

Carmichael was not the only one growing impatient that year. Local activist John Hulett, a founder and leader of the Lowndes County Christian Movement for Human Rights, began seeking assistance from SNCC after being repeatedly refused help by the SCLC. Carmichael and other SNCC volunteers joined with Hulett's fledgling organization, which was also trying to register black voters. The two groups redoubled their efforts following the murder of Jonathan Myrick Daniels, a white Episcopal seminarian and SNCC volunteer, on August 20. Given the extent of white resistance, however, group leaders doubted the effectiveness of trying to register blacks for the white-controlled Democratic Party. Instead, they formed a new, independent party at the county level, the Lowndes County Freedom Organization, and attempted to register as many black voters as possible. Hulett served as the LCFO's first chairman.
Alabama election laws required political parties to have an emblem, so the new party chose a crouching black panther. Hulett explained that like a panther, Lowndes County African Americans had been pushed back into a corner and would come out "fighting for life or death." The emblem was seized on by the media, and LCFO also came to be known as the Black Panther Party. Although the organization was, in theory, open to anyone, it became a de facto all-black organization, as no white voters wanted to join.

After much effort, more blacks were registered to vote than whites. The majority of these new voters, however, were sharecroppers, and they faced hostile responses from land-owning whites through evictions that left them homeless and unemployed. SNCC and LCFO leaders organized a "tent city" to house the displaced sharecroppers and helped them find new work and homes.

The spirit of the LCFO endured despite its defeat. Similar "freedom organizations" appeared across the country. The party's slogan of "Black Power" also spread throughout the nation, and its black panther emblem was adopted by activists Bobby Seale and Huey Newton, a SNCC veteran in the Lowndes County effort, who together organized the Oakland-based Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in 1966. There was no formal relationship between the LCFO and the later organization, and Hulett and others resented the use of their symbol to represent an organization that encouraged the use of violence. The latter organization became much more well-known than the LCFO for its openly militant rhetoric, but its foundation was the LCFO's principles of self-empowerment and grass-roots activism.
Additional Resources
Carson, Clayborne. In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1981.
Additional Resources
Carson, Clayborne. In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1981.
Cobb, Charles E. Jr. On the Road to Freedom: A Guided Tour of the Civil Rights Movement. Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin Books, 2008.
Cammeron, Dwight B., and Richard Adams. The Lowndes County Freedom Organization. VHS video. Produced by the University of Alabama Center for Public Television and Radio. Princeton, N.J.: Films for the Humanities & Sciences, 1995.
Gaillard, Frye. Cradle of Freedom: Alabama and the Movement that Changed America. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004.
Jeffries, Hasan K. Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama's Black Belt. New York: NYU Press, 2009.