Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama's Black Belt
“Bloody Lowndesis an important book. The author's careful analysis of the 1966 election is both readable and quite useful to understanding the importance of the moment.”-EverythingAlabama.com,"Without succumbing to the temptation to paint the struggle for black equality in broad strokes, Jeffries isolates the locus of the issues that framed the movement and uses these to explain how, through a variety of social networks, the movement spread regionally and ultimately nationally...is an exceptional piece of scholarship. Jeffries has produced an important work that will unquestionably reshape the debate over the origins and legacy of the civil rights and black power movements for years to come."-The Journal of American History,“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 ofFreedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination“Excellent scholarship, important history, and an invaluable contribution to understanding current and future “conversations” on race and politics in a dynamically changing political environment.”-Charles V. Hamilton,co-author ofBlack Power: The Politics of Liberation“Jeffries’sBloody Lowndesis an important contribution to the literature of the African American freedom struggle. Jeffries reveals the deep historical roots of black struggles against racial and economic oppression in the Black Belt. He makes clear that the civil rights reforms of the 1960s were insufficient responses to the ‘freedom politics’ that spawned the Lowndes County Freedom Organization—the first Black Panther Party.”-Clayborne Carson,author ofIn Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s