In December 1965, a city of tents appeared on this site as temporary shelter for evicted black sharecropper families from Lowndes County. These farmers had worked and lived on white-owned farms, but after they dared to register to vote following passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, white landowners ran them from their homes and livelihoods. The Davis family was evicted after 25 years, the Glover family after 35 years, and the Lusane family after 60 years, and some 40 families were turned out. Some moved in with friends or relatives, others left the county, and still others left the state, but those with nowhere else to go came to Tent City. After the wave of evictions, the Lowndes County Christian Movement for Human Rights and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee worked to keep families together by purchasing more than six acres here and, with local volunteers, erecting canvas tents, setting up army cots, and installing stove heaters in time for the first residents.