ABSTRACT
The crisis over black voting reached boiling point in the sleepy townof Selma, once a cotton market on the muddy Alabama river. BullConnor grew up in Selma, and the state’s Citizens’ Council first met there. To keep the white monopoly in political power after emancipation, Alabama’s state constitutional convention of 1901 instituted a literacy test that excluded nearly all blacks for more than a half century. Although 57 per cent of the voting-age population was black in the surrounding Dallas county, just 1 per cent of them was registered to vote. Elsewhere, intimidation shut the door to black voting. In the adjoining, heavily black counties of Lowndes and Wilcox, not one black had dared to register since Reconstruction. Whites boasted that any black trying to register would be dead by sundown.
