For African Americans in the 1960s, being driven off white-owned land for trying to register to vote was not an isolated incident. As in Lowndes County, blacks in Tennessee, Mississippi, and Greene County, Alabama, were forced from their homes and livelihoods and made to live in tents. In 1960, 257 black sharecroppers in Fayette County, Tennessee, were evicted from their houses and blacklisted by white merchants after they tried to register. Their families endured nearly two years in dirt-floor tents. Mary Williams remembered hearing a loud noise as she, her husband, and their baby slept in their Fayette County tent, then realizing her husband Earlie had been shot through the arm. She also recalled the bitter cold of tent city life, saying there were four tents and four families in their tent city, that she gave birth to one of her children the night they moved in, and that the dog outside froze to death. Tent city families in Fayette County struggled to carry on, and the injustices they suffered drew national attention and led to the first federal lawsuit brought under the 1957 Civil Rights Act. In 1966, one family was among several living in tents after eviction in Greene County, Alabama; the young woman in the center of a photograph went into labor four days later, was turned away by a local white hospital, and bled to death.