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.
How will the first election with an all-Black party end? It’s Election Day, 1966, and the Voting Rights Act is being put to the test. The Lowndes County Freedom Organization’s candidates have canvassed, campaigned and called on Black voters to show up to the polls for the Black Panther - at no small danger to themselves. In the fourth episode of Panther, the ballots are counted. Who will come out on top?
“There comes a time you have to make up your mind. Are you going to keep on being in bondage? Or are you going to break yourself out of it? Sometimes life is not worth living, if you’re going to live in chains.” - Lillian McGill, secretary of the Lowndes County Christian Movement for Human Rights
Below you’ll find a full transcript of the episode.
TRANSCRIPT:
ARCHIVAL TOWNSPERSON 1:
The Freedom Organization in this county, we thought that the Democratic or Republican Party, either one of them had become corrupted. That we were organizing a political organization here in this county that isn’t corrupted.
ROY S. JOHNSON, HOST:
Black folks in Lowndes County, Alabama, rural, left behind Lowndes County had decided to form their own political party, separate from the Democrats and Republicans that had shut them out.
EUNICE ELLIOTT, HOST:
Two sides of the same racist coin.
JOHNSON:
You know that’s right, Eunice. And this new Black party had a bad mascot, the Black Panther. The party also had a name, the Lowndes County Freedom Organization. The next thing a party needs? Candidates.
ELLIOTT:
And this is where that nominating convention comes in. The Voting Rights Act protected a lot of things, but the right to participate in primaries wasn’t one of them. This nominating convention would be the first time most of these people would vote.
JOHNSON:
Now, pastor Aaron McCall was born and raised in Lowndes. He was only 14 on the day of that nominating convention. Not old enough, of course, to vote, yet he remembers it well.
PASTOR AARON MCCALL, GUEST:
It was a euphoric day. I mean, remember James Brown had a song that says, “Say it loud. I’m black and I’m proud.” I mean, that was a very, very prideful day for us here. And the reason they had had to have that nominating committee here was that the law had said that it had to be held with so many feet of the courthouse or in the courthouse itself. And since the courthouse was already occupied by those who denied, obviously the white supremacists that they want us there, they selected this because we were close enough within the boundaries of what the law said.
ELLIOTT:
What Pastor McCall is alluding to is a conflict over where the nominating convention could be held. Now, the whites in power in Lowndes County, they looked for any way they could to stymie the LCFO’s efforts. Alabama law dictated that nominees had to be elected in a vote held at a public polling site, and the only place that qualified in Lowndes was the county courthouse. And you know they were not going to let the LCFO hold their convention there.
JOHNSON:
So folks are going to love this Eunice. John Hulett, that president of the LCFO was able to, shall we say, negotiate a solution. He told the county sheriff, the LCFO would be having its convention at the courthouse come hell or high water. Now, the law told Hulett they would do nothing to keep black folks safe. If violence broke out, the sheriff said the LCFO was on its own. Hulett said that was just fine. Black folks were comfortable protecting themselves by any means necessary.
ELLIOTT:
Now, the Justice Department didn’t really like the idea of a shootout in Alabama. So after some back and forth with the state government, it was decided the LCFO would not hold its nominating convention at the courthouse, but they’d have it just down the road in Hayneville, another town in Lowndes County at First Missionary Baptist Church.
JOHNSON:
That’s Pastor Aaron McCall. That man with all the memories of the nominating convention, that’s his church today.
ELLIOTT:
I’m Eunice Elliott.
JOHNSON:
And I’m Roy S. Johnson. 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)
MCCALL:
I mean people from everywhere, people on canes, people were on crutches. People, I mean, they were just determined to make their voices known and heard.
ELLIOTT:
That day in May, the church yard was full to the brim.
MCCALL:
Man, it was hundreds of people, hundreds of people there. They started early in the day and the afternoon. The candidates was around. I mean, there were people who at the risk of their own lives. There were threats out against people showing up. The white people was out in their cars driving by, looking out and seeing who was there. And a lot of people were kicked out of their homes and stuff like that. A lot of the professionals, the teachers and so forth, those who were brave enough to come out and be a part of the movement, they lost their job. They were let go from school system and so forth. But they held on. They stuck it out, and they went on from the time the polls open to the time the poll closed. It was hundreds of people all day long. It was a steady stream.
ELLIOTT:
That steady stream filed from the line right into the voting booth.
MCCALL:
Then they would go over to the tables over here, okay, and when they get that, get over here, they would find their names again on this voters roll. And they would check off, and they would hand a paper ballot. And some of the candidates was standing behind the table there where they were actually voting. And every time one of them voted, and that was their first time voting right? 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 it. I’ve done it.”
ELLIOTT:
Now, just try to put yourself there in that dirt yard. Imagine what that choice must have meant. You’re risking your livelihood and your life to make your mark on that ballot. Here’s Regina Moorer.
REGINA MOORER, GUEST:
So you can imagine when they were having this nominating convention in May of 1966 that there was some excitement there. You have these local residents who want to stand up and put their name on a ballot to challenge the status quo, to challenge white supremacy in Lowndes County. So it wasn’t an easy decision necessarily politically. It wasn’t easy, but they felt that the time had come where they had to do something.
JOHNSON:
By the end of the day, seven folks were selected to represent the Lowndes County Freedom Organization Party. And they didn’t look like any party slate anyone had ever seen, not in Lowndes County.
ELLIOTT:
For sheriff, Mr. Sidney Logan Jr.
JOHNSON:
For coroner, Mr. Henry Ross.
ELLIOTT:
For tax assessor, Ms. Alice Moore.
JOHNSON:
For tax collector Mr. Frank Miles Jr.
ELLIOTT:
And lastly, three nominees for Board of Education, Mr. Robert Logan, Mr. John Henson, and Mrs. Willie Mae Strickland. Now, I can’t stress enough just how radical of a slate this was. The names on the ballot didn’t have long resumes to qualify them for the job. They were for and from the community. And that was what mattered. This was a key philosophy for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee or SNCC, but it was far from what the SCLC, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference was advocating for.
MOORER:
The thing that SNCC was adamant about was that the people who were going to be on the ballot shouldn’t necessarily be the elites. Shouldn’t necessarily be the most educated person. And so that’s where you saw that sort of divide between SNCC and SCLC and even like some of the black elites trying to determine and articulate who’s qualified to run for office. But the Lowndes County Freedom Organization said, “No, we need to look like the community that we want to represent.” There was still overwhelmingly a lot of residents in this county who did not have college educations. So why would we assume that just because you have a college education that you’re the most qualified person to represent these communities? And so Lowndes County Freedom Organization wanted their slate of candidates to look like the people that they were seeking to represent. Because the idea was that if the voters can see themselves in you, then they’re more likely going to support you.
JOHNSON:
This tension over which Black candidates belong on the ballot is one that stretches down through time, even to today. Should it be regular folk who live and work in the community, or people with the name recognition needed to bring in additional campaign cash?
MOORER:
And I think that was a part of what made the Black community really rally behind these candidates because these were not people who were deemed to be like the elites. They were the best candidate because they spoke to the constituents, they spoke to the needs of the community, and they understood the community, and they looked like the community.
ELLIOTT:
And once the names were set to go on the ballot, it was now time to get to work, campaigning to get those names out into the community and getting folks excited to vote.
MOORER:
And so there was this massive effort to get voters registered in the county.
ELLIOTT:
That operation looked a lot like what you’re probably used to, canvassing, knocking on doors, a whole lot of conversations on a whole lot of porches.
LILLIAN MCGILL, GUEST:
When you go out there, some people is receptive of you, and some you have to convince, and some you’re never going to convince. So you make your mark by trying. But we take certain neighborhoods, and we would go in those neighborhoods for that day.
JOHNSON:
Registering didn’t go quite as smoothly as planned. Remember, the Voting Rights Act was supposed to eliminate all the BS that had for decades gotten in the way, like poll taxes and jelly bean counting. You know what I’m talking about. This election was the very first test of that law. It was time to see how the law got put into action. In the beginning, Lillian McGill says, those enforcing the new law were just about as bad as you think.
MCGILL:
The first day, they only went through eight applications. Nobody passed. The next time, they went through 16, only two people passed. And the next time, we decided then we needed the federal register. They had decided federal registers had to come in.
ELLIOTT:
Of course, it wasn’t until the Feds entered the scene that Black folks were finally able to register, finally able to exercise their legal rights.
JOHNSON:
Aside from LCFO’s nominating convention, there was something else big going on. In May of 1966, Stokely Carmichael was elected chairman of SNCC. He succeeded John Lewis, yes, that John Lewis. Back then, the future congressman was known for supporting non-violence just like his mentor Dr. King. So that election marks more than a change in title for Stokely. It was a revolutionary turning point for SNCC in its philosophy. Think about what we just told you that debate about who belongs on the ballot. That question drove a wedge between SNCC and the SCLC.
ELLIOTT:
And that wasn’t the only thing. As much as Stokely and SNCC believed that a third party was the way to gain control of the county to claim Black power, the SCLC believed the opposite.
MOORER:
There was this difference between the SCLC and with SNCC. There were members and leaders of the SCLC, particularly Hosea Williams and Albert Turner who were telling Black voters in the Alabama Black Belt to not vote for third party candidates, to vote for the Democratic Party. And there were members of the SCLC who did a tour leading up to the November 1966 election because this was going to be like the test of the Voting Rights Act. So this was going to be the election that proved whether or not the Voting Rights Act actually had teeth.
ELLIOTT:
As for the question of how to test if the VRA had teeth.. SNCC and SCLC had different answers, and it definitely caused some ripples between the two.
MOORER:
So members of the SCLC toured the Alabama Black Belt. Dr. King was on this tour with them. Coincidentally, they skipped Lowndes County. They did not include Lowndes County on their tour because they were already basically bashing like Bob Mants and Stokely Carmichael saying that “You’re setting these Black voters up for failure. You’re telling them that they can form a viable third party to challenge the Democratic Party in the state. And instead you should be telling them to vote for the Democratic Party.” But members of SNCC continued to instill in the voters in Lowndes County that you can have your own third party, you can be a viable candidate, and you can have your own nominating committee. Select your candidates, get them on the ballot.
JOHNSON:
What you might not know yet is the national reach of the LCFO’s work. Stokely Carmichael was by now a national figure, controversial in some circles of the movement, a movement now in transition, but well known in all. Beyond his work in Lowndes, he was on the speaking circuit, stirring crowds all around the country, crowds hungry for his message, hungry for Black power.
STOKELY CARMICHAEL:
I maintained that every civil rights bill in this country was passed for white people, not for Black people. I knew that I could vote, and that that wasn’t a privilege. It was my right. Every time I tried, I was shot, killed or jailed, beaten or economically deprived. So somebody had to write a bill for white people to tell them, “When a Black man comes to vote, don’t bother him.” That bill again was for white people, not for Black people. “You need a civil rights bill, not me. I know I can live where I want to live.” So that the failure to pass a civil rights bill isn’t because of Black power, isn’t because of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, is not because of the rebellions that are occurring in the major cities. It is incapability of whites to deal with their own problems inside their own communities. That is the problem of the failure of the Civil Rights Bill.
ELLIOTT:
And it wasn’t just Stokely speaking circuit that spread these ideas. What sometimes gets lost in the history books is how all of these localized movements were interconnected with one another. Members of the LCFO themselves would travel to nearby states to help get more Black voters organized. That was the whole mission of SNCC and the SCLC to facilitate and encourage collaboration and coordination. And there was something else that these localized groups used to follow each other, not just in the South but across the nation. It was a newspaper aptly named The Movement. SNCC published it in an effort to help its members on the West Coast and all around the country stay up-to-date on what was happening in the south.
JOHNSON:
Those old copies of The Movement are ink stained windows into the work happening in Lowndes County in the 1960s. It’s also some of the most honest journalism to be found from those days. Terry Cannon, the white snake field organizer, got his start as a writer with The Movement.
TERRY CANNON, GUEST:
I went to San Francisco and was working in a project organizing against urban removal, which was basically, as you know, negro removal unsuccessfully, I should say. But the person in charge started a Friends of SNCC Committee for the Bay Area. And he asked me to come down and start a newsletter for the Friends of SNCC. And in doing that, I became a SNCC Field secretary for I think it was $20 a month, and turned that newsletter into The Movement, which was a national newspaper that ran for oh until the early seventies, and was distributed nationwide, and covered most of the major movements going on in the United States.
JOHNSON:
You’ve probably heard the names of two of The Movement’s readers, Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, the two men who introduced the Black Panther to Oakland and launched the party as we know it today.
CANNON:
Stokely Carmichael came out to Oakland to talk to people, to Black students, and nobody was interested. The only people who were interested were Bobby Seale and Huey Newton. And they said, “That’s a great idea. That’s what we need here.” But of course, their way of going about it was much different. It was sort of like trying to organize SNCC first in Oakland and then trying to organize a mass party.
JOHNSON:
Here’s one of the Black Panther founders himself, Bobby Seale. Even 50 years later, he still had a clear idea of what he was trying to do back in the day.
BOBBY SEALE:
I wanted to make and do organize a political electoral machine in this city, in community complex, and in cities all across America. That’s what my goal objective was.
ELLIOTT:
Sound familiar?
JOHNSON:
The real unifying factor between these movements Eunice was a new concept, a concept coined by Stokely Carmichael, the idea of Black power. It was an idea he conceived through his work with SNCC, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, and the LCFO.
CANNON:
And they talked about it, and they weren’t too sure how it would sound. And Stokely used it in a speech, and the response was so positive, people cheering and applauding it that there was no way you could avoid it from that point on. I mean, it wasn’t like it came out, and dribbled, and nobody responded to it. It absolutely symbolized where the movement was at that point. They corresponded with a rejection of SNCC and the Civil Rights Movement in general, the subjection to the whims, desires and racist positions of white liberals who were all fine with us registering voters as long as we voted Democratic.
ELLIOTT:
A good bit of the Black Panther’s inspiration came directly from Lowndes carried out west in the pages of The Movement. Lillian McGill will tell you.
MCGILL:
The one in Oakland started out wanting. They heard about us. The Black Panther was there to be a emblem for us because they had to have one. And when it got all out, how fearful whites were about it. ‘Cause the characteristic of a Black Panther, they thought we were out to kill and do white folk. That was not it. You just had to have a mascot. Huey Newton group decided that they wanted to be a part of it. But we were never a Black Panther party. We were the Freedom Organization with the Black Panther. And I want that distinguished.
JOHNSON:
A lot of the folks in Lowndes were keen to differentiate between the Black Panther Party of Oakland and the LCFO’s work in Lowndes County.
ELLIOTT:
There were certainly some distinguishing factors there, Roy, but they weren’t as different as you might think. Here’s Regina Moorer again.
MOORER:
Some of the things that SNCC organizers mentioned when they were rallying and mobilizing voters in Lowndes County, they asked them to think about if you control your county government, you also control like your education systems. You control like your local county healthcare system. What did the Black Panther party do? They were into education programs. They were into healthcare programs for members of the community. So there are a lot of similarities between the things that they wanted to provide for Black communities. They just had different approaches and different approaches about the way that they wanted to go about getting those things accomplished.
ELLIOTT:
There was one thing in particular that a lot of folks highlighted, and they wanted to be separate from. That was the Black Panther Party’s supposed penchant for violence. And they said the LCFO wasn’t about it. But here’s the thing. Even though the right to arms was certainly not a part of the LCFO’s platform, no one in Lowndes was opposed to self-defense. The LCFO might have been a nonviolent party, but its members, well, they did what they had to do to keep themselves safe.
MCGILL:
Well, I had a gun. I never said I was nonviolent. I don’t pick up and go do violence, but I protect myself. My child went to school at Hayneville. Somebody put the word out “Them Ns better not come over after our schools and be in the road” and sent somebody by here to tell me and make sure I know. I said, “Thank you for being so nice, but go back and tell them it won’t be only the Black folks blood running in the street.” So I put mine on the bus, and the rest of them took theirs. I put mine on the bus and let him go. They came and say, “He’ll be safe.”
JACKSON:
We had to because things was, I mean, you just didn’t know, and you didn’t take anything for granted. We were just walking around scared and just like a time bomb ready to go off it. They bothered us. We were ready for them. And sometimes my husband and them used to just ride around and just shoot too. Just let them know that we could shoot too, just shoot. But they rode around with their guns in the back of their trucks too, to let them know they weren’t scaring us with that. We were not afraid. I’m going to tell you, we were not afraid.
ELLIOTT:
SNCC organizers had policies in place for safety too, even for something as simple as driving down the highway. Here’s Terry Cannon again. He wasn’t only a field organizer. He also served as Stokely Carmichael’s bodyguard in Lowndes.
CANNON:
When we drove around, Stokely never carried a gun. The only time I understand he was forced to was when he visited Fannie Lou Hamer, and she insisted. She says, “No, you don’t come into my house without a pistol.” But other than that, he didn’t. So when we would, we drove several times to Selma, and I was driving, which put him in the odd position of being my bodyguard because in SNCC, nobody was allowed to pass the car on the left because they would shoot the driver, and then everybody would get killed. So if they tried to pass on the right, the person who was in the passenger seat had to hold his, put his body up against the window so that he’d catch a bullet in case somebody tried to ambush them. That was sort of the SNCC procedure. So Stokely in that case was in the passenger seat, and I was doing the driving.
MCGILL:
Everybody’s afraid because at that time, you’d have to understand the white people, most of them had trucks, and they would have gun racks in a truck. It wasn’t fear that I’m going to run somewhere. Everybody tell you that. They didn’t think I had fear, but I had common sense enough to know you could die, and people had died. So anybody could go loose off the deep end anytime they want to when they’ve been killing people at random and nothing happened. It comes a time that you have to make up your mind are you going to come or keep on being in bondage, or you going to break yourself out of it? Sometimes life is not worth living if you going to live and change.
ELLIOTT:
Each of the two groups fundamentally stood for bucking the status quo. Katherine Coleman Flowers is a renowned environmental justice and climate activist today, but back in the sixties, she was just a little girl in Lowndes County watching the movements change the world around her.
CATHERINE COLEMAN FLOWERS, GUEST:
I think that the difference between what was happening in Oakland, and around the country, and what was happening in Lowndes County, I think they were both movements that probably struck fear into the status quo because it was changing the status quo. And they both were about self-defense, whether you were in Oakland or whether you were in Lowndes County because the history of racialized violence goes back to the beginning of us coming to this country. So I think the difference is that one was an urban perspective and the other one was a rural perspective. It may have been different if Lowndes County had been in Oakland or in another city versus being in a rural community. So you have to organize different in a rural community.
JOHNSON:
Urban or rural, city or country, the idea of Black power swept through them both.
MOORER:
When people talk about what Black power means and what that meant even for the Lowndes County Freedom Organization, I think the idea was to instill in people a sense of owning who they are as individuals, and owning their collective power, as well as their individual power. So the idea of Black power meant that yes, you are a Black person, but that does not mean that you are a person who deserves to be discriminated against, you are a person who deserves to be terrorized. I think Stokely Carmichael is actually the one quoted in the book where he says that, “True Black power is when you have people in office who draw their power from the collective community, and are willing to represent the interest of the community.”
So it was this idea of making sure that people recognize that Black power actually meant something collective, and not necessarily something on an individual level, and not necessarily power for the sole purpose of gaining elected office, but for empowering your communities. So when he talked about Black power in terms of a school board, that meant that now you’re going to have equitable access to quality textbooks, quality schools, and transportation for your children, not just that you have people on the school board just say you have a Black school board member.
ELLIOTT:
Stokely might have been building towards the idea of Black power in Lowndes, but he spoke it into being in the state next door.
MOORER:
While this party is organizing and preparing for the November 1966 election, we saw Stokely Carmichael leave Lowndes and go to Mississippi to participate in the Meredith March there. And that was the first time he actually uttered the phrase “Black power.” I mean, what he was building here in Lowndes County was essentially Black power, right, but to actually say it and to get the crowd fired up ... And when he says, “What do we want? Black power?” And now you have all these people energized, and then now you have the media like, “Is this really what you’re trying to do?”
JOHNSON:
Now, Black power might be contentious in the zeitgeist today, but in 1966, those two words put one after the other were even more incendiary and brand new.
MOORER:
And so now you have people wondering, “Well, what are you doing for this Lowndes project? Is this really what you want to do? Do you really want to tell these people that their rallying cry is going to be like this notion of Black power?” So there were even some candidates who were Lowndes County Freedom Organization candidates who were a little bit concerned. Some of them wrote to him like, “What are you doing in Mississippi? What are you doing with all this Black power stuff?” So there was even some hesitancy among some of them initially like, “Do we really want to market ourselves as being this party that’s for Black power?” And so you start to see the Lowndes County freedom organization start to embrace this notion of Black power. But then you still see this rift within the Black community where some of the Black residents were not necessarily on board with this idea of saying that this is the party that’s going to have a rally cry for Black power.
And I think some of that was social and economic pressure. So you had even some of those who were considered to be the Black elites in the county. They were fearful because of economic, social, and political pressures to not necessarily get behind not just a rallying cry about Black power, but also to not necessarily align themselves with the Lowndes County Freedom Organization.
JOHNSON:
All of these national movements, all of the internal strife, all of the danger, all of the threats to life, they all led to November 8th, 1966, to election day.
MOORER:
Frederick Douglass he said, “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did, and never will.” So the residents in Lowndes County saw that the power structure, meaning that the white power structure in Lowndes County was not going to give up their power. They were not going to concede without a fight.
JOHNSON:
That’s after the break.
ELLIOTT:
Viola Bradford was in Lowndes that day to cover the election. She spent the entire day side by side with Stokely Carmichael.
BRADFORD:
He was up encouraging, very encouraging and upbeat, telling the people, “Come on now,” just laughing and very ... He’s very charismatic. So he was up, up, up the whole day trying to get people to get up. He was on his job just like that all day from one polling place to another, one house to the other encouraging people, making speeches. “Y’all go to the polls.” We went by this man’s house. He was 85 years old and blind sitting on his porch ready for us to take him to the polls. He had never voted. His parents were slaves. And so we all day long, that’s what we did from poll to poll. By that night falls, things start changing. We saw Blacks being on the back of pickups trucks been taken to the polling place. I don’t know if they were told who to vote for, what to vote for. I don’t know.
MOORER:
What we saw when the white residents saw the high turnout numbers, then those who were sharecroppers, they were rounded up by the people, the white landowners who they sharecropped for, right? And then they were taken to their precinct to vote with the landowner standing like right in the booth behind them, or watching them to make sure that they’re voting for the Democratic Party.
JOHNSON:
Tensions were high, as were the stakes. Violence elevated as the day wore on. Spirits were high at the start of the day, but then truckloads of sharecroppers, Black folks started rolling in. Black folks brought in to vote for white candidates, Viola remembers.
BRADFORD:
It was evening because the polls closed at six, something like that seven. It was dark, and I think they were winning. I remember that the candidates then by evening fall, they were losing. And I remember seeing people on pickup trucks with white men driving their sharecroppers to the polls. And I’m saying, “Oh, that was kind of strange.”
ELLIOTT:
All the miles walked during canvasing, the mass meetings held under threat of bombings or even shootouts, the homes lost to racist landlords, months of hard work, life-threatening danger, and collective organizing. And it all came down to this, staring down that same intimidation they’d fought so hard against.
MCGILL:
We had a slogan, “Pull up lever for the Black Panther, then go home.” We knew we had enough people to do it, but we didn’t know who was going to vote how, because we’d been down that road where people tell you one thing and do something else.
JOHNSON:
At the end of that long November day in 1966, not a single LCFO candidate had won.
BRADFORD:
And I remember the tides turned, and they lost. 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. But it was not enough. When the day was over, not one of the seven candidates of the Lowndes County Freedom Organization had defeated his white opponent. Sheriff Frank Ryles, a Democrat finished ahead of Freedom candidate Sidney Logan, 2,320 to 1,643. Other candidates running under the Black Panther label lost by margins ranging from 273 to 677.
ELLIOTT:
It was no doubt a pretty severe blow to all those who work so hard or organize. But Joanne Mants stands by their work.
JOANNE MANTS, GUEST:
You fight for the right for people to make a decision. Now those decisions may not be what my vision is, and their visions may have been different from the beginning. You never know, but you have to work with people where you find them.
JOHNSON:
This isn’t where our story ends though. What came after for the people of Lowndes? Well, that’s next time on Panther.
KING:
It doesn’t make me feel good. I don’t feel good behind that. I think every person should have the right to vote, and it shouldn’t be intimidated. We thought we had to overcome some of them. But it look like they trying to repeat themselves.
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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)
Pod People transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a Pod People contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of Pod People’s programming is the audio record.