Editing Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (section)

===Lowndes County===
Carmichael had been working with a voter registration project in Alabama that had taken what, at the time, may have seemed an equally momentous step. In the face of murderous Klan violence, organizers for the [[Lowndes County Freedom Organization]] openly carried arms.<ref name="LowndesCounty - Encyclopedia">[http://www.encyclopediaofalabama.org/face/Article.jsp?id=h-1781 "Lowndes County Freedom Organization"] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130813072422/http://encyclopediaofalabama.org/face/Article.jsp?id=h-1781 |date=2013-08-13 }}, Encyclopedia of Alabama.</ref> Participating in the Selma to Montgomery march, Carmichael had stopped off in the county in March 1965.<ref name=lcfogenesis>{{cite web|url=https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/selma-montgomery-march/#:~:text=On_March_23,_1965,_the,County_Freedom_Party_(LCFP).|title=March 23, 1965: Selma to Montgomery March Continues|publisher=Zinn Education|access-date=August 3, 2020}}</ref>  Local registration efforts were being led by [[John Hulett]] who that month, with John C. Lawson, a preacher, became the first two black voters in Lowndes County in more than six decades.<ref>{{ Cite book|last=Greenshaw|first=Wayne|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=bI1rzKFsBl4C|title=Fighting the Devil in Dixie: How Civil Rights Activists Took on the Ku Klux Klan in Alabama|publisher=Chicago Review Press|year=2011|isbn=9781569768259|pages=[https://books.google.com/books?d=bI1rzKFsBl4C&pg=PA214 214]}}</ref>

Carmichael gained the confidence of local residents when, handing out voter registration material at a local school, he refused to be intimidated by local police: they were either to arrest him or leave. With SNCC workers then "swarmed" by young people, Carmichael took the initiative to help form the LCFO with Hulett, its first chair. The organization would not only register voters but, as a party, run candidates for office—its symbol, a rampant black panther, representing black "strength and dignity".<ref>{{cite book |last1=Jeffries |first1=Hasan Kwame |title=Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama's Black Belt |date=2009 |publisher=New York University Press |isbn=9780814743065 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=XFWVLK4_PCoC}}</ref>

Hulett warned the state of Alabama that it had a last chance to peacefully grant African Americans their rights: "We're out to take power legally, but if we're stopped by the government from doing it legally, we're going to take it the way everyone else took it, including the way the Americans took it in the [[American Revolution]]." Certain the federal government was not going to protect him and his fellow LCFO members, Hulett told a federal registrar, "if one of our candidates gets touched, we're going to take care of the murderer ourselves."<ref>[http://freedomarchives.org/Documents/Finder/DOC513_scans/Lowndes_Co/513.LowndesCO.bpp.6.1966.pdf ''The Black Panther Party''] (pamphlet), Merrit Publishers, June 1966.</ref>