The conference program featured the symbol of a black panther from the Lowndes County Freedom Organization (LCFO) that Carmichael was publicizing. The LCFO was part of a new effort by local blacks and SNCC to build an independent political party outside of the exclusive white Democratic Party, marking a departure from its strategy of mobilizing civil disobedience against Jim Crow segregation in the early 1960s. Lowndes County was 80 percent black, yet in early 1966, despite the 1965 passage of the Voting Rights Act, there was still not a single black person registered to vote in Lowndes County. So on May 3, 1966, with SNCC’s help, the LCFO convened and nominated candidates for sheriff, tax assessor, coroner, and school board and encouraged blacks to register to vote. As blacks registered, white resistance intensified. At one SNCC rally, a deputy sheriff fired into the crowd, shooting two civil rights workers and killing one, Carmichael’s friend Jonathan Daniels, a white ministerial student.

Because so many whites in Lowndes were illiterate, the ballot featured a drawing of a party mascot. The all-white Democratic Party featured a white rooster and the slogan White Supremacy/For the Right. The LCFO selected the black panther as its symbol to signify a fierce black political challenge. In a June 1966 interview, John Hulett, the chairman of the LCFO, explained the symbol of the panther: “The black panther is an animal that when it is pressured it moves back until it is cornered, then it comes out fighting for life or death. We felt we had been pushed back long enough and that it was time for Negroes to come out and take over.”