The Fight for the Vote in Bullock County: A Civil Rights History

Union Springs and Bullock County occupy a serious and important place in American civil rights history — one that deserves to be told alongside the porch stories and Southern sayings that inspired this brand. If you want the lighter side of where we come from first, start with the porch where this all started. This is the part of the story that doesn't fit on a t-shirt, but matters just as much.

In the early-to-mid 20th century, Bullock County had a Black population that made up the overwhelming majority of its residents, yet for decades those residents were almost entirely shut out of the ballot box through discriminatory registration practices, intimidation, and outright obstruction. Organizations like the Bullock County Voters League worked for years, often at real personal risk, to register Black voters and challenge the systems designed to keep them out.

The activist and civil rights lawyer Virginia Foster Durr — herself an Alabama native who became a fierce advocate against the poll tax and voter suppression — was closely connected to the broader Alabama voting rights movement that Bullock County's organizers were part of. The work being done on the ground in small counties like Bullock, often overshadowed by the larger, more famous marches, was foundational to the Voting Rights Act of 1965 finally becoming law.

By the late 1960s and into the 1970s, Bullock County saw the direct results of that decades-long fight: Black residents were elected to local office in numbers that reflected the county's actual population for the first time, a milestone that took relentless, often dangerous organizing to achieve.

It's not a comfortable story, and it's not meant to be a cute one. But it's part of what makes Union Springs and Bullock County a real place with a real, complicated history — not just a backdrop for cute sayings. We think that context matters, and we think a hometown is worth knowing fully, warts and triumphs alike.

Want more of the town's history? Read about how Union Springs got its name, learn about the night Hank Williams played here, or see what still draws hunters and handlers to Bullock County's bird dog field trials to this day. And if you want to wear a piece of this hometown pride, check out our Hometown Collection.