Courts continued, “After we had gotten to the registrar’s office, we were handed a sheet of paper which contained 10 questions. They told us we could not have the ballots until we had answered the questions.” The first question asked if they were members of the Democratic Party. “The next question was, ‘Do you want your children to go to school with the white children?’ The next question was, ‘Are you a member or do you support the NAACP?’?” The registrar refused to accept any of their votes. Not one black ballot was counted in Humphreys County in 1955.49
Subsequently Courts and four of his comrades wrote and sent a petition to Governor Hugh White asserting that their voting rights were being denied and their lives threatened and asking for protection of both their ballots and their bodies. They sent a copy to the U.S. Department of Justice. The response was chilling. “Now, the Governor sent that petition back to Belzoni to the White Citizens’ Council,” Courts explained. Percy Ford showed the original petition to all five signatories, one by one. “You signed this petition and sent it to the governor,” Courts remembered Ford telling him. “Now you see how much protection you have gotten from the Governor.”50
As the coercion increased, Courts scrawled a note to Evers: “I am reporting a few the Citizen Council putting the preasher on. Mr. V. G. Hargrove, Tchula, Misss. Farmer. Mr. Neely Jackson Tcula Miss. farmer. Mr. Fread Myls Belzoni Miss. merchen, Mr. Will None, planter, Belzoni, Miss., Mr. Willie A Harris, Taxie Cab oner Belzoni Miss. Mr. Gus Couters Belzoni merchen and a lot of others I dount have thire names. All these men have ben ask to get out of the NAACP. And to return thire poll tax or tare up receat. Your truley Gus Courts, 61 First St. Belzoni Miss.”51 Evers filed the letter along with several similar reports. Citizens’ Council members persisted in warning Courts to get out of Belzoni or face the consequences.
About eight o’clock on Friday night, November 25, 1955, a forty-two-year-old black woman named Savannah Luton entered Courts’s grocery store on First Street in Belzoni. “I was busy waiting on customers in my store,” Courts recalled. He greeted Luton from behind the old drink box and cash register. “I was buying a dime’s worth of coal oil and I heard this noise that sounded like firecrackers,” she said later. “I bent down to look out the window and told Mr. Courts, ‘There’s some white folks out here shooting at us.’ He didn’t even know he was shot until then.”
The shotgun had been loaded with unconventionally large buckshot, and two quick blasts splattered the upper edge of the bed of Courts’s pickup truck and sprayed irregular holes across the store’s plate glass window. When Courts touched his side his hand came away covered with blood; the slugs had caught him in his left arm and stomach. Unharmed, Luton rushed out the front door just in time to see a two-toned automobile spraying dust and gravel as it raced away toward downtown Belzoni. There was a white man at the wheel and other people in the car whom Luton couldn’t make out. Running back into the store, she found Courts fallen. He had one hand pressed up against the wound to his side and the other to the wound in his arm. Blood seeped through his fingers and dripped onto the wood floor.52
Friends and family rushed Courts to the hospital—not the local hospital nearby but the Taborian Hospital in Mound Bayou. “When I walked out to get into the car, I told my friend, Ernest White, who came to take me to the hospital, that I wanted to go to Mound Bayou hospital, which is 80 miles away. The sheriff came over in 30 minutes to my store, after I had left for the hospital. He asked my wife where I was. He said he had been over to the hospital, just two blocks away, for 30 minutes waiting for me.” When his wife said he’d gone to Mound Bayou, the officer was not pleased. “I believe they would have finished me off if I had landed up in the Belzoni hospital,” said Courts.53 Sheriff Shelton complained: “They took Courts across two counties, to 80 miles north of here, though we have the best hospital in the world and two of the best doctors.”
“I’ve known for a long time it was coming and I tried to get prepared in my mind for it,” Courts said, “but that’s a hard thing to do. It’s bad when you know you might get shot just walking around in your store.” Although it was more than a year before Courts had full use of his arm again, he recovered from the buckshot. Other wounds proved harder to heal. No one was ever charged in the case. The New York Times ran one tiny story about the murder of Reverend Lee, but no national press reported on what happened to Courts or on the wave of intimidation against black voters all over the state. U.S. Attorney General Herbert Brownell Jr. insisted that under federal law the Justice Department had no authority to prosecute, even though the courts had long since found that the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution created a national citizenship and so empowered the federal government to protect the right of all citizens to vote.54
Like Lee and Courts, a sixty-three-year-old African American cotton farmer named Lamar Smith decided that he would risk everything to help bring the vote to black Mississippians. About two weeks before Milam and Bryant drove to Reverend Wright’s farmhouse to take Emmett Till, Smith went to the courthouse in Brookhaven, Mississippi, to obtain more of the absentee ballots he was distributing to African Americans so that they could vote without being intimidated or attacked.55 It was ten o’clock on Saturday morning and the square was filled with people. At least three white men set upon the unarmed Smith as he crossed the courthouse lawn and beat him mercilessly. Then at least two of them held him while another fired a .38 revolver into his heart and, by one account, fired a second shot into his mouth. Dozens of people stood nearby. The sheriff was close enough to recognize at least one of the killers and to describe the bloodstains on the shirt of another. The FBI investigation stated flatly that his assailants killed Smith “in front of the sheriff.”56