Interview with John Hulett

I'd like to go back just a little bit in time, even before SNCC came in, even before you started forming the Lowndes County Freedom Organization, just give me a kind of a picture of what Lowndes County was like?


Lowndes County was considered as a total rural county. Real, very poor. Bad roads, you know the school system was very bad, about the worst almost in the nation. There were no jobs available here in this area except farming and sharecropping. Most of the young peoples who finished school, ah, ah, went to school, once they came out of school, they immediately left the South and went, and went North, to try to live, and even to survive, they'd have to care of the families then at that time. So the, the, Lowndes County was not a good place for young people to live in. Most of the, the adults who lived here, you know, were, were kind of lived under fear most of their lives, because of the some type of treatment, treatment that was given. At a certain age you just didn't go into, if you lived here, and that was just a few people in the county who caused many of our problems. But because of those people were not stopped by other people, it, it caused a, most Black peoples had to live in fear. We had a sheriff during that time, ah, I can never forget, that at night time, and a young man, if he walked the road at night, if you see a car light coming, everybody would just run in the bushes and hide until they come by, it was raining, whatever it was, you stayed out there and waited until that car passed. They thought the sheriff was coming by and maybe would do something to them. There were peoples who had beaten in a numbers of cases, and because of this type of things.