Murder of Reverend George W. Lee

Reading by Zinn Education Project

Rev. George Washington Lee, one of the first African Americans registered to vote in Humphreys County, Mississippi since Reconstruction, used his pulpit and his printing press to urge others to vote.

Lee was head of the Belzoni, Mississippi NAACP. After countless threats against his life and demands that he remove his name from the voting rolls, Lee was murdered on May 7, 1955.

History News Network reports in “The Grim and Overlooked Anniversary of the Murder of Civil Rights Activist the Rev. George W. Lee“:

In April, Lee was one of the speakers at the Council’s annual meeting, which drew a crowd of more than seven thousand to the all-Black town of Mound Bayou. Simeon Booker of Jet, observed how Lee’s “down-home dialogue and his sense of political timing” had “electrified” the crowd. “Pray not for your mom and pop,” Lee suggested. “They’ve gone to heaven. Pray you can make it through this hell.”

Less than a month after this speech, on May 7, 1955, a convertible pulled alongside Lee’s car just before midnight. An unidentified assailant fired three shot-gun blasts shattering his jaw and driving him off the road. Lee died before he could make it to the hospital. The attack came days after he had received a threatening note demanding that he drop his name from the voting rolls. An autopsy extracted lead pellets from his face that were consistent with buckshot. The sheriff, who wanted to call it a traffic accident and close the case, claimed that they were dental fillings torn loose by the impact of the crash.

Here is background about Lee from the Mississippi Civil Rights Project website:

A savvy businessman, Lee exemplified an earlier generation of activists who solidified successful businesses and then used this as a launching pad for community activism. As the pastor of a Baptist Church, an operator of a printing press, and an active member of the NAACP, Reverend George Lee made his mark on the community once referred to as “Bloody Belzoni.”

He was also the first African-American to register to vote since Reconstruction in Humphreys County, where Black people were a majority of the population. In 1953, Lee and Gus Courts co-founded the Belzoni branch of the NAACP. As early as 1954, Rev. Lee was heavily involved in the local voter registration drives. Working along side Courts, who was elected NAACP president, they successfully registered 92 new African-American voters. Both Courts and Lee also ran small grocery stores.