Murder Mystery: Shining a Light on the Story That the Newspapers Left Out
Lesson by Allyson Criner Brown, Deborah Menkart,
and Jenice L. View
Herbert and Prince Lee (left photo). Louis Allen (right photo).
The murder of Mississippi voting rights activist Herbert Lee (Sept. 25, 1961), and subsequent murder of witness Louis Allen (Jan. 31, 1964), were key events in the history of the modern Civil Rights Movement. However, they were barely mentioned in the local press at the time and the story is missing from textbooks and public memory today.
We hope that this lesson for high school students and adults can begin to fill that gap. Using a mixer format, students take on the roles of key people and institutions from the period and interview each other.
These two murders can introduce students to the widespread and institutional use of violence (terrorism) against African Americans when they tried to exercise their constitutional right to vote from the end of Reconstruction through the 1960s. (See Civil Rights Martyrs at Southern Poverty Law Center for more names.)
The story also highlights the fight for voting rights and grassroots organizing, carried out in communities all over the country, yet missing from most textbooks which focus instead on marches and individual heroes. As historian Charles Payne notes in an interview about his book, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle,
The Civil Rights Movement’s made up by hundreds, thousands of folk that are historically invisible and anonymous. One way to say it, there is one wing of them that come from strong religious backgrounds, people who are committed to say Gandhi and nonviolence, that’s one string.
Another string of them come from the servicemen, I’m thinking primarily of Black servicemen now, who served in World War II and came back with a whole different sense of entitlement about being an American citizen. Mississippi sent close to 90,000 Black men into the service. They come back changed, they come back empowered, both empowered and entitled.
There’s a middle-class stream that for me is represented by the NAACP, which sets up these string of court victories, which by 1944, gets the white primary outlawed, which then becomes over the next seven or eight years the basis of probably most Black political organizing in the deep South states.
The fact is that Black people can no longer be [legally] excluded from primaries. But somebody has to organize at the ground level, somebody’s got to be willing to walk folk down to the registration office, somebody has to be willing to teach people how to take the test we have to pass. So, all those streams come together with increasing intensity in the ’50s and ’60s to create the movement.
The people and stories in this lesson are part of the “streams” Payne refers to, the streams that were central to the river of the Civil Rights Movement and key to understanding how to create social change today.
Grade Level: Middle and high school
Time Required: One class period
Essential Question
What was the impact of the murders of Herbert Lee and Louis Allen on Pike County? Did it set back or strengthen the voter registration movement?
Essential Understandings
Murder and other forms of terrorism were used in an attempt to intimidate and prevent African Americans from exercising their right to vote.
Local officials and the mainstream media did not pursue justice in these cases and often intentionally tried to obstruct it.
There were further repercussions for anyone who tried to expose the truth.
Materials
Bob Moses Testimony
Roles/Bio Sheets
Herbert Lee, dairy and cotton farmer
Mrs. Prince Lee, wife of Herbert Lee, 1963
Louis Allen, owner, timber business
Elizabeth Allen, wife of Louis Allen
Hank Allen, son of Louis Allen
E. H. Hurst, Mississippi State Legislator
Sovereignty Commission, State of Mississippi, 1956-1977
Bob Moses, organizer, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)
E. W. Steptoe, Amite activist and dairy farmer
George Reese, Amite Activist
John Doar, U.S. Justice Department
C. C. Bryant, McComb activist and labor leader
Amzie Moore, president, local NAACP
Billy Jack Caston, cousin of Sheriff E. L. Caston, son-in-law of E. H. Hurst
E. L. Caston, Amite sheriff, 1954–1962
Daniel Jones, Amite sheriff
Witness, African American
Witness, African American
Witness, white
Witness, white
Percy Hazelwood, grocery owner
Amite Coroner’s Jury, white
Undertaker, African American, McComb
Lloyd King, Louis Allen’s boss
Interview Sheets
Background for Teacher: What Really Happened
Bob Moses’ Testimony:
Bob Moses. Source: Schomburg Center
SNCC organizer Bob Moses said:
On Sept. 31 Herbert Lee was killed in Amite County. . . .
The Sunday before Lee was killed, I was down at Steptoe’s with John Doar from the Justice Department and he asked Steptoe was there any danger in that area, who was causing the trouble, and who were the people in danger. Steptoe had told him that E. H. Hurst who lived across from him had been threatening people and that specifically he, Steptoe, Herbert Lee, and George Reese were in danger of losing their lives. We went out but didn’t see Lee that afternoon. At night John Doar and the other lawyers from the Justice Department left. The following morning about 12 noon, Doc Anderson came by the Voter Registration office and said a man had been shot in Amite County. I went down to take a look at the body and it was Herbert Lee; there was a bullet hole in the left side of his head just above the ear.
I remember reading very bitterly in the papers the next morning a little short article on the front page of the McComb Enterprise Journal, said that “the Negro had been shot in self-defense as he was trying to attack E. H. Hurst.”
That was it. You might have thought he had been a bum. There was no mention that Lee was a farmer, that he had a family, that he had nine kids, beautiful kids, that he had been a farmer all his life in Amite County, and that he had been a very substantial citizen. It was as if he had been drunk or something and had gotten into a fight and gotten shot.
Our first job was to try to track down those people who had been at the shooting, who had seen the whole incident.
Background for Teacher: What Really Happened
From the same interview with Bob Moses:
Essentially, the story was this: They were standing at the cotton gin early in the morning and they saw Herbert Lee drive up in his truck with a load of cotton, E. H. Hurst following behind him in an empty truck. Hurst got out of his truck and came to the cab on the driver’s side of Lee’s truck and began arguing with Lee. He began gesticulating towards Lee and pulled out a gun that he had under his shirt and began threatening Lee with it. One of the people that was close by said that Hurst was telling Lee, “I’m not fooling around this time, I really mean business,” and that Lee told him, “Put the gun down. I won’t talk to you unless you put the gun down.” Hurst put the gun back under his coat and then Lee slid out on the other side, on the offside of the cab. As he got out, Hurst ran around the front of the cab, took his gun out again, pointed it at Lee and shot him.
Hurst was acquitted. He never spent a moment in jail. In fact, the sheriff had whisked him away very shortly after the crime was committed.
Now we knew in our hearts and minds that Hurst was attacking Lee because of the voter registration drive, and I suppose that we all felt guilty and felt responsible, because it’s one thing to get beat up and it’s another thing to be responsible, or to participate in some way, in a killing.
Sample Bios
Herbert Lee
Dairy and cotton farmer
When Bob Moses arrived in Amite County, Mississippi in the summer of 1961, Herbert Lee, one of the few Black people with a vehicle, drove the young SNCC field secretary around the county, the two of them attempting to convince local African Americans to register to vote.
Born in Amite County in 1912, Herbert Lee had little formal education. His wife taught him how to sign his name after they were married. By the 1950s, he was a successful dairy farmer. When he traveled with his nine children, he was careful to avoid gas stations and restaurants in which they might experience racism.
Lee was a childhood friend of E. W. Steptoe and one of the charter members of the Amite County chapter of the NAACP Steptoe organized in 1952. In majority-Black Amite County, only one Black person was registered to vote. It was the most Klan-ridden county in the state, and only a handful of people were willing to participate in the effort to gain voting rights. As a few people began trickling into the voting school Moses organized in the tiny church on Steptoe’s property, an alarmed white community began threatening reprisal and violence. [Description from SNCC Digital Gateway]
Louis Allen
Owner, timber business
Louis Allen ran a small timber business in Liberty, Mississippi, the county seat of Amite County, a county notorious as a Ku Klux Klan stronghold. A World War II veteran with a seventh-grade education, he was also a landowner. SNCC was active in the county, but Allen did not attempt to register to vote or become involved in the Movement. Allen’s life changed on the morning of September 25, 1961, when he witnessed the murder of NAACP leader and SNCC supporter Herbert Lee by Eugene Hurst, a state legislator.
Allen watched as Hurst aimed his pistol at Lee — who stood with empty hands and an unlit cigarette in his mouth — after limited verbal exchange. But witness or not, Allen was pressured by local law enforcement officials to lie about what had happened. He testified that he had seen Lee holding a tire iron with the intention of hitting Representative Hurst. A piece of iron was “found” under Lee’s body by the same authorities that had coerced Allen. The coroner’s jury exonerated Hurst the next day.
Allen was uncomfortable with his untruth. “I did not want to tell no story about the dead, because you can’t ask the dead for forgiveness,” he told SNCC organizer Bob Moses. He decided to tell the truth at the grand jury hearing that would examine the coroner jury’s findings. And that meant putting his life on the line. [Description from SNCC Digital Gateway]
E. W. Steptoe
Amite NAACP local chapter organizer and dairy farmer
Eldridge Willie “E. W.” Steptoe had been involved in the struggle long before SNCC came to Amite County, Mississippi where he lived and farmed. Steptoe’s strength, experience, and support for SNCC really helped the young organization learn how to sink roots in the rural South.
In 1953, Steptoe tried to register to vote and was told he failed the test. Although he only had a sixth grade education, Steptoe knew he had the right to vote. He had heard about the NAACP on a trip to New Orleans and decided to start a branch in Amite County. Steptoe hosted secret meetings on his farm, and the chapter grew to over 200 members.
In 1954, Klansmen and the county sheriff raided an NAACP meeting and seized membership lists, which caused membership to plummet. Unwilling to let the branch die, Steptoe personally paid for enough memberships to qualify to be an official NAACP chapter. The next few years were slow going in Amite County, but Steptoe remained resolved in his organizing. He visited local churches and tried to educate Black people about voting rights. [Description from SNCC Digital Gateway]
Sovereignty Commission
State of Mississippi, 1956–1977
In defiance of Brown v. Board of Education, Mississippi lawmakers created the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission in 1956 “to do and perform any and all acts and things deemed necessary and proper to protect the sovereignty of the state of Mississippi” from “encroachment . . . by the Federal Government or any branch, department or agency thereof.” A tax-supported state agency that was part of the executive branch, the Sovereignty Commission included the governor (who also served as chair), the lieutenant governor, the speaker of the house, the attorney general, two state senators, three state representatives, and three citizens.
The Sovereignty Commission used paid and unpaid informants throughout the state to keep the NAACP and the Mississippi Progressive Voters’ League under surveillance. By the summer of 1959, these informants and agency investigators had enabled the Sovereignty Commission to accumulate more than four thousand index cards and several hundred investigative files containing baseless rumors, random information, and bizarre details. They also sponsored a film, Message from Mississippi, that extolled the “benefits” of segregation. [Description from Mississippi Encyclopedia] ■