Professor Hasan Jeffries discusses his book Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama’s Black Belt. We talk about what made this rural Alabama County such an important and complicated location in the Civil Rights struggle. How school desegregation and voting registration was still accomplished in the shadow of some of the era’s worst white terrorism. And how the Black Power slogan was born, and the Black Panther symbol took on meaning.
Hasan Kwame Jeffries is associate professor of history at The Ohio State University where he teaches courses on the Civil Rights and Black Power Movement. Professor Hasan is the author of Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama’s Black Belt, which tells the remarkable story of the African American freedom movement in Lowndes County, Alabama, the birthplace of Black Power. He is also the editor of Understanding and Teaching the Civil Rights Movement, a collection of essays by leading civil rights scholars and teachers that explores how to teach the Civil Rights Movement accurately and effectively.