Good morning POU.
In 1940s Jim Crow Alabama, Elmore Bolling was a young, self-made Black entrepreneur with a genius for business. So we know how this story ends.
Against all odds, Elmore Bolling built a network of trucking and farming businesses that nourished his community — he offered good paying jobs for Black people, services valued and used by white business owners, and philanthropy for churches and individuals.
He paid for his success with his life: in 1947, angry whites, aggrieved that Elmore was winning business contracts they thought should be theirs, lynched Elmore, cutting his life short at age 39.
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 in Alabama 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.
After Elmore was killed, local white people—including those who respected Elmore and had hired him or had other business dealings with him—falsely laid claim to the small fortune he had amassed (about $500,000 in today’s dollars) and plunged his family into poverty.
Though Josephine Bolling McCall’s father was killed when she was 5 years old, it was not until she was 60 that she discovered an article in the Chicago Defender describing the real reason for her father’s killing: “Enraged whites jealous over the success of a Negro, are believed to be the lynchers of Elmore Bolling.” This was also the first time she heard her father’s killing referred to as a lynching and the revelation sent her on a ten year search for the truth about her father’s life and death, culminating in her book, The Penalty for Success: My Father Was Lynched in Lowndes County, Alabama.
She talks about that day in this interview: