After federal registrars came in August 1965, thousands and thousands of Negroes registered to vote in Lowndes County, Alabama, and white plantation owners retaliated with mass evictions. In December 1965, over forty families either left the county, moved in with friends and relatives, or took up residence in Tent City, where a small cluster of canvas tents erected on this site became home to some eight families for almost two and one-half years after white landowners evicted them from their tenant farms for seeking their right to vote. During the Selma to Montgomery Voting Rights March, Stokely Carmichael and other members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee moved into Lowndes County to help black residents register, and at the time of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 only a handful of black voters were registered even though blacks made up 85 percent of the county's population. With assistance from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Lowndes County Christian Movement for Human Rights purchased six and three-quarter acres of land on this site so families with nowhere else to go could move there after being evicted from their tenant homes.