I have spent most of my life asking companies to come to Alabama. 

In the Alabama State Senate, I chaired the committee that recruited industry, and I had a hand in bringing Mercedes-Benz to Tuscaloosa County. I have never believed a poor county should be grateful for staying poor. Dr. King told us our struggle was for genuine equality and that genuine equality was economic. He was right then and he is right now. Jobs are a civil rights matter, and anybody who tells poor people to turn down work has not been poor. 

So, hear me when I say I am not writing to stop economic development that helps Lowndes County. 

I am writing about half a mile. 

On the night of March 23, 1965, the marchers walking from Selma to Montgomery stopped in a field in Lowndes County. It had rained on them all day. The field belonged to a Black farmer named Robert Gardner. 

Understand what that man did. White neighbors came to the Gardners first with money, trying to buy them off. When the money did not work, the threats started. Somebody cut their telephone line. Somebody cut their power. Robert Gardner opened his field anyway and let a few thousand exhausted people sleep on his land. 

That is not a story about a campsite. That is a story about a man who was offered a price and did not take it. 

The U.S Park Service calls the place Campsite 3. It went on the National Register in 2023. A company out of Houston now wants to build a data center half a mile from it, on the same highway. Alabama named that stretch of road for Bob Mants, who organized through Lowndes County when doing that work could get a young man killed. 

Now somebody will tell me that Lowndes County is poor and cannot afford my principles. I have heard that my whole life, usually from people who were doing fine. Lowndes County is one of the poorest counties in this country. Families there have raw sewage in their yards in the year 2026. Nobody has to explain need to me. 

But look at what is actually on the table. Thirty years of tax abatement, on a project whose tenant has never been named. The company assembling the land does not intend to run the thing. It puts the pieces together and sells them to somebody else, and it has not said who. So Lowndes County is being asked to sign a thirty-year agreement with a stranger, and to do it quickly, because Alabama’s law changes in January and thirty years becomes twenty. 

That is not investment. That is a closing table with the buyer’s chair empty. 

And here is the part that ought to bother everybody. We have come a long way, but we have a long way to go, and some of the distance left is measured in what we have let ourselves forget. Our young people have amnesia about where we came from. Part of that is our own fault, because we did not teach them. But you cannot teach ground that is not there anymore. You cannot take a child to a loading dock and tell her that her grandmother slept here. 

Let me tell you what happened in Virginia. 

A company wanted 2,100 acres of data centers beside the Manassas battlefield. The county said yes. A national preservation organization and the neighbors sued, and this March a Virginia court threw the whole approval out. That county had already spent $1.7 million defending it. By July the company had walked away from the project entirely. 

I do not begrudge those families a thing. They protected their ground and they were right to. What I want somebody to explain to me is why that ground got a national organization, four years of lawyers and a courtroom, and our ground gets a county commission meeting on a weekday morning. 

If somebody proposed this a half mile from Gettysburg, there would be no debate. There would be nothing to debate. The only reason this is a question at all is that the history belongs to us, and our history has always been priced cheap. 

I am not asking anyone to leave a dollar on the table. Alabama has land, and a great deal of it sits nowhere near this highway. Build it there. Hire Lowndes County people to pour the concrete and pull the wire. Put the money into the water and the sewer lines that county has needed for fifty years. Do that and I will drive down and cut the ribbon myself, and I will say so into any microphone you put in front of me. 

What I am asking is that this one road be left alone. 

I called a book of mine Easier to Obtain than to Maintain. This is exactly what I meant. We obtained that highway with our feet in 1965. Keeping it is the harder job, and it is the one we are losing, quietly, a parcel at a time, while everybody argues about tax rates. 

To whichever company is deciding whether to put its name on this site, I have one thing to say. Next March you will post something about the anniversary of that march. You will use a photograph of that road. Before you do, go and stand in that field and look at what you are about to build beside it, and then decide whether you want both of those things to be true about your company. 

Robert Gardner was offered money to turn that march away. He said no, and it cost him. Sixty-one years later somebody is standing in the same field with the same offer. 

You can build the future anywhere. You only get to lose the past one time. 

Dr. Charles Steele Jr. is Former President of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and a former Alabama state senator from Tuscaloosa.