This land is
not disposable.

The site lies along U.S. Highway 80, the route of the Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail. That is not an association a marketing team chose. It is the road.

The Robert Gardner Farm, designated by the National Park Service as Campsite 3 of the 1965 march, is reported by al.com as half a mile away, down U.S. Highway 80. We use that attribution because no parcel-boundary-to-farm measurement from a survey exists in our record, and we would rather cite a reporter than invent a number. Inside Climate News put the distance at just over a mile in June 2026, and that is the figure this site used until August 13, 2026.¹​²​³​

On July 23, 2026, Charles Steele Jr., a former president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and a former Alabama state senator from Tuscaloosa, published an opinion piece headlined "Build it. Just not there," which argues for the jobs and asks that this facility be built somewhere other than this highway. It put the distance at half a mile, which this site noted at the time as differing from the figure it then used. Later reporting has since put it at half a mile as well.⁴​³​

In 2022 the Lowndes County portion of Highway 80 was renamed the Robert Mants Memorial Highway. Bob Mants was a SNCC field secretary who marched on Bloody Sunday, helped build the Lowndes County Freedom Organization, later served as a county commissioner, and opposed a U.S. 80 landfill in 2000. The renaming covers the county stretch of the highway, which is the stretch the proposed site fronts.

On May 24, 2026, his family wrote to the Lowndes County Commission opposing the project. The letter describes the area as sacred ground, warns against sacrifice zones, and states: "this land is not disposable." It asks whether the company would place such a facility in their own communities, near their own homes, families, and water sources. It closes with two words: "Do better."⁵​⁶​

Lowndes County has a documented history of being asked to absorb what other places would not. The sanitation record includes a 2018 Title VI complaint describing heavy clay soil that prevents septic systems from working and the resulting use of straight pipes for raw sewage; a 2017 visit by the United Nations Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty, who described the conditions as a human-rights violation; and Baylor University research finding 34 percent of tested residents positive for hookworm.

In May 2023 the U.S. Departments of Justice and Health and Human Services announced an interim resolution agreement with the Alabama Department of Public Health, the first federal environmental-justice action of its kind under Title VI. It was terminated on April 11, 2025.

That history is not a legal argument against a data center. It is the reason residents here read a promise carefully.⁷​⁸​⁹​

Large industry is not new here. The Burkville plant at 1 Plastics Drive, operated today as SABIC Innovative Plastics US LLC, spans roughly 6,300 acres less than a mile from the parcel. The EPA lists it as a Clean Air Act major source, an NPDES major source, and a RCRA large-quantity generator. In 2012 the EPA settled a Clean Air Act enforcement case against the Burkville and Mt. Vernon facilities for $1,012,873 in combined civil penalties on a fifteen-count complaint.

That plant arrived with a forty-year abatement. The chairman himself raised the comparison from the floor on May 26. It is the county’s own worked example of what a long abatement looks like decades later, and it is the right thing to study before signing another one.¹⁰​¹¹​