I discovered these lynchings while conducting research for my dissertation about the civil rights movement in Lowndes County, and I was struck by the fact that none of the white people who had committed these atrocities hid their identities. The brother Will and Jesse Powell in 1917. The lynching of Elmore Bolling was neither the first nor the last that occurred in Lowndes County during the century after emancipation. They found that Bolling was simply, and I quote, 'Too prosperous as a Negro farmer.' An NAACP report documenting the lynching described Bolling's body as having been 'Riddled by shotgun and pistol shots.' Clarke Luckie, one of Bolling's white neighbors admitted publicly to having orchestrated the murder, and justified his actions by claiming that Bolling had insulted his wife over the telephone.īut NAACP investigators uncovered the truth behind the killing. Hasan Kwame Jeffries: On December 4, 1947, Elmore Bolling, a 30-year-old Black businessman in Lowndes County, Alabama, was murdered in cold blood near his home.
