Enslavement & Racial Terror / Lynching Targeting Black Sharecroppers

Marker Text: In Summer 1935, hundreds of black sharecroppers in Lowndes County, Alabama staged a strike to protest poor pay and mistreatment. In response, white mobs and local law enforcement arrested and attacked black leaders in a terror campaign, lynching at least three black men within two weeks. On August 22, 1935, a white mob shot prominent black leader Jim Press Meriweather and left him to die in the woods. The mob then demanded information from his wife, Annie Mae. When she refused, the mob stripped her, hanged her from a wooden beam and beat her unconscious with a knotted rope. Mrs. Meriweather survived. Days later, on August 28th, police arrested G. Smith Watkins, a black preacher who helped lead the strike. Rev. Watkins never reached the jail; he was found shot to death, lynched in a swamp near the county line weeks later. On September 2nd, a white mob organized by the Lowndes County Sheriff ambushed black leader Ed Bracy at his Hope Hull home, fatally shooting him nineteen times in the neck and head. Jim Press Meriweather, G. Smith Watkins, and Ed Bracy were lynched to preserve white supremacy and warn the entire black community not to dare demand equality. State and federal authorities did little to investigate the racialized anti-union attacks in Lowndes County, even after Mrs. Meriweather bravely testified before federal authorities in Washington, D.C.