Voting Rights Act of 1965: Rev. George Lee Remembered
Belzoni, Mississippi, a small Delta town once known for lynchings and Saturday night shootings, survived a tornado after Hurricane Katrina.
“We’re up here in the Delta, far from the coast, where they really got it. We didn’t get the hurricane, but we did get a tornado and it was pretty bad,” said the owner of a used car lot on the north edge of this cotton village once known as “Bloody Belzoni”.
Katrina’s subsequent torrential winds and rains, in fact, damaged most businesses in this community that has been slowly rising on its own since the early days of civil rights violence.
In recent years, Belzoni leaders have created a marketing plan in hopes of attracting new business: colorful five- and six-foot acrylic statues of smiling catfish in polka-dotted bow ties herald Belzoni’s new self-proclaimed status of the World Capital of Catfish.
Catfish are scattered throughout the center. And every summer there’s a catfish barbecue and Delta blues celebration.
For many Belzonians, memories of past violence will never be erased despite marketing efforts, and it is close to downtown, in a poor and blighted neighborhood, where African-Americans placed a block of granite at the beginning of a city street .
Only “George Lee Avenue” is engraved on the cold stone.
But this tribute is to a beloved leader who died a violent death fifty years ago for his right to vote.
* * * *
Rev. George Washington Lee, the first black person to register to vote in Humphreys County since Reconstruction, was shot to death on a neighborhood street while driving his car on the night of May 7, 1955.
Some who knew Lee and stayed to grow old in this Delta city say their friend was a kind and brave man who was brutalized and killed by angry white men for his advocacy of voting rights.
LEE AND THE SECOND of the main targets of the Belzoni Citizens Council, Gus Courts, lived and ran small grocery businesses. The Citizens’ Councils were private, Klan-influenced organizations formed in the Delta in 1954 to keep black citizens out of the polls and prevent integration from taking place.
Lee also preached, often using his pulpit and printing press to urge others to act and vote.
White officials once offered Lee protection on the condition that he end his voter registration efforts, but Lee refused.
Heading the new NAACP Chapter in town, Courts was ordered by his banker to turn over all NAACP books and when he refused, Courts was told to leave town. But he stayed.
Eleven Courts was given a list of ninety-five registered blacks in Humphreys County by a member of the Citizens’ Council who warned that anyone who did not remove their name from the voters list would lose their job. She later auditioned his experiences before a congressional committee.
Both Courts and Lee tried for years to pay poll taxes in order to vote and were finally allowed to sign the register only after the county sheriff feared federal prosecution. Throwing a nerd required a separate battle.
On the day of his murder, nearly a year after Brown vs. Topeka Board of Education and three months before the lynching of Emmett Till in nearby Sunflower County, Rev. Lee visited the Courts to speak about the latest warning.
Lee reported receiving an earlier anonymous death threat demanding that he remove his name from the voting list. He told Courts that he had a strange feeling about this particular threat.
That night, as Reverend Lee drove down Belzoni’s Church Street, two gunshots shattered the stillness of the night, and the minister’s Buick sedan swerved off the curb and crashed into a frame house.
With the lower left side of his face missing, the Rev. George Lee staggered through the rubble but died during transport to Humphreys County Memorial Hospital.
When NAACP leader Medgar Evers arrived in Belzoni to investigate Rev. Lee’s murder, he was told by Sheriff Ike Shelton that Lee lost control of his car and died from the accident; the lead shot found in his jaw tissues were dental fillings.
An autopsy was not necessary for the “freak accident,” Shelton said.
But in Mrs. Lee’s insistence, two black doctors examined her husband’s body and reported that the tissues contained buckshot “fired at close range from a high-powered weapon.” They also found powder burns.
Over the next several days, Evers and two national representatives from the NAACP met with eyewitnesses and the full story emerged:
Lee had been followed by three men in another car.
His right rear tire was punctured by a rifle shot and as he slowed down, the second because “he pulled parallel and was shot at point-blank range in the face. There were also descriptions of the three men, with attempts at identification.”
Evers always doubted that any FBI investigation would take place, as there was never any public report “or even a solid rumour” about what was in the report.
Rev. Lee’s murder was a cold-blooded response to demands for equal treatment by more blacks in Mississippi and was backed by the lies of the local sheriff and police, Evers later reported; Evers was assassinated ten years later on his driveway from Jackson by a member of the Delta Klansman and a member of the White Citizens Council.
Aaron Henry of Clarksdale, also a black leader from Mississippi, recalled: “We felt we needed protection because the past had taught us that when a black man is killed, stay out of town if your skin is black.”
However, surprisingly for one of the first times, no protection was needed at the public funeral that took place in Belzoni.
“There wasn’t a white man in the streets on the day of the service, except for the press. There was a large black turnout at the funeral. This large black presence and the absence of whites marked a turning point,” Henry said. .
* * *
As Aaron Henry predicted, Rev. Lee’s assassination became a critical turning point in 1955; his untimely death would help fuel the subsequent passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA), one of the most successful civil rights laws in United States history, guaranteeing millions of minority voters an equal opportunity to participate in elections and make their voices heard.
The VRA ended literacy tests, poll taxes, and other methods to keep blacks from voting that had long poisoned the roots of this country’s democracy. In 1964, only 300 African Americans held public office in the entire country, including only three in Congress.
But today, more than 9,100 black elected officials serve, including 43 members of Congress, the largest number ever, according to the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, Inc., often called simply Inc.
The VRA also opened up politics to more than 6,000 Latino public officials, including some 260 elected at the state or federal level, with 27 serving in Congress. Native Americans, Asians, and others who have historically faced harsh barriers to full political participation have also benefited greatly.
However, violations of the VRA still occur and the United States has yet to achieve the constitutional goal of equal political opportunity.
Inc. leaders and others who support voting rights reauthorization point to three crucial sections of the Voting Rights Act that will expire in 2007 unless Congress votes to renew them:
*Requirement that states and local jurisdictions with a documented history of discriminatory voting practices submit planned changes to their election laws or procedures to the US Department of Justice or the US District Court. in Washington, DC for prior authorization. A 1982 bipartisan congressional report warned that without this provision, discrimination would reappear “overnight.”
* Requirements that communities with concentrations of limited English proficient voters provide them with bilingual election assistance, including bilingual ballots, election materials, and poll workers.
*The authority to send federal examiners and observers to monitor elections.
Inc. leaders and others involved in voting rights see these provisions as critical to ensuring fairness and equal opportunity for minorities in American politics:
“At a time when the United States is vigorously dedicated to promoting the ideal of multi-ethnic democracy in Iraq and around the world, we must ensure that lawmakers preserve and strengthen the tools necessary to ensure the continued success of democracy here at home.” Reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 is a first step.”