In 1952 and 1953, with the help of Medgar Evers, Lee and his friend Gus Courts, a grocer, organized the Belzoni branch of the NAACP. Courts became the first branch president, and Lee was soon the first black citizen registered to vote in Humphreys County since the end of Reconstruction.22 They held a number of voter registration meetings, for which Lee printed leaflets. According to Courts and Roy Wilkins, the national NAACP executive director, they managed to register roughly four hundred African Americans. When Sheriff Ike Shelton refused to accept poll tax payments from African Americans and ordered Lee to “get the niggers to take their names off the [registration] book,” Lee and Courts threatened to sue him.23
This affront brought down the wrath of the Citizens’ Council, which launched a campaign of intimidation and reprisal that soon forced virtually all black voters to remove their names from the registration rolls. By May 7 the number of African American voters in the county fell to ninety-two.24 Local white wholesalers refused to sell Courts wares for his store or to extend him credit. If he didn’t take his name off the registration list, they told him, he would lose his lease. No doubt frustrated that economic reprisals were not working, Citizens’ Council leaders next assured Lee that if the two men would simply remove their names and cease their registration efforts the Council would protect him and Courts from harm.25
The implicit threat was something to weigh soberly. White men had recently beaten two black ministers who had advocated the ballot for African Americans at Starkville and Tupelo.26 In Belzoni the NAACP’s adversaries responded to the successful voter registration drive by smashing the windshields of eighteen parked cars on a single street in the black community and shattering the windows of a number of black-owned businesses. The vandals left a note that promised, “You niggers paying poll tax, this is just a token of what will happen to you.”27 On an evening in the spring of 1955 a mob of white men swarmed Elks’ Rest, a local African American social hall, smashed up the place, destroyed equipment, tore up the checkbook, and left this note: “You niggers think you will vote but it will never happen. This is to show you what will happen if you try.”28
By May 7, 1955, Lee had received countless death threats by phone and mail, including from one anonymous caller who said, “Nigger, you’re number one on a list of people we don’t need around here any more.” That night Lee drove downtown to pick up a suit from the dry cleaner’s for church the next day. It was after eleven, but relationships were informal among the town’s black merchants and Lee knew that his friend, who lived in the same building where he kept his dry cleaning shop, would not mind pulling a clean suit out of the back room.29
Heading home, Lee drove past Peck Ray, a local handyman, and Joe David Watson Sr., a gravel hauler. Both men belonged to the local Citizens’ Council. Watson had been arrested recently for shooting into a black sharecropper’s home, but District Attorney Stanny Sanders had chosen not to try the case. According to records from the FBI investigation conducted later, witnesses said “they saw two men leave a downtown street corner where they had been standing, enter Ray’s green, two-toned Mercury convertible, drive away and return shortly afterward. Several witnesses saw a convertible fitting that description following Lee with only its parking lights on.”30
As Lee neared his home in a black neighborhood, the convertible pulled up behind him. Witnesses thought one of the passengers in the car looked like Sheriff Ike Shelton.31 The first shot flattened one of Lee’s tires. Then the Mercury pulled up alongside Lee’s car, and a .20-gauge shotgun blast blew away his lower left jaw. Lee’s car careened into a nearby frame house, collapsing the porch and knocking a huge hole in the front wall. Blood pouring from his head, Lee staggered from the wreckage. A passing black taxi driver saw him collapse and whisked him off to Humphreys County Memorial Hospital, but Lee died in the backseat. A coroner’s jury found that he died from blood loss from wounds caused by about two dozen number-three buckshot.32 Yet the Jackson Clarion-Ledger’s headline the following day was “Negro Leader Dies in Odd Accident.” The FBI report on the case noted, “Sheriff I. J. Shelton made public statements that the metal fragments in Lee’s jaw were most likely fillings from his teeth.” This was a little over three months before the murder of Emmett Till.33
Less than an hour after the midnight shotgun blasts took Lee’s life, operators for Belzoni’s telephone system reportedly began telling black customers that all of the town’s long-distance lines were in use. So Lee’s friends sped north to Mound Bayou to inform Dr. Howard, who called Representative Charles Diggs in Michigan, who called the White House. Others raced to Jackson to tell Medgar Evers and A. H. McCoy, the president of the state conference of NAACP branches. Evers assembled all the known facts for the national press. “It was clearly a political assassination,” recalled Roy Wilkins at the national office, “but the local lawmen practically pretended that nothing had happened.”34 In his annual report for the Mississippi state office Evers was blunt: “[Lee’s] independent business, print shop and grocery, made it difficult to squeeze him economically, so their only alternative was to kill him.”35
McCoy called Ruby Hurley, the NAACP southeastern district director, who was on assignment in Panama City, Florida. She caught the first morning plane to Jackson, where she met Evers, who drove her south to Belzoni. Hurley noticed that Evers was unusually defiant and carried a gun. “Medgar was brand-new then and had some ideas we had to change,” she said, adding that he was “anything but nonviolent.” Seeing an unmarked sheriff’s car on their trail, Hurley decided to keep quiet about it: “I was afraid he might stop and ask the man what he was following us for.” In Belzoni they found the black community braced with rage and terror: many residents feared what might happen next, while others openly advocated revenge.36
Hurley persuaded Wilkins to have the national office match a $500 reward offered by the RCNL for any information leading to the arrest and conviction of the murderers.37 Word came to Evers and Hurley that a man named Alex Hudson and a young female schoolteacher had witnessed Lee’s murder from a porch directly across the street. Hudson had fled to the home of relatives in East St. Louis the very next day.38 The schoolteacher “moved suddenly from her home during the night and has not been heard from since,” an NAACP investigator reported.39