HAYNEVILLE, Ala.—When Alabamians marched from Selma to Montgomery in 1965 to demand voting rights for African Americans, Highway 80 became their path toward freedom. 

Two weeks after state troopers had violently attacked nonviolent demonstrators on that highway’s Edmund Pettus Bridge, Alabamians took back to the street. Led by Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., thousands of citizens marched the 54 miles to Montgomery over three days, camping alongside Highway 80 in makeshift camps hosted by residents and business owners. 

More than six decades later, residents and civil rights activists are engaged in a new fight on that historic road. 

Their battle cry? We don’t want you here. 

That was the overwhelming message from those who attended an open house last week deep in the Alabama Black Belt. There, in the aging cafeteria of a recently-shuttered middle school, developers of a proposed hyperscale data center campus had hoped to woo community members who’ve already expressed deep skepticism about their project’s economic, environmental and health impacts. 

They had no such luck. 

Instead, proponents of Project Red Clay, a planned data center campus of more than 3 million square feet, found themselves largely on the defensive, answering questions from residents to whom developers have, through the years, promised much and given little.

Cloverleaf Infrastructure, the company behind the project, said the open house was an effort to hear from residents and answer any questions they may have about the project.

If constructed as planned, the data center campus would consist of four 720,000-square-foot buildings, a 100,000-square-foot warehouse and a 30,000-square-foot office, all to be located on around 800 acres of rural land at the intersection of Highway 80 and Route 21, according to company plans obtained by Inside Climate News. 

While a spokesperson for the company told ICN that the facilities’ expected water and power demand haven’t been finalized, Cloverleaf representatives have publicly stated that they have requested 1,500 megawatts of energy capacity from Alabama Power, the state’s largest electric utility, and up to 100,000 gallons of water per day from the Pintlala Water System, a small rural water utility. 

If realized, that would amount to enough energy to power around a million homes per day and enough water to supply hundreds. 

Perman Hardy, a 67-year-old Lowndes County native, said that providing a significant amount of infrastructural support for a data center is criminal when many poor folks in her community and across the Black Belt do not have adequate access to clean drinking water and sanitary facilities.

“How can you bring this type of facility here when we still have people who have sewage in their yard?” Hardy asked. 

Poverty in the Black Belt, nicknamed for its dark, fertile soil, is widespread. In Lowndes County, which is more than 70 percent Black, around a quarter of residents live below the federal poverty line, according to census figures. 

Conditions in Lowndes and the surrounding counties have for years been the subject of international concern. Following a visit to Alabama in 2017, Philip Alston, then the United Nations special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, characterized the situation in the Black Belt as the result of racism and the demonization of the poor. 

“In Alabama, I saw various houses in rural areas that were surrounded by cesspools of sewage that flowed out of broken or non-existent septic systems,” Alston wrote after the visit. “The State Health Department had no idea of how many households exist in these conditions, despite the grave health consequences. Nor did they have any plan to find out, or devise a plan to do something about it.”

Under President Joe Biden, federal officials reached a settlement agreement with Alabama officials aimed at improving conditions for rural Alabamians facing sewage woes. In 2025, President Donald Trump terminated those efforts, criticizing the program to improve sanitary conditions as “illegal DEI.”

Despite limited improvement in services for residents, utility providers and some local leaders seem more than happy to accommodate a large data center, Hardy said, all driven by what she sees as empty promises of endless tax revenue and job creation. 

Farmer and school bus driver Chequita Surles-Johnson said she, too, is skeptical of Cloverleaf’s promises to improve her community. 

“We have a name for those kinds of claims,” she said. “We call them ‘lies.’”

Surles-Johnson has lived in Lowndes County for nearly three decades. There, she and her husband work a 100-acre farm they use to feed customers at their family diner on Highway 80, just a stone’s throw from where the data center campus would be constructed. 

As the open house dragged on inside, Surles-Johnson plopped into a camping chair she set just behind a barrier erected by local police in the middle school’s parking lot ahead of the meeting. She wanted the developers to know: Residents are watching, and they’re not going anywhere. 

“We don’t need this in our community,” she said. “This isn’t going to bring families here.”

What it will bring, she fears, is higher utility bills, air pollution from backup generators and another headache for a community that’s already struggling to stay afloat. 

Ann Burgwin Faulkner has helped lead the charge against Project Red Clay since she first heard rumblings about the project months ago. That’s when she and other residents began organizing among themselves, trying to learn as much about data centers and artificial intelligence as they could. 

At the open house, Faulkner told a Cloverleaf representative that she and other residents should have heard about the development from its proponents up-front. Instead, she said, the more residents learned about the project, the more adamant their opposition became. 

In addition to environmental and economic concerns, Faulkner said she believes it would tarnish the legacy of the civil rights movement to construct the hyperscale data center at its proposed location. 

As currently sited, the facility would be built directly along a section of Highway 80 designated as a national historical trail, just over a mile from the Robert Gardner farm, where marchers camped overnight on their way to Montgomery. In 2022, the Lowndes County portion of Highway 80 was renamed the Robert Mants Memorial Highway after Bob Mants, a Lowndes County native and longtime civil rights activist who had served as the secretary of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the 1960s. 

In a letter to county commissioners reviewed by ICN, Mants’ daughter Katanga and widow Joann wrote in opposition to Project Red Clay. 

“Lowndes County is not just any rural place. It is sacred ground in the history of this nation,” the letter said. “Communities like Lowndes County are too often treated as ‘sacrifice zones,’ where environmental harm is tolerated because the population is poor, rural, and politically overlooked. We cannot allow that pattern to continue. This land is not disposable. It is historic, it is cultural, and it is home.”

Protecting that sacred ground is what’s most important, Faulkner said, and that’s why she plans to do everything she can to stop the construction of the data center campus. 

Faulkner said she is hopeful that pushing Cloverleaf to live up to its stated values will prevent the construction of the data center. At the open house, dozens of residents wore shirts featuring a quote that Michael Evans, a development principal at Cloverleaf, wrote in an email to local officials in Michigan about another of the developer’s proposed data centers. 

“Cloverleaf will not work in communities where this type of development is unwelcome or does not match the existing use of the land,” Evans wrote in the September 2025 email. “A decision we will make 10 times out of 10.”

Evans referred questions about the shirts to Cloverleaf’s public relations team.

Danielle Decatur, vice president of community engagement and communications for the company, said she understands residents’ frustrations about not hearing from the developer sooner, but that it’s difficult to get ahead of the grapevine in fast-moving developments.

“It’s always tricky when you’re developing a project because you can’t really talk about something if it’s not real yet,” Decatur told Inside Climate News. 

At this point, however, Decatur said the company is willing to make commitments to community members about some aspects of the development that Cloverleaf can control, including that the facility will use a closed-loop cooling system meant to reduce water demand. 

But there are many questions about the project that simply can’t be answered yet, Decatur said, because Cloverleaf is still negotiating to secure an end user for the facility. Like many data center developers, she said, Cloverleaf focuses on land acquisition, permitting and construction. A separate end user, often a large tech company like Meta or Google, then operates the data center, often determining many of the facility’s ultimate design specifications. 

Decatur said that anything company representatives promise publicly will be incorporated into a contract agreement with the end user. 

“Any commitment we make here, the end user has to carry out,” Decatur said. 

Asked whether even minor commitments like pledges to limit lighting could be included in such agreements, Decatur doubled down, saying that “anything we say publicly” would be enforceable through detailed agreements with end users or through pre-development agreements with local governments. 

When Decatur was finished, Faulkner asked where she was from. 

Seattle, Decatur said, where she recently worked for Microsoft. 

“Well, y’all are so nice,” Faulkner said, smiling. “But we don’t want it here.”

When Decatur didn’t answer, Faulkner continued. 

“And we’re not going to change our minds.”

Stafford Willis reported an offer from Alabama football on Tuesday after visiting the Crimson Tide.

Willis is a 2027 offensive lineman prospect out of Arab High School in Alabama. He currently garners a three-star rating from most recruiting sites and holds more than 30 D1 offers. Those offers include previous offers form South Carolina, Virginia, Virginia Tech and others.

The Crimson Tide currently does not hold a commitment from a 2027 offensive lineman, but Alabama is making a push for several. Willis joins this list.

At 6-foot-5 and 290 pounds, Willis is a physical offensive lineman who displays the ability to properly execute a variety of blocking assignments. One can see him executing effective combo blocks and continuing to find work at the second level of defenses throughout his film. Stafford also flashes some agility along with some impressive strength.

Alabama will look to get the rising senior back to campus for an official visit soon.

Watch Stafford Willis’ Highlights Below:

Justin Smith is the Managing Editor and Lead Writer for Touchdown Alabama Magazine with over 10 years of writing experience & expertise. Smith has consistently delivered high quality, extensively researched information on the University of Alabama’s Crimson Tide football team that fans can trust. Smith is official credentialed media with the University of Alabama under Touchdown Alabama Magazine. He is also the Director of Recruiting for Touchdown Enterprises, specializing in scouting and analyzing high school recruits around the nation, specifically focusing on recruits within the state of Alabama.

A federal Alabama judge has prohibited the state from executing an inmate this week using the controversial new method of nitrogen gas, ruling that it amounts to cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the U.S. Constitution.

U.S. District Judge Emily Marks issued the ruling on Tuesday, June 9, that could stop the execution of Alabama death row inmate Jeffrey Lee. Lee is scheduled to be executed on Thursday, June 11, for a double murder during a pawn shop robbery in 1998.

The ruling also stops the state of Alabama from executing other inmates with the method, though no others are scheduled this year, and the state is expected to appeal the ruling, which could put the matter in front of the U.S. Supreme Court.

The office of Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey did not immediately respond to a request for comment from USA TODAY.

Marks’ ruling stems from a hearing about how much pain inmates experience during a nitrogen gas execution. She concluded that they experience up to three minutes of “severe air hunger” resulting in emotional distress, anxiety, physiological stress, and physical discomfort.

The U.S. Constitution does not guarantee a death row inmate a pain-free death but does require executions to be free of cruel and unusual punishment.

Defense attorneys, death penalty opponents and some witnesses to nitrogen gas executions argue it amounts to torture and so is a clear constitutional violation.

Alabama was the first state in the nation to carry out a nitrogen gas execution, that of Kenneth Eugene Smith in 2024. Since then, the state has executed six other inmates with the method, and Louisiana has used it once.

Under the method, executioners strap inmates to a gurney with chest and shoulder harnesses and attach a mask to his face. Ultra-high-purity nitrogen gas flows into the mask, and that displaces breathable air until none is left. The inmate loses consciousness and dies.

Witness accounts from the first four Alabama executions describe “suffering, including conscious terror for several minutes, shaking, gasping, and other evidence of distress,” Louisiana Chief District Judge Shelly Dick wrote last year when addressing the method in her state. The witnesses saw inmates “writhing” under their restraints, “vigorous convulsing and shaking for four minutes,” heaving, spitting, and a “conscious struggling for life,” she wrote.

Initially, Marks ruled last week that Lee showed he was likely to experience pain during his execution but not to an unconstitutional degree. The 11th U.S. District Court of Appeals disagreed with her on Monday and sent the case back to her for reconsideration.

Lee’s execution would be the first in Alabama this year. Another inmate, Charles Lee “Sonny” Burton, had been set to be executed by nitrogen gas in March, but Ivey commuted his death sentence to life just two days before the execution. The decision had nothing to do with the execution method. Ivey said it would be “unjust” to take Burton’s life when he wasn’t the triggerman in an AutoZone robbery gone bad in 1991.

It was the second time the Republican governor has commuted an inmate’s sentence in her nine years in office. She has presided over 25 executions.

Amanda Lee Myers is a senior crime reporter who covers the death penalty, cold cases and breaking news for USA TODAY. Follow her on X at @amandaleeusat.