By Drew Taylor, Alabama Reflector

EUTAW — In the town square of Eutaw, the modern world hems in a relic of an older one that no longer exists.

The Eutaw Hotel is long gone. Even among older locals, the V.J. Elmore’s Five & Dime is nothing but a faint memory. Places like Mills Pharmacy or Main Street Diner get the foot traffic these days. But inside the square, the old Greene County Courthouse still stands, along with a towering oak tree just yards away.

The tree was much shorter when Earlean Isaac, then 15 years old, marched with others to the courthouse for voting rights in 1965. It was where Isaac, who would go on to become the first Black female probate judge in the county, was beaten by a police officer.

“He hit me with his Billy club,” Isaac said.

By 1969, with a newly ordered election mandated by the Supreme Court to recognize the National Democratic Party of Alabama, voters would elect four Black candidates– Harry Means, Franchie Burton, Vassie Knott and Levi Morrow Sr.—to the Greene County Commission and put two new Black members, Robert Hines and James Posey, on the Greene County School Board. These six men put Greene County on the map as the first county across the country since Reconstruction to put a majority-Black government in office.

A year later, outside the very courthouse where Isaac was beaten, Thomas Gilmore, a minister who had returned to Greene County from Los Angeles a few years prior, was sworn in as the first Black sheriff in Greene County, going on to get the nickname of “The Sheriff Without a Gun.”

Today, across the street from the old courthouse sits the new one, named after William McKinley Branch, the first Black probate judge in Greene County. It’s a history that plays a crucial part in the area’s voter turnout, often among the highest across Alabama in any given year.

Leading the vote in Alabama

During the primary election in May, Greene County had a 51% voter turnout, compared with the 23.11% turnout statewide. Countywide, there are 6,332 registered voters.

“Usually, our voter turnout depends on who’s on the ballot that will really drive the votes out,” Isaac said.

There were several big local races in Greene County this spring, including races for a district judge and sheriff. But Greene County consistently outpaces the rest of the state for turnout. In the 2022 primary, 44.5% of the county’s eligible voters cast ballots. In 2020, Greene County’s turnout for the presidential election was 68.3%, compared to 62.8% statewide. In 2024, while the state as a whole posted its lowest voter turnout for a presidential election in over 30 years with 58.5%, nearly 61.7% of Greene County’s registered voters turned out to the polls.  

This comes despite Greene County being Alabama’s smallest county by population. Just 7,730 people lived there in 2020, according to the U.S. Census. Recent estimates have that number closer to 7,000 as of last July. Greene County also ranks as among the oldest, with a median age close to 44, and one of the poorest, with a median household income of about $29,200, compared to $63,999 statewide.

Richard Fording, a political science professor at the University of Alabama, said that because of these obstacles, trying to explain this surge of voters in both Greene County, as well as the Black Belt as a whole, is complicated.

“These are counties where the demographic disadvantages are pretty extreme,” Fording said. “It’s more interesting for that region.”

However, for people from Greene County, one thing it has never lacked is political involvement. Rep. Curtis Travis, D-Tuscaloosa, who remembers meeting both Gilmore and Branch as a boy at his father’s garage in Eutaw, credits his home county with putting him in the Alabama Legislature in the first place.

“Greene County was the one that got me over,” said Travis, who beat Ralph Anthony Howard by 500 votes in Greene County to win the Democratic primary in 2022.

For Travis, one aspect of Greene County’s high voter turnout, as well as much of the Black Belt’s, is a recognition of the past and how Black people were able to make change with the vote.

“That empowerment is something that is shared with pride,” Travis said. “They keep it alive, and they know where they come from.”

Community centers are one way the community tries to keep that tradition alive, often hosting candidate forums with locals. However, Travis said these forums are anything but easy for anyone looking for votes.

“There was one candidate who came out to speak to the seniors at the Boligee Community Center and it was like he was on trial,” Travis said. “They like to get their questions out there.”

Hattie Samuel, mayor of Bolligee, said the town’s community center, located in the former Greene County Training School, has always been a good place for people to talk about politics and engage with the political system.

“What we do is when a candidate qualifies to run, we like to study that person,” Samuel said. “A lot of people at the center can’t get around for the campaign, so having these candidates come here has been great.”

Severe Strode, a 93-year-old woman who lives in Boligee, is a regular at the Boligee Community Center and one of those in Greene County who tried to keep that empowerment alive, getting out to vote in the last primary.

“This election, I feel more people felt a need for change in Greene County,” Strode said. “I also vote because it is one of my civil rights.”

 In “There Goes My Everything: White Southerners in the Age of Civil Rights, 1945-1975,” author Jason Sokol wrote that the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was a crucial change in momentum for Black Alabamians in Greene County.

“As Blacks made up more than 75% of the population, they quickly surpassed whites on the voting rolls,” Sokol wrote. “Suddenly a political minority, few Greene whites knew exactly what had hit them.”

The shift played out in dramatic fashion in Eutaw’s town square, where in 1966 Black and white Alabamians gathered to watch as the vote counts were rolling in for the sheriff’s race. Bill Lee, a former tackle for the Green Bay Packers, had already been sheriff for 10 years, but the office had been held by his father and brothers going back as early as the 1930s. 

Challenging Lee was Gilmore, had come back home to Greene County just a few years before from Los Angeles. In the time since he had come back, Gilmore led many protests in Eutaw, often coming face to face with Lee.

Gilmore ultimately came up short, getting only 1,949 votes to Lee’s 2,246.

Despite court challenges to the results, Lee would hold onto office. But in an interview with Marshall Frady of Newsweek, the former sheriff seemed to predict what was about to come.

“But you know — I don’t understand a bit of it,” Lee said of the civil rights movement, as recounted in Frady’s “Southerners: A Journalist’s Odyssey.” “This thing’s so massive. I mean, you just can’t expect 1,500 hundred people to be able to keep beating off 2,700. It just stands to reason they bound to win something eventually.”

Today, Black Alabamians make up almost 80% of the population.

Protecting that legacy may also help mobilize voters this year. Fording, whose area of focus is voter turnout, said that with the Supreme Court giving the Republican-led Alabama Legislature permission to redraw its congressional map, all but wiping out a predominantly Black Congressional district, there has been a sense of urgency for Black voters, especially those in marginalized areas like the Black Belt, to make their voices heard and vote.

“That has sent shockwaves into that community,” Fording said.

Like Fording, Isaac believes the redrawn Congressional lines in Alabama will continue to bring out people to the ballot box.

“Our voice is being diminished,” she said. “The little voice we do have is being taken away from us.”

Spiver Gordon lives less than a mile from the old Greene County Courthouse, yet only yards from the place he keeps history alive.

Next to his home on Greensboro Street, Gordon keeps up the Magnolia House, part of the Alabama Civil Rights Freedom Farm Museum that holds hundreds of artifacts from the civil rights era, from photos of Martin Luther King, Jr. to an article by the Montgomery Advertiser announcing Isaac’s swearing in as probate judge back in 1989.

As Gordon walks into each room, another table of framed photos appear every time he flicks on the lights. Even the bathroom has different rows of photos he’s been trying to restore.

“I have their stories here,” said Gordon.

Gordon worked for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference before becoming the first Black member of the Eutaw City Council in 1984. He has had his ups and downs in politics, but said that Greene County has always had a vibrant political history.

“It’s been a continued process,” Gordon said.

Isaac, who served as probate judge until 2016, remembers how people took election years pretty seriously, especially precinct leaders in places like West Greene or Boligee.

“In Boligee, they would celebrate how they toppled Forkland in a particular race by getting more votes,” she said.

Fording said that in places with older populations in the Black Belt, where some still remember a time before the Voting Rights Act, casting a ballot is taken as a kind of civic responsibility.

“As a region, the strong sense of group identity is in the fact that the voting rights struggle is still very salient in those communities,” he said. “Any surge happening now is how current events are triggering those memories.”

Despite the challenges facing Greene County, Isaac still loves the area and knows that better things are in store for it.

“I travel a lot, but after a couple of days, I always want to come back to Greene County,” she said. “This is home.”

As Gordon looks out onto Greensboro Street, a stack of bricks sits next to the Magnolia House. At 86 years old, Gordon has plans to add onto the building, adding more rooms, more pictures, and more memories. For him, and for Greene County, the work isn’t done yet.

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Read the original article on the Alabama Reflector’s website here

Featured Image: Spiver Gordon stands inside Magnolia House, a civil rights museum in Eutaw, Alabama, U.S., on Friday, June 5th, 2026 (Andi Rice /Alabama Reflector)