our jobs, or at least I see my job, is consistently creating an environment that doesn’t make people comfortable or that pushes them to have to ask a question. That asks the question of What is my responsibility?
(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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