By the summer of 1961, Herbert Lee was wealthy man by local standards – local black standards. After thirty years of farming in the deepest corner of the Deep South, Lee had a small dairy farm, a modest home, nine children, and a road or two that did not seem like a dead end. So one day that scorching summer, when a young, bespectacled black man from New York showed up on his porch wearing bib overalls and speaking softly about his right to vote, Lee decided he could take a few risks. He agreed to drive the stranger around Amite County. To friends and family, Lee’s decision suggested a death wish.
Blacks did not vote in Mississippi – never had as long as anyone could remember. “Niggers down here don’t need to vote,” one cop said. “Ain’t supposed to vote.” Entire counties where black faces far outnumbered white had not a single black voter. Seventy some years had passed since Mississippi had crafted a clever combination of poll taxes, literacy tests, and other legalistic voodoo that, within a decade, slashed black voting rolls from 190,000 to just 2,000. Ever since, whenever a Negro had dared to register, terror had taken care of him. A trip to the courthouse registrar landed his name in the newspaper. Soon the “uppity nigger” was beaten, fired, thrown off a plantation, or left trembling in the night by a shotgun fired into his shack. Herbert Lee knew the risks, but when he decided to face them, he did not know he was risking his life.
On the morning of September 25, 1961, Lee was rattling along dusty back roads toward the tiny town of Liberty, Mississippi. Looking in the rearview mirror of his old pickup, he saw a newer truck. Lee pulled into the parking lot of a cotton gin. The other pickup, its tires popping the gravel, pulled along side. Lee recognized the driver, a burly white man with jug ears and a broad, shiny forehead, pink from the summer sun. Lee had known “Mister Hurst” all his life, had even played with him as a boy. The two men’s farms were not far apart. Perhaps Mister Hurst just wanted to talk. Then Lee spotted the .38 in his neighbor’s hand.
Through the window of his pickup, Lee shouted, “I’m not going to talk to you until you put the gun down!” Hurst said nothing, just bolted out of his truck. Lee frantically slid across his seat and scrambled out the passenger door. Hurst circled, gun waving.
“I’m not playing with you this morning!” the hulking white man said. Before Lee could run two steps, Hurst put a bullet in his left temple. Lee fell face down in the gravel. The new pickup sped away. The parking lot fell silent. The body, encircled by onlookers, lay in a pool of blood for hours beneath the sizzling sun. Blacks were afraid to move it and whites refused.
No one knew how many black men were murdered in Mississippi in 1961. No one could remember the Magnolia State ever convicting a white man of killing a black man. At the coroner’s inquest, Hurst spun a story about a tire iron Herbert Lee had brandished. His gun, Hurst said, had gone off by accident. A witness was coerced into swearing he saw the tire iron, too, the same one “found” under Herbert Lee’s body. State legislator E.H. Hurst never went to trial. But the bullet that killed Herbert Lee set off a string of firecrackers that clustered in a single summer, a season so radically different, so idealistic, so savage, so daring that it redefined freedom in America.
