— Mississippi Freedom Trail —

Front

The Reverend George Lee (1903-1955), a pioneer in the early Mississippi civil rights movement, was a vice president of the Regional Council of Negro Leadership, a co-founder of the Belzoni NAACP branch, and a powerful public speaker. In the spring of 1955 he addressed a crowd of 10,000 gathered at a Mound Bayou, Mississippi, voter registration rally. Two weeks later, on May 7, he was assassinated; no one was ever charged for the murder.



Rear


The Reverend George Lee, a prominent minister and successful entrepreneur in Belzoni, was determined to succeed as a civil rights leader as well. He was the first black citizen to register to vote in Humphreys County, where blacks were a majority of the population. In 1953 Lee and Gus Courts, a black grocer and early activist, so-founded the Belzoni branch of the NAACP. When Lee and Courts tried to register to vote and the sheriff refused to accept their poll taxes, they reported the case to federal authorities. They then registered successfully, angering local whites. Together, Lee and Courts registered nearly all of the county's black voters in 1955, despite threats of violence and economic pressures. The Regional Council of Negro Leadership, a leading black organization in the state, pressed for voting rights and organized a successful boycott of gas stations that refused to install restrooms for blacks. Lee spoke at the Council's annual meeting in 1955 in Mound Bayou, and Jet magazine reported that Lee "electrified" the crowd. He urged them to vote, telling them if they did, the Delta would someday send a Negro to Congress.



On May 7, 1955, Lee was driving on a street in Belzoni pulled up along-side his and assailants shot him in the face. He lost control of the car and crashed, and died on the way to the hospital. The next day Jackson's Clarion-Ledger ran the story under the headline "Negro Leaders Dies in Odd Accident." Lee's wife and others demanded an investigation by the FBI, which built a circumstantial murder case against two men, but the local prosecutor refused to take the case to a grand jury. When NAACP field secretary Evers came to investigate the murder, Sheriff Ike Shelton, insisting an autopsy was not necessary, informed Evers that Lee died from a car crash and that the lead found in his jaw was dental fillings. An examination of Lee's body by two black physicians revealed that two to three rifle shots were fired — one at point blank range into the cab — ripping of the lower left side of his face. Medgar Evers and others called on Governor Hugh White to investigate, but White refused. The crime went unchallenged, but news of it was reported nationally. The Reverend George Lee's widow, Rosebud Lee, prophetically decided to hold an open-coffin ceremony for her late husband, planting the seeds for a similar decision by Mamie Till-Mobley, Emmett Till's mother. Many consider Lee to be the first martyr of the modern civil rights movement.

Show me all markers in:  Belzoni, MS  |  Humphreys County  |  39038  |  Mississippi  |  United States of America

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