The enslavement of black people in the United States was a brutal, dehumanizing system that lasted more than 200 years. Between 1819 and 1860, Alabama's enslaved population grew from 40,000 to 435,000. According to the U.S. Census, 2 out of 3 of Lowndes County's more than 27,000 residents were enslaved black people in 1860, giving the county the fifth largest enslaved population in Alabama and the 12th largest nationwide. Mount Willing Church was built at this site in 1832 by enslaved people, who were forced to sit in segregated sections when they attended services. White landowners committed to a myth of racial inferiority used the domestic slave trade to build an agricultural economy dependent on the exploited labor of black people. After the South lost the Civil War in 1865, many white people remained committed to white supremacy and used violence to continue oppressing and exploiting black people. Between 1877 and 1950, white mobs lynched thousands of African Americans to intimidate black communities and enforce racial hierarchy, and of the more than 350 documented racial terror lynching victims in Alabama, at least 16 were killed in Lowndes County. In summer 1935, hundreds of black sharecroppers in Lowndes County staged a strike to protest poor pay and mistreatment. White mobs and local law enforcement responded by arresting and attacking black leaders in a terror campaign that lynched at least three black men within two weeks. On August 22, 1935, a white mob shot black leader Jim Press Meriweather and left him to die in the woods, then demanded information from his wife, Annie Mae; when she refused, the mob stripped her, hanged her from a wooden beam, and beat her unconscious with a knotted rope, though she survived. On August 28, police arrested G. Smith Watkins, a black preacher who helped lead the strike, but he never reached jail and was found weeks later shot to death, lynched in a swamp near the county line. On September 2, a white mob organized by the Lowndes County sheriff ambushed black leader Ed Bracy at his Hope Hull home and fatally shot him nineteen times in the neck and head. Jim Press Meriweather, G. Smith Watkins, and Ed Bracy were lynched to preserve white supremacy and warn the black community not to demand equality, while state and federal authorities did little to investigate these racialized anti-union attacks in Lowndes County even after Annie Mae Meriweather testified before federal authorities in Washington, D.C.