Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama’s Black Belt
In Bloody Lowndes, author Hasan Kwame Jeffries tells the story of the independent political party called the Lowndes County Freedom Organization (LCFO) and it’s protest of black enfranchisement. The LCFO inspired black people throughout the country, and was used as an inspiration for both Black Power and the Black Panther Party for Self Defense. Bridging the gaping hole in the literature between civil rights organizing and Black Power politics, Bloody Lowndes offers a new paradigm for understanding the civil rights movement.
Reviews and endorsements of the publication include:
“Jeffries has written the book historians of the black freedom movement have been waiting for. His beautifully written account rescues Lowndes County from its role as merely a backdrop to ‘Black Power,’ to being one of the key battlegrounds for democracy in the United States. Here are local people whose local struggles have contributed mightily to the kind of politics we desperately need in the Obama age—the politics of ‘freedom democracy,’ a politics born in Reconstruction, rooted in social justice and human rights, and honed in the Alabama cotton belt.”—Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
“Jeffries is at the top of a very short list of ‘young lions’ paving the way for a new interpretation of the history of the Civil Rights-Black Power movement. His work on the legendary Lowndes County Freedom Organization is outstanding in terms of the breadth and carefulness of research, depth and clarity of conceptualization, organization and presentation of material, and the originality and the wealth of the results.”—Komozi Woodard, author of A Nation Within a Nation: Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and Black Power Politics
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