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.
Signs opposing the data center development are as common as summer wildflowers in Lowndes County. Credit: Lee Hedgepeth/Inside Climate News
The 800-acre proposed site of Project Red Clay, a hyperscale data center campus, in rural Lowndes County. Credit: Lee Hedgepeth/Inside Climate News
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.’”
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