The MISSISSIPPI
Civil Rights & Delta Blues
BOOKSTORE
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The MISSISSIPPI Civil Rights & Delta Blues BOOKSTORE |
Lamar Smith and Herbert Lee
"In August 1955, Lamar Smith, sixty-three-year-old farmer and World War II veteran, was shot in cold blood on the crowded courthouse lawn in Brookhaven, Mississippi, for urging Blacks to vote. In Local People, John Dittmer writes “although the sheriff saw a white man leaving the scene 'with blood all over him' no one admitted to having witnessed the shooting” and “the killer went free.”"
"On September 25, 1961, farmer Herbert Lee was shot and killed in Liberty, Mississippi, by E.H. Hurst, a member of the State Legislature. Hurst murdered Lee because of his participation in the voter registration campaign sweeping through southwest Mississippi. Authorities never charged him with the crime. According to Charles Payne in I've Got the Light of Freedom, “Black witnesses had been pressured by the sheriff and others to testify that Lee tried to hit Hurst with a tire tool. They testified as ordered. Hurst was acquitted by a coroner's jury, held in a room full of armed White men, the same day as the killing. Hurst never spent a night in jail.”"
Source - "The Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi" by Curtis J. Austin (Mississippi State Historical Society).