Mark Reviews Movies: LOWNDES COUNTY AND THE ROAD TO BLACK POWER

Lowndes County and the Road to Black Power, Greenwich Entertainment

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Review by Mark Dujsik | December 1, 2022

One of the defining events of the civil rights movement of the 1960s was the march from Selma, Alabama, to the state capital city of Montgomery. Geographically between those two cities and along the highway where the march proceeded, there's Lowndes County, a place that should be in the history books alongside the more-famous march. It's not, though, so here's Lowndes County and the Road to Black Power to serve as a detailed primer for the place's historical and political significance.

The documentary, directed by Geeta Gandbhir and Sam Pollard, frames Lowndes County as more than the middle ground on the path of another event. It's more akin to a crossroads, where things might have gone one way, offering up change that was a long time coming, or the way that it did, in which political power wasn't simply deferred but was overtly denied. It was enough to make even the most optimistic feel skeptical about the major leaders, goals, and tactics of the mainstream civil rights movement, and after years and decades and centuries of various forms of injustice, no one, really, could or should blame that shift in thinking.

Early on, Gandbhir and Pollard make it clear that their film won't be covering the same topics, taking the same perspective, or treading the same ground as so many history lessons about the era. Here, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is a figure in the background, working elsewhere and with certain powers-that-be in order to affect broad changes that other powers-that-be might easily evade. One of the major players in this effort—to register Black voters in Lowndes County during the 1960s—starts to talk a bit about such leadership, suggesting that it might have had, to put it about as mildly as she does, some oversights. She literally stops herself from saying anything more. "I might start telling the truth," she seems to warn herself about possibly saying what needs to be said in the wrong—or, maybe, the right—way.

Other key players, such as Ella Baker and Stokely Carmichael (later Kwame Ture), appear via archival interviews. For the most part, the directors do sit down to speak with former members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), who were on the front lines of the civil rights movement—from the sit-in protests at the start of the decade, to the Freedom Rides, to the efforts of voter registration in the Jim Crow South, to the rise of a Black Power movement in Lowndes County and beyond.

Almost the whole of the documentary's narrative is spoken to us from first-hand accounts of those who lived, worked, protested, and acted in this place and at that time. The film also features a pair of modern experts, a couple of historians, who provide some of the necessary connective tissue from the past to the narrative's present, as well as to our own time. It's the voices of those who were there, though, that make all the difference.

There are many voices here, reflecting the notion that, while a leader might serve as a guiding force or public presence for a movement, it's the people on the ground doing the work that really matter. Indeed, as Baker and others assert occasionally throughout this shared narration, people empowered to have faith in themselves and an idea might not need a leader at all.

That's essentially the philosophy of SNCC's activities in Lowndes County circa 1965 and leading up to the midterm elections the following year. Local John Hulett, a Black man and activist, began the voter registration efforts for African Americans in the county. They made up the overwhelming majority of the population, but before Hulett registered to vote there, not a single Black person was on the voter registry. Threats, as well as acts, of violence and the fear of losing employment, especially since sharecropping on white-owned plantations was a common career, kept that number at zero for some time.

When SNCC arrived, they started a grassroots effort to get more people registered to vote. There was no pressure: If someone said no, they'd accept that decision and stop by the next day to see if the person had a change of heart. It's a group effort that extends beyond even the structure of one organization.

The group eventually took up residence and a headquarters in Lowndes County, so as to avoid the dangerous back-and-forth travel on the highway at night. While they do the work to actually effect political change on the ground in this place, their story is overshadowed, misrepresented, or completely ignored, because it's the significant players, such as King and President Lyndon B. Johnson and the establishment of the Democratic Party, and the big events, mainly the passages of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, that received—and continue to receive—the bulk of the attention.

While it may be a matter of history, there are details and connections here that a good number of people might discover for the first time by way of this film. That's how readily and easily the facts of history can be dismissed or overlooked, but Lowndes County and the Road to Black Power sets out to reclaim at least this piece of the historical record. It does so with the potency of the memories and words of those who lived through that history.

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