Belzoni, Mississippi, a small Delta city as soon as identified for lynching and Saturday evening gun fights, survived a twister following Hurricane Katrina.
“We’re up right here within the Delta, away from the coast the place they actually received it. We did not get the hurricane however we did get a twister and it was fairly unhealthy,” stated the proprietor of a used automobile lot on the northern edge of this cotton hamlet as soon as often called “Bloody Belzoni.”
Katrina’s subsequent winds and extreme rains did the truth is damage most companies on this group that has been slowly lifting itself up by the bootstraps since earlier days of civil rights violence.
In latest years Belzoni leaders created a advertising and marketing plan, hoping to usher in new enterprise: colourful 5 and six-foot acrylic statues of smiling catfish sporting polka-dot bow ties promote Belzoni’s newly self-acclaimed standing of Catfish Capital of the World.
The catfish are scattered all through downtown. And a catfish barbecue and Delta blues celebration takes place every summer time.
For many Belzonians reminiscences of previous violence won’t ever be erased regardless of advertising and marketing efforts, and it’s close to downtown, in a poor and vandalized neighborhood, the place African Americans have positioned a granite block firstly of a metropolis road.
Only “George Lee Avenue” is etched into the chilly stone.
But this tribute is to a beloved chief who died a violent demise fifty years in the past for his or her proper to vote.
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Rev. George Washington Lee, the primary black individual to register to vote in Humphreys County since Reconstruction, was shot to demise on a neighborhood road whereas driving his automobile on the evening of May 7, 1955.
Some who knew Lee and have remained to develop previous on this Delta city say their good friend was a sort and courageous man who was brutalized and killed by white males angered over his voting rights advocacy.
LEE AND THE SECOND of Belzoni Citizen Council’s prime targets, Gus Courts, each lived and ran small grocery companies. Citizen’s Councils have been non-public Klan-influenced organizations fashioned within the Delta in 1954 to scare black residents away from the polls and maintain integration from happening.
Lee additionally preached, typically utilizing his pulpit and his printing press to induce others to take motion and vote.
White officers as soon as supplied Lee safety on the situation he finish his voter registration efforts, however Lee refused.
Heading the city’s new NAACP Chapter, Courts was ordered by his banker to show over all NAACP books and when he refused, Courts was informed to go away city. But he stayed.
Once Courts was handed a listing of ninety-five blacks registered in Humphreys County by a Citizens Council member who warned that anybody not eradicating their identify from the voting record would lose their job. He later testified about his experiences earlier than a Congressional Committee.
Both Courts and Lee had tried for years to pay ballot taxes as a way to vote and have been lastly allowed to signal the register solely after the county sheriff feared federal prosecution. Casting a poll required a separate battle.
The day of his homicide, virtually a 12 months after Brown vs. Topeka Board of Education and three months earlier than the lynching of Emmett Till in close by Sunflower County, Rev. Lee visited with Courts to speak in regards to the newest warning.
Lee reported getting an earlier nameless demise menace demanding he take away his identify from the voting record. He informed Courts that he had an odd feeling about this specific menace.
That evening as Reverend Lee drove his automobile alongside Belzoni’s Church Street, two gun blasts shattered the evening stillness, and the minister’s Buick sedan swerved over the curb and rammed right into a body home.
With the decrease left facet of his face gone, Rev. George Lee staggered from the wreckage however died throughout transportation to the Humphreys County Memorial Hospital.
When NAACP chief Medgar Evers arrived in Belzoni to research the homicide of Rev. Lee, he was informed by Sheriff Ike Shelton that Lee misplaced management of his automobile and died from the crash; the lead pellets present in his jaw tissues have been dental fillings.
An post-mortem was not obligatory for the “freak accident,” Shelton stated.
But at Mrs. Lee’s insistence, two black physicians examined her husband’s physique and reported the tissues contained pellets “fired at shut vary from a high-powered gun.” They additionally discovered powder burns.
Over the subsequent few days, Evers and two nationwide NAACP representatives met with eyewitnesses and the complete story emerged:
Lee had been adopted by three males in one other automobile.
His proper rear tire was punctured by a rifle shot and as he slowed, the second automobile “pulled parallel and a shotgun was fired point-blank into his face. There have been additionally descriptions of the three males, with tentative identifications.”
Evers all the time doubted that any FBI investigation befell, since there was by no means any public report “or perhaps a strong rumor” as to what was within the report.
Rev. Lee’s homicide was a cold-blooded reply to calls for for equal therapy coming from extra Mississippi blacks and was backed by the lies of the sheriff and native police, Evers later reported; Evers was assassinated ten years later in his Jackson driveway by a Delta Klansman and member of the white Citizens Council.
Recalled Aaron Henry of Clarksdale additionally a black Mississippi chief: “We felt we would have liked safety as a result of the previous had taught us that when one Negro is killed, keep out of city in case your pores and skin is black.”
Yet surprisingly for one of the primary occasions, no safety was wanted on the public funeral that befell in Belzoni.
“There wasn’t a white man on the streets the day of the service, aside from the press. There was an ideal turnout of Negroes for the funeral. This massive presence of Negroes and absence of whites marked a turning level,” Henry stated.
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As Aaron Henry predicted, the homicide of Rev. Lee grew to become a essential turning level again in 1955; his premature demise would assist immediate later passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA) – one of probably the most profitable civil rights legal guidelines in American historical past, guaranteeing hundreds of thousands of minority voters the equal alternative to take part in elections and have their voices heard.
VRA ended literacy exams, ballot taxes and different strategies of conserving blacks from voting that had lengthy poisoned the roots of this nation’s democracy. In 1964, solely 300 African Americans served in public workplace nationwide, together with simply three in Congress.
But right this moment, greater than 9,100 black elected officers serve, together with 43 members of Congress, the most important quantity ever, in line with the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, Inc. typically merely known as Inc.
The VRA additionally opened politics for greater than 6,000 Latino public officers together with some 260 elected on the state or federal stage, with 27 serving in Congress. Native Americans, Asians and others who’ve traditionally encountered harsh boundaries to full political participation even have benefited significantly.
Yet violations of the VRA nonetheless happen and the United States has but to realize the constitutional purpose of equality of political alternative.
Inc. leaders and different who assist voting rights reauthorization level to 3 essential sections of the Voting Rights Act that may expire in 2007 until Congress votes to resume them:
*A requirement that states and native jurisdictions with a documented historical past of discriminatory voting practices submit deliberate modifications of their election legal guidelines or procedures to the U.S. Department of Justice or the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. for pre-clearance. A bipartisan Congressional report in 1982 warned that with out this provision, discrimination would reappear “in a single day.”
* Requirements that communities with concentrations of voters who’re Limited English Proficient present them with bilingual election help together with bilingual ballots, election supplies, and pollworkers.
*The authority to ship federal examiners and observers to observe elections.
Inc. leaders and others concerned in voting rights see these provisions as essential to making sure equity and equal alternative for minorities in American politics:
“At a time when America is vigorously engaged in selling the best of multi-ethnic democracy in Iraq and throughout the globe, we have to be certain that lawmakers protect and strengthen the mandatory instruments to make sure the continued success of democracy right here at residence. Reauthorization of the 1965 Voting Rights Act is a primary step.”
Voting Rights Act of 1965: Rev. George Lee Remembered
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