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Josephine McCall was just five years old when her father, was lynched on Dec. 4, 1947. The memory, still fresh in her mind, inspires her 76 years later and is the reason she tells the story, so that current and future generations can remember to do better.

“I saw him lying in the ditch with his eyes open,” McCall said as she described that fateful day, when she and her mother heard shots ring out and hurried to her father’s nearby store, where they found he had been gunned down, already dead.

In her book, “The Penalty for Success,” McCall details the lynching of her father, Elmore Bolling, an entrepreneur and philanthropist who operated a fleet of trucks and a general store.

“My father had become a very successful entrepreneur, philanthropist and farmer who owned three tractor trailer trucks,” McCall said. “He had a store on U.S. Highway 80, where we call ‘the crossroads’ at the intersection where one road leads to Hayneville and the other to Lowndesboro. 

“It was a very popular spot and carried a wide variety of products and had a large open floor for social activities. He was earning quite a lot of money. The NAACP and my research indicate he was lynched because he was too prosperous to be a negro.”

Bolling’s death changed the trajectory of his family’s lives as they went from prosperity to poverty almost overnight. Looking back, however, McCall said she has been able to use her father’s legacy of generosity as an inspiration to fuel her work.

“A lady came to my mom’s house and brought a newspaper clipping,” McCall said. “I remembered that the most important thing in the article was that it said my father had an excellent reputation in the community. That never left my mind when I grew up, knowing there was something special about my dad and to read it on the front page of a newspaper, that he had an excellent reputation, meant a lot.”

A Dec. 12, 1947 article in The Alabama Tribune cited Bolling as “a friend to both white and colored” who “tried to help both races whenever he could with money, time and food.” Later, McCall began to research events surrounding her father’s death and began writing her book in 2000.

In 2007, a historic marker was placed to commemorate Bolling’s life. The Elmore Bolling Initiative foundation was formed in 2008, to continue Bolling’s legacy.

“The significance that I found in my father’s life, that it influenced other people’s lives when he raised other people’s standards as he raised his, that’s why the foundation came into existence,” she said.

Initially, the foundation aimed to supply every Lowndes County Public School student with a laptop, but McCall soon discovered that no consistent broadband existed across the county. Today, she is working alongside others trying to bring broadband to underserved communities.

In addition to those efforts, the foundation awards one scholarship per year to local students pursuing higher education. To fund the scholarships and expand their reach, a fundraising weekend is planned for October 18-20.

On Oct. 18, a gala featuring Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones will establish a narrative that pushes society to confront the uncomfortable truths of racial injustice. A forum on Discrimination Against Black Farmers will take place Oct. 19.

The weekend concludes Oct. 20 with a tour of historic Lowndes County sites: the Lowndesboro School, Lowndes County Interpretive Center, Elmore Bolling Historic Site and others.

McCall invites community members to visit the foundation website, www.bollinginitiative.org to learn more or purchase tickets. Her book is available at her website, www.josephinebollingmccall.com.

“I’ve done all this research because I want the world to know that my father was lynched because of his prosperity,” McCall said. “My father’s soil is in the Equal Justice Initiative museum and his name is on one of the hanging monuments. I want the world to know he was a good man.”