3. Strain, Christopher Barry. “Civil Rights and ... - Freedom Archives

preferable to that of the Southern Chri:tisn Leadership Conference~ SNCC was "the
only organization that came into the county and began to move around that issue: getting
people registered to vote and developing something for themselves," according to John
Jackson, a Lowndes County resident who became state project director of SNCC in
Alabama.s The brat SNCC workers active in Lowndes included Robert Mama, Stokely
Carmichael, Judy Richardson, Willie Vaughn, and Scottie B. Smith .
Violence strengthened the black people of Lowndes County and forged their
determination to see justice. Viola Liuzzo, a white woman from Detroit and mother of
five children, was shuttling marchers from Montgomery to Selma when she was shot to
death in her car. Jonathan Daniels, a twenty-six-year-old white seminary student, was
gunned down in Hayneville on August 20, 1965 9
To mobilize voters, John Hulett, Jesse Favors, and other local blacks founded the
Lowndes County Christian Movement for Human Rights, which was quickly eclipsed by
its "political parallel," the Lowndes County Freedom Organization (L.CFO) . They began
organizing in October 1965 ; eight months later, in May, they were ready to enter the
political arena . Their immediate aim was to gain access to the levers of local government
with the initial elation of seven county officials in November 1966 ; then, it became to
sJohn Jackson, interviewed by Robert Wright, August 3, 1968, Hayneville, Alabama,
transcript, Ralph J . Bunche Oral History Collection (Civil Rights Documentation
Project), Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University .
9For more on Liuzzo, see Mary Stanton, Erom Selma to Sorrow : The Life and Dear_h_
of Viola Liuzzo (Athens : University of Georgia Press, 1998).
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