Choctaw County Civil Rights Protester’s 1971 Death Never Brought Charges, but Her Legacy Endures

BUTLER, Ala. — More than five decades after a car struck and killed 19-year-old Margaret Ann Knott during a civil rights demonstration outside the Choctaw County Courthouse, no one has ever been charged in her death. County grand jurors chose not to indict the driver in 1971, the U.S. Department of Justice decided that year not to bring a federal case, and a renewed federal review opened in 2019 ended in 2024 without charges. Yet the 1971 tragedy remains one of the defining moments of the Choctaw County civil rights movement, and the community in this west Alabama county still gathers each September to honor her.

This fall, relatives, friends and neighbors met again on Sept. 13 at Morning Star Baptist Church on Alabama 17, on the edge of Butler, for the annual memorial service that raises money for a college scholarship in her name. Before the crowd dispersed, a man who had been standing beside Knott when she was hit rose to share what she told him in the moments after the collision: that she had died for freedom. He had given the same account to FBI agents in 1971 and again in 2022.

A Legal Case That Closed Without Charges

The question of criminal responsibility for Knott’s death has been examined three times, and each review ended the same way.

• 1971 state grand jury: Alabama Attorney General Bill Baxley named a special prosecutor to present the case because the local district attorney was ill. Of the 18 grand jurors, 12 were white and six were Black. More than four dozen people were called to appear, and roughly 30 gave testimony. After two days, the grand jury declined to indict the driver on a murder charge, announcing its decision on Sept. 23, 1971.
• 1971 federal review: The FBI interviewed 65 witnesses and completed a short investigation that October. Federal officials advised against bringing charges, citing a lack of evidence that federal civil rights law had been violated.
• 2019 to 2024 federal review: The Justice Department reopened the matter in 2019 under the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crimes Reauthorization Act of 2016. In 2024 it closed the case, concluding the evidence could not prove the driver acted willfully, using his vehicle to disrupt the demonstrators and strike Knott. The department added that even with stronger evidence, a federal prosecution was no longer possible because the five-year federal deadline for filing charges had long since passed.

The original Emmett Till law and its 2016 reauthorization direct federal investigators to revisit unresolved racially motivated killings from the civil rights era. Many of those reviews, like this one, end without prosecution because witnesses have died, evidence has been lost or legal deadlines have passed.

What Happened on Sept. 11, 1971

That Saturday, demonstrators had blocked all four intersections surrounding the courthouse in Butler, the county seat. At about 1 p.m., a 28-year-old white U.S. Department of Agriculture employee left his office at South Hamburg Avenue and Church Street, headed home in a beige 1964 Chevrolet. He drove into one of the blocked intersections, and his car struck Knott where Pushmataha Street meets Mulberry Avenue.

Witnesses gave sharply different versions of what followed.

Protesters told the FBI the car approached at roughly 25 to 30 miles per hour and hit Knott from behind before she could move aside. Several said demonstrators then pounded on the car and tried to push it back so she could get free, and that the driver instead accelerated. According to those accounts, the vehicle lurched forward, rose and came down on top of her before speeding off.

Other witnesses, most of them white and many acquainted with the driver, described a different scene to investigators. In their telling, protesters surrounded the car, struck its doors and tried to drag the driver out, and he sped up to escape, running over Knott in the process. The driver later told the FBI he believed his life was in danger, accelerated to get clear of the intersection, and did not realize he had hit anyone until afterward.

Knott was taken to Choctaw County Hospital with multiple broken bones. While she was being treated, she suffered a fat embolism, a blockage that cuts off blood flow, and staff were unable to revive her. Her death came at 2 p.m. Official records disagree on what killed her: her death certificate lists a fat embolism resulting from being struck by a car, while an autopsy by the state toxicologist attributed her death to a ruptured spleen.

Demonstrators went looking for the sheriff and gave him the only identifying details they had, the Chevrolet and its license plate number. The sheriff identified the driver and sent deputies to arrest him at home on a murder charge. A circuit judge set bond at $5,000, and the driver was released.

A County Under Pressure

Knott’s death came amid a summer-long campaign for equal treatment in a county where Black residents made up 43 percent of roughly 16,500 people but held no seats in county government.

Choctaw County schools had been operating under federal court oversight for five years in United States v. Choctaw County Board of Education. As desegregation continued in 1971, the county dismissed nine Black teachers, according to accounts from the period. Knott’s mother, also a teacher, was reported to be among them, although an education official maintained she was on maternity leave rather than fired.

The dismissals prompted Anthony S. Butler, who had served in World War II and worked as both an educator and a funeral home operator, to organize direct action through the Concerned Black Citizens of Choctaw County, an affiliate of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The group pressed for the teachers to be rehired and for Black residents to be represented in county leadership, on government staffs, in law enforcement and in downtown businesses. He would go on to become mayor of Lisman, a town roughly seven miles northwest of the county seat. He died in 1996.

Through the summer, hundreds of people, most of them students, joined daily marches into Butler. Organizers held Monday evening mass meetings at area churches, including the AME Zion Church in Butler. Adult volunteers handed out water, soft drinks and sandwiches, and young marchers carried handmade signs calling for equal rights and an end to segregation while singing freedom songs such as “We Shall Overcome” and “Keep Your Eyes on the Prize” Black residents also boycotted downtown stores, and when the fall term arrived, more than 90 percent of the county’s Black students stayed out of school in a strike. County leaders still refused to meet with the movement’s leaders.

The Week That Followed

The day after Knott died, an estimated 450 to 500 people marched in silence through downtown Butler, pausing to pray and circling the courthouse before returning to church. Despite the calm nature of the march, Gov. George Wallace activated 150 Alabama National Guard members and deployed them alongside 52 state troopers to patrol the town. At the request of county and town officials, a circuit judge issued a temporary injunction against the SCLC and the local organization to halt demonstrations.

Students defied the order on Sept. 13 by gathering in school gyms in Butler and Lisman instead of going to class. Deputies took 165 people into custody, the majority of them students, and transported them to the armory used by the National Guard. There, young people were fingerprinted, photographed and given juvenile hearings. Bond was set at $200 per charge for adults and $100 for youths 14 and older, with no bond amount for younger children. Adults and 10 young people who refused bail were held in jails in Sumter, Marengo and Washington counties, with some kept six to a cell for a week at the Washington County Jail in Chatom.

On Sept. 14, with the injunction briefly lifted, an estimated 2,500 mourners led by SCLC President Ralph Abernathy and Knott’s twin sister, Mary Ann, followed her casket on a mule-drawn wagon from the AME Zion Church. The procession passed the driver’s home and halted at the spot where she was struck, where Abernathy knelt and kissed the ground. The casket was then moved to a hearse for the trip to Pleasant Hill Baptist Church in Yantley. One of Knott’s first cousins, the youngest speaker and the only woman on the program, delivered a tribute she had written herself, fulfilling a childhood promise the two had made. Abernathy’s eulogy, which lasted more than half an hour, laid the blame for her death on prejudice and racism. She was buried in the church cemetery.

Arrests continued. On Sept. 15, deputies detained 40 Choctaw High School students who skipped class. Later that morning, after several hundred people gathered with Abernathy inside Bethel Baptist Church and marched toward the courthouse in defiance of the injunction, deputies arrested 160 people and carried them away on school buses. Abernathy and a minister from Selma were held at the county jail, while the others were sent to the Thomaston Prison Camp in Marengo County. The National Guard was released that afternoon, but state troopers stayed. Another 48 people were arrested while protesting outside the jail, pushing the week’s total past 400.

An Agreement Reached

Meanwhile, county officials finally agreed to sit down with Black leaders. The talks took place at the Hayden and Butler funeral home in Lisman, with two federal mediators from the Justice Department’s Community Relations Service taking part. Abernathy refused to post bail until a deal was struck.

Late on the afternoon of Saturday, Sept. 18, county officials accepted most of the movement’s demands. They agreed to reinstate several of the Black teachers, drop charges against Black demonstrators and expand Black representation in government and in downtown stores. Abernathy then posted bail and left town. Relatives have said it took a loss as painful as Knott’s to begin bringing change to the county.

Growing Up in Yantley

Knott and her twin grew up in Yantley, a tight-knit Black community about 17 miles northwest of Butler. Their parents and the parents of two cousins were siblings on both sides, making the four girls unusually close; relatives describe them as more like sisters than cousins. Their families took part in the movement, and during the 1960s the four were in the first group of Black students to enroll in formerly white county schools through a voluntary freedom of choice plan. Growing up, they shared everything from childhood illnesses to plans for each other’s weddings, and they pledged to sing or speak at one another’s funerals.

Keeping Her Memory Alive

Knott’s mother forgave the driver, believing he had not acted on purpose. She tried for years to place a marker close to the courthouse at the spot where her daughter was struck, but the effort stalled. In 2019, the Margaret Ann Knott Memorial Bridge on County Road 45 in Yantley was dedicated by county officials. Her mother died in 2018, and her twin sister died in 2020.

In the mid-1970s, Knott’s mother created a scholarship fund to help graduating high school seniors with college costs. Near the end of her life, she asked a fellow church member to keep it going, and the fund continues to support students today. At this year’s gathering at Morning Star, faith leaders reflected on Knott’s sacrifice, singing was led by the Greene County Community Choir, and those in attendance contributed to the scholarship.

The cousin who spoke at the funeral has said her father urged her not to let the loss derail her. She went back to Livingston University, now the University of West Alabama, earned her degree and later a master’s degree, and built a career in student affairs at the University of Southern Mississippi, work she has described as rooted in the pain of losing Knott.

Choctaw County sits along Alabama’s western border with Mississippi, north of Washington County. For families there, the story of a young protester who never saw the changes her death helped bring about remains a living part of local history.