In Lowndes County, Alabama, people have sewage in their yards. Roughly a quarter of residents live below the poverty line. A federal program under President Biden to fix the sanitation crisis was shut down in 2025, dismissed as "illegal DEI." Many families still cannot flush their toilets.

Now a developer wants to build one of the largest data centers in the country next door, drawing up to 100,000 gallons of water per day from the same rural utility that serves those households, and 1,500 megawatts of electricity from the same grid.

The company is Cloverleaf Infrastructure. The project is called Project Red Clay. And the community is saying no.

The 800-acre proposed site sits directly along Highway 80, a federally designated national historic trail and the road where thousands of Americans marched from Selma to Montgomery in 1965 to demand voting rights. The site is about a mile from where civil rights marchers camped overnight on their way to the state capitol. The road has since been renamed in honor of Bob Mants, a Lowndes County native and secretary of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. His family has written to county commissioners in opposition to the project.

"Lowndes County is not just any rural place," his daughter and widow wrote. "It is sacred ground in the history of this nation. 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."

At a public open house last week, residents filled a shuttered middle school to tell the developer the same thing. Signs opposing the project line the roadsides like summer wildflowers. Residents wore shirts printed with a quote from Cloverleaf's own development principal, written in an email about another project: "Cloverleaf will not work in communities where this type of development is unwelcome or does not match the existing use of the land. A decision we will make 10 times out of 10."

Lowndes County has made its answer clear.

We are calling on Cloverleaf Infrastructure to honor its own stated commitment and withdraw Project Red Clay. We are calling on the Lowndes County Commission to reject any permits or agreements that move the project forward. And we are calling on the state of Alabama to fix the sanitation crisis that has left Black Belt residents without basic services before approving any large-scale infrastructure that draws from those same strained systems.

This is sacred ground. It is not a sacrifice zone.