Editing Luverne, Alabama (section)

==History==
Luverne was one of numerous towns developed in the state as a result of railroad construction.

On July 2, 1880, the '''Montgomery and Southern Railway''' was created to construct a new railroad linking [[Montgomery, Alabama|Montgomery]] to the Florida coast. The company completed around {{convert|30|mi}} of [[Narrow-gauge railway|narrow gauge]] track by September 18, 1882. The company was reorganized as the '''Montgomery and Florida Railway''' in May 1886, and a second time as the '''Northwest and Florida Railroad''' in 1888. In November 1888, the railroad reached the site of Luverne in the central part of [[Crenshaw County, Alabama|Crenshaw County]], near the Patsaliga River. Now totaling {{convert|51|mi}} the line was converted to standard gauge by July 1889 and it was decided to proceed no further. The '''Alabama Terminal and Improvement Company''', a subsidiary of the '''[[Alabama Midland Railway]]''', controlled the railroad by 1889 and the line from Montgomery to Luverne was into the network of the latter.<ref>{{cite book |title=American Narrow Gauge Railroads |last=Hilton |first=George W. |year=1990 |publisher=Stanford University Press |pages=304 |isbn=0-8047-1731-1 }}</ref>

The new railroad terminus attracted related development, and the town grew. It was incorporated in 1891, and became a center of timbering in the [[Piney Woods]] of southern Alabama, as the land was not fertile enough to be suitable for large-scale cotton plantation agriculture.

In 1893, the citizens of Crenshaw County voted to move the county seat from [[Rutledge, Alabama|Rutledge]] to the more populous Luverne.<ref name=alabama>{{Cite encyclopedia
  | last = Sanford
  | first = William
  | title = Luverne
  | encyclopedia = Encyclopedia of Alabama
  | date = December 10, 2009
| url = http://www.encyclopediaofalabama.org/face/Article.jsp?id=h-2318
  | accessdate =January 28, 2010 }}</ref>

By the late 1930s, lynchings of African Americans were increasingly conducted in small groups or in secret, rather than in the former mass public displays.<ref>Mrs. Jessie Daniels Ames, ''The Changing Character of Lynching'', Commission on Interracial Cooperation, 1942</ref> On June 22, 1940, an African-American man named [[Lynching of Jesse Thornton|Jesse Thornton]] was [[Lynching in the United States|lynched]] in Luverne for failing to address a white man with the title of "Mister". He was fatally shot and his body was later found in the Patsaliga River.<ref name="guzman">[http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/maai3/segregation/text2/lynchingcrime.pdf Jessie P. Guzzman & W. Hardin Hughes, “Lynching-Crime,” ''Negro Year Book: A Review of Events Affecting Negro Life, 1944-1946'', 1947; part of National Humanities Center, ''The Making of African American Identity, Vol. III, 1917-1968''; accessed 04 June 2018]</ref> The [[Equal Justice Initiative]] documented that the white man Thornton had apparently offended by his [[Jim Crow]] infraction was a police officer.<ref name="lynching13">{{cite book|title=Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror: Second Edition: Report Summary|date=2015|publisher=[[Equal Justice Initiative]]|location=Montgomery, Alabama|page=15|url=http://eji.org/sites/default/files/lynching-in-america-second-edition-summary.pdf|quote=In 1940, Jesse Thornton was lynched in Luverne, Alabama, for referring to a white police officer by his name without the title of "mister."|access-date=May 16, 2017|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170429053159/http://eji.org/sites/default/files/lynching-in-america-second-edition-summary.pdf|archive-date=April 29, 2017|url-status=dead}}</ref> This was the only lynching recorded in the county.