Lowndes County

And we recognize all of those ancestors after 1965 who pushed that weapon forward, who no longer had to abscond to New York or Chicago to run for office or Cleveland or Detroit to run for office or Philadelphia or Boston to run for office, but who ran for offices in little places like Tuskegee, Alabama.

who ran for office across the Black Belt and who, with the help of even youngers, through the Black Panther Party of Lowndes County, Alabama, Bloody Lowndes, as it was called, acquired and used that franchise in the years after the Civil Rights Act to say, now we must protect Black power.

And finally, we recognize everyone and everything that has come since.

Every ancestor who never missed an occasion to vote and every one of us who were with them when they did it.

Marketplace's Kaylee Wells recently spent several days reporting on this across Alabama.

She spoke to neighbors of one proposed site in Lowndes County.

The data center developer says it'll create hundreds of jobs and generate tens of millions in tax revenue for the county every year.

But the people living nearby worry about light and noise pollution, in the kind of place people move to escape light and noise pollution.

Those concerns don't seem to have swayed local elected officials.

The county commission recently approved a 20-year, $1.1 billion tax abatement for the project and ended some recent meetings without taking public comments.

In Lowndes County, Alabama, I'm Kaylee Wells for Marketplace.

You can hear more of Kaylee's reporting from Alabama at Marketplace.org. Our executive producer is Nancy Farghali.

It hurts my heart to have to go through it again at my age.

She's 85 and lives in Lowndes County, about 20 miles west of Montgomery.

Forty years ago, a plastics plant went in right behind her house and bought up her property.

The place she moved to is now less than 100 yards from a proposed hyperscale data center.

Well, I believe that because you can drive through my community that I raised my family in right across the road and all the houses are gone.

You won't recognize any of it.

Lowndes County is rural, like 13 people per square mile rural.

It's also got no zoning laws, so it's an attractive place for a data center.

And I'd like to see that eventually go across the board into beef and chicken.

And, you know, we know we need to know, is that beef coming from South America? Is it coming from Asia or is it coming from, you know? Lowndes County, Alabama.

I mean, I'd like to know that.

And I'm going to choose the Alabama beef every single time.

He was someone who'd been very influenced by the civil rights movement in the South.

He traveled to the South several times, connecting himself to activists in Lowndes County, Alabama, in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

He's one of the first people to bring the image of the Black Panther in the Bay Area and to wear a beret.

I mean, in a lot of ways, he was one of the first people to speak out against the Vietnam War.

i just

gotta get out even if it's just to go walk and lay eyes on the, I have not been to the farm in quite a few months, uh, down in Lowndes County, that farm.

So I just want to get out there.

But my number one objective was to take the only camera that I have right now and put it out.

You're talking about an osage orange.

Yeah, it's Osage orange, Bodock.

And it's funny, even in the black belt, you know, a lot of folks around Lowndes County, Montgomery, they call it mock orange.

So that's what I grew up calling it.