'Too successful to be a Negro': Alabama woman remembers father lynched in Lowndes County

After Black people were freed from slavery, they were never treated as equals. They dealt with racially segregated cities and unfair treatment. That’s why many created their own to survive.


n the early 1900s, Elmore Bolling grew a booming business in Lowndes County, Alabama. The young Black entrepreneur leased a plantation off Hwy 80 in Lowndesboro to build his wealth.

Bolling never learned to read or write but he managed to earn through a range of businesses which included owning a fleet of trucks to make all sorts of deliveries from Lowndesboro to Montgomery. Bolling had a general store off of HWY 80. He also grew sugar cane, corn, and cotton on his land.

It was Dec. 4, 1947, when Bolling was lynched by a group of white men after confronting him near his general store. His daughter, Josephine Bolling McCall, said her father was shot six times with a pistol and once in the back with a shotgun.

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