Located along the route of the historic Selma-Montgomery Voting Rights march, Mount Gillard is known as the "Mother Church of the Civil Rights Movement" in Lowndes County AL.
The state historic marker reads as follows:
"Mount Gillard
Baptist Church
The roots of this house of worship date to 1868 when 26 African American members of Mount Gilead Church left to form their own congregation. The present building was constructed in 1901, with several enlargements and renovations throughout the twentieth century.
Located along the route of the historic Selma-to-Montgomery March, Mount Gillard is known as the "Mother Church" of the Lowndes County civil rights movement. Its members were committed to equality and suffrage; theirs was the first church in the county to host civil rights demonstrations and mass meetings. The Lowndes County Christian Movement for Human Rights held its inaugural gathering in the church on March 28, 1965. The meeting occurred three days after the nearby murder of civil rights worker Viola Liuzzo. The group's political arm, the Lowndes County Freedom Organization recruited a slate of African American candidates for public office in the election of 1966. The Lowndes County Anti-Poverty Action Committee was also organized here. Mount Gillard congregants were active in each organization.
The church was listed on the Alabama Register of Historic Places in 2003.
Erected by the Alabama Historical Association
2016"
From the Birmingham News website: (
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"The Black Panther Party's deep Alabama roots: From 'Tent City' to black power
Updated on February 21, 2017 at 2:51 PM Posted on February 28, 2016 at 8:17 AM
By Connor Sheets
For many years, Nellie Nelson worked as a sharecropper, often picking 300 pounds of cotton a day in the fields of Junior Bryant, a white man whose land she paid to live on in Lowndes County, Alabama.
The 85-year-old African American woman describes the arrangement as akin to the bad old days of outright slavery, and recalls owing the Bryant family money at the end of many growing seasons, falling deeper into debt as the callouses on her hands grew ever thicker and years of her life slipped away.
The story of Nelson's early life is similar to those of many black people who lived in Lowndes County and elsewhere in the Deep South in the mid-20th century. But their lives rapidly began to change in the 1960s, as the heroes of the civil rights movement broke barriers across Dixie, with Lowndes serving as one of the largely forgotten epicenters of their efforts.
An impoverished rural county whose residents have for generations been predominantly black, its white leaders clung hard through the first two-thirds of the 20th Century to the post-Reconstruction Era's segregation, racism and socioeconomic systems of control. But, improbably, lowly Lowndes would in the mid-1960s play host to the birth of the Black Panther Party.
That genesis story is well-known by many who live in or near the county sandwiched between Selma and Montgomery, but it is often forgotten by the history books. The Lowndes black population's agitations of 1965 and 1966 at first left dozens of black residents homeless and marginalized, forced to live in makeshift encampments where they endured violent threats and attacks. But their courageous acts sparked a revolution that would swiftly sweep the nation.
Beginning in 1965, Nelson joined scores of fellow black Lowndes County residents in attending "mass meetings" at Mt. Gillard Baptist Church off U.S. Route 80. The house of worship was a natural gathering place for the local African-American community, and it doubled as a way to skirt a draconian injunction that barred more than two black people from speaking together in a public place.
"I was very interested in the mass meetings because I wanted to learn all I could and do all I can because we needed better assistance here in Lowndes County and we needed to get together," Nelson recalled earlier this month.
Former sharecropper Nellie Nelson lived in Lowndes Country during the difficult period when many of the county's white residents kicked black families off their land in retaliation for registering to vote.
Within the relatively safe confines of that humble country church, they absorbed lessons about the goals of the struggle for equal rights and how to organize for change delivered via speeches by black civil rights leaders like Stokely Carmichael and Huey Newton.
Today, these giants of civil rights history are remembered as two of the founding fathers of the Black Panther Party, which many believe originated in Oakland, California in October 1966. But the true roots of the Black Panther Party go back to the poor, rural county Nelson has called home her entire life.
Right to vote
Lowndes County first emerged as a civil rights nerve center in the summer of 1965, when a young Carmichael -who had recently coined the term "black power" and would go on to become a patriarch of the Black Panthers - was sent there by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) to attempt to register black voters.
Before the voting drive got underway in tandem with the Lowndes County Christian Movement for Human Rights, only a handful of black people - who had been inspired by a small-scale, locally organized registration drive that began that January - were registered to vote in the county. This despite the fact that more than 80 percent of its approximately 15,000 residents were African-American.
As part of this effort, Carmichael and the SNCC founded the Lowndes County Freedom Organization (LCFO) shortly after his arrival in the county in an attempt to register blacks to vote and nominate African-American candidates for local office.
It was the LCFO that first used the famous image of the coiled black panther that would go on to become the namesake of the national Black Panther Party. Newton would later say that the black panther symbolized the spirit of America's maligned black population, who after being backed into a corner for so long were finally fighting back against their oppressors.
By Aug. 6, 1965, when President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 into law, codifying the right of Americans of all races to vote, only about 250 of Lowndes County's more than 12,000 black residents had passed literacy tests and become registered voters.
The impacts of the historic law were not immediately felt in Dixie. The poll tax was not specifically ruled unconstitutional in Alabama until a federal court ruled on the matter on March 3, 1966, and even then access to the electoral process was severely limited in much of the state.
In Lowndes County - which had long been known as "Bloody Lowndes" due to its reputation for racially driven brutality - white people angered by the new paradigm instigated race riots and wrought violence against many African-Americans who registered to vote. During that period, several movement figures of both races were killed by those who wished to enforce the existing order.
'Tent City'
Adding insult to grave injury, many black residents of Lowndes County were in a situation much like Nelson's, renting their land and homes from white men. In order to punish blacks who registered to vote, many landowners kicked them off their land.
"When the civil rights [movement] started, and the mass meetings were going on, I started going to the mass meetings," said Nelson, who retains a youthful energy and moves quickly with the assistance of a cane, though her neck is badly crooked after decades of hard labor.
"After going to the mass meetings, living on this man's place, he wanted to put me off because I was going to the mass meetings - but still I was working for him - and I don't see why because working on the farm is not easy. Picking cotton is not easy. Hoeing is not easy. But you have to do what you have to do."
Nelson spoke to AL.com in the living room of her Lowndesboro home, which prominently features a large framed photograph of President Barack Obama - whom she voted for in both 2008 and 2012 - and his family hanging above the couch, surrounded by pictures of her children and grandchildren.
She was fortunate enough to have relatives in Michigan who sent money for her to purchase land and build that house after she and her family were evicted, but many other black Lowndes residents were not so lucky. Between 10 and 20 families were forced to move into what came to be known as "Tent City," one of several such encampments across the South that blacks were forced to move into during this tumultuous period.
Lowndes County's Tent City was an assemblage of large, sturdy military-surplus tents donated by the National Guard to the newly homeless residents, who set up camp just off U.S.-80 for many months. They largely relied on the generosity of friends and strangers both local and across the nation for food and other necessities, according to Anthony Bates, park ranger at the Lowndes County Interpretive Center, an impressive National Park Service museum a stone's throw from the site where the tent city once stood.
Life in Tent City was difficult, and the men and women who lived there often endured threats and other intimidation tactics at the hands of white residents who disagreed with their cause.
"There were shots that were fired into the tents - or I should say really into the site - several times throughout the week," Bates explained. "Young men had to grow up very quickly, and so if you were 10, 11, 12 years old, you might learn how to shoot a shotgun just because you were living in Tent City, and you never know what could happen on a nightly basis."
But for many people, there was no other option, and Tent City is a specter that still hangs over Lowndes County to this day - a reminder of the cruelty its white residents perpetrated on their fellow citizens just 50 years ago this year. Nelson, who offers homemade pound cake to everyone who enters her home, still remembers what many of her friends went through during that period.
"God bless their souls, they had to move and had to have tents and live over there in Tent City, and that's where so many moved," she said. "But God bless us, we found somewhere we could move, and we didn't have to go to Tent City, my children and all of us."
The Panthers' first election
Despite the advent of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the abuse black residents suffered for registering to vote in Lowndes County, the new black voting bloc would have no measurable impact on the outcome of the November 1966 state and local election.
This was more than a year-and-a-half after thousands of protesters marched through the heart of Lowndes County en route from Selma to Montgomery, passing Mt. Gillard along the way. The civil rights tide was rolling across the American south, and black empowerment was taking root in many Alabama communities.
As they always had, the Lowndes Democratic and Republican parties proposed all-white slates of candidates for a variety of offices in the black-majority county. The LCFO and other advocates coordinated a slate of politicians who ran for county-level office on the new Black Panther ticket in the election, and "Lowndes County Negroes [were] serious about taking over their county," according to a 1966 SNCC newsletter.
But none of the candidates won their races, a result that led many black Lowndes County black residents to question the election's legitimacy.
"You have to think about what was going on in the area. Look back at Tent City, this location. If you support this new organization, if you support this movement and you are losing your job, you are losing your home, it makes it kind of intimidating to maybe go out and vote, especially for people who look like you," Bates explained.
"Also, too, there were some of the votes that weren't properly counted. Now I'll be honest, I wasn't there when everything was counted and things were put into place, but you can tell with just the difference in votes, there were some things that weren't in place."
But over time, black Lowndes residents gained increasing power over political outcomes in the county, and three of the five current members of the Lowndes County Commission are black, a sign of how far the community has come in the past five decades.
'A long way to go'
Yet today, Nelson, Bates and others in tune with the black communities of Lowndes County and beyond believe that appreciation for the progress made during the civil rights era has fallen precipitously in recent years. They are particularly concerned that young black people have lost touch with the struggles of their forebears and the gains they fought so hard to make.
Lowndes County Commission Chairman Robert Harris, who is African-American, says that though many strides have been made and obstacles overcome, black people in Alabama and across the nation still face many problems and inequities that must be addressed.
"The question remains: Why are we segregated in our school system, why are we still segregated in our churches when we all believe in God? Why is there such a difference in earnings when we do the same jobs as others?" he asked.
"As far as people being put off their property, that's not happening anymore because people either bought their property or moved from the South further north. So they have gotten past the Tent City type of deal, but we still have a long way to go to reach an equal playing field. We as a race don't want a handout; we just want an opportunity to start out on an equal playing field."
Nellie's son, Arthur Nelson Sr., currently serves as head of the Lowndes County Friends of the Civil Right Movement, an organization devoted to the county's civil rights history that is working to build a monument honoring Tent City. He vividly remembers going with his mother to the mass meetings at Mt. Gillard as a young boy, and says that it is vitally important for the lessons of the civil rights era to be passed down.
"If you don't know your history, you have a strong way of repeating it, and I think what has happened is we've become too complacent with the way things are now," he said.
"And we forget that there were times when we couldn't walk into McDonald's and buy a hamburger, and because we have all this freedom now, we just lose track or we forget from whence we've come. And that way our folks, and especially our new generation, they don't realize how important it is to keep the dream alive; they don't realize how important it is to keep pressing forward."
The way to combat that complacency and ignorance, Nellie Nelson believes, is to educate young people about civil rights history and the gains her generation made, and to emphasize the importance of continuing to strive for equality and better lives.
"Them that are old enough, they think about it. But you have to teach th