Then there’s the Stokely Carmichael connection. Its nickname at the time was “Bloody Lowndes.” They’re in the South and things are bad, but in the first part of the 20th century, Lowndes is a place where you have a strong majority-Black population that is ruled by this almost feudal elite-and ruled not benevolently, but by a regime of naked violence, of lynchings and beatings and brutality, that keeps people in check by fear alone. Vann: A lot of the history of the movement is told in spaces that aren’t so extreme as Lowndes County. Can you explain why it was so influential? Kelli: Lowndes County’s chapter in the civil-rights movement isn’t as well-known as others, but it is, as you note, monumental in shaping that story. And so you can see through their lifetimes, through the trajectories of living people, both the historical wound and how it’s manifested in the present. The filmmakers Sam Pollard and Geeta Gandbhir talked to people who are still alive-not just living, but vibrant presences-who were in Lowndes County as grown adults and were not able to vote. We like to think about this history of racial oppression in America as being something that was a very long time ago, in black-and-white pictures. You still see very high poverty rates and lower life expectancies than in other places. That fact still reverberates through the outcomes in the county today. Newkirk II: Lowndes was a majority-Black county in Alabama, and yet it was ruled by a white elite who saw that it was conducive to their own interests to not allow those people who lived there to vote, to have a say. Kelli María Korducki: You say in the documentary that “to understand why we’re having conversations about reparations, and why the racial wealth gap exists, you can do no better than looking back at Lowndes County.” Why is that? The murders in Memphis aren’t stopping.

George Packer: America has had it worse.

Stokely black power