Julia Wilder, a black woman who was president of the Pickens County Voters League and an officer of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), had been hard at work to make the Voting Rights Act viable in rural Alabama. By the late 1970s, no black American had ever been elected to county office in Pickens, a county that was 42 percent black. Joining Wilder, then in her sixties, was Maggie Bozeman, a black woman and president of the local NAACP. For the 1978 county elections, Wilder and Bozeman collected absentee ballots from more than three dozen elderly black people, had those forms
...more
