George W. Lee was a Baptist minister, businessman, and civil rights leader who became one of Mississippi’s leading advocates for Black voting rights. His efforts to help African Americans register to vote challenged the foundations of Jim Crow, and on May 7, 1955, he was assassinated in retaliation for his activism.
Born on December 25, 1903, in Edwards, Mississippi, George W. Lee grew up in poverty. His childhood was marked by hardship. His mother died while he was still young, and he was raised by an aunt after suffering abuse from his stepfather. Despite the obstacles, Lee graduated from high school, an uncommon achievement for many African Americans in Mississippi at the time.
As a young man, Lee moved to New Orleans, where he worked unloading bananas on the docks while taking a correspondence course in typesetting. Through years of hard work and determination, he built a better life for himself.
Eventually, Lee settled in Belzoni, Mississippi, where he became a Baptist minister. But preaching alone was not enough for him. He opened a grocery store, started a small printing business with his wife, Rosebud, and became one of the area’s most respected Black businessmen. His financial independence gave him the freedom to challenge a system that relied on keeping African Americans poor, dependent, and politically powerless.
By the early 1950s, Lee had become deeply involved with the NAACP and the Regional Council of Negro Leadership (RCNL), one of Mississippi’s most influential Black organizations led by Dr. T. R. M. Howard. The organization promoted economic independence, voting rights, and equal treatment under the law.
At the time, Mississippi’s Black population vastly outnumbered whites in several Delta counties, yet almost none could vote. Although the Fifteenth Amendment guaranteed African American men the right to vote, Mississippi’s 1890 constitution effectively stripped that right away through poll taxes, literacy tests, and intimidation.
Lee decided that had to change.
Along with fellow activist Gus Courts, he founded the Belzoni branch of the NAACP in 1953. When local officials refused to accept their poll tax payments, preventing them from registering to vote, Lee and Courts challenged the decision in court. They successfully registered nearly all of Humphreys County’s approximately ninety Black voters by 1955, an extraordinary achievement in a county where Black political participation had long been crushed.
His activism made him a marked man.
Following the Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, white segregationists across Mississippi organized through White Citizens’ Councils to resist integration and suppress Black political activity. Black families who attempted to vote often faced eviction, job loss, threats, and violence.
Lee refused to back down.
Only weeks before his death, he delivered a powerful speech before more than 7,000 people at the RCNL’s annual meeting in Mound Bayou. Speaking about the struggle facing African Americans, he declared:
“Pray not for your mom and pop. They’ve gone to heaven. Pray you can make it through this hell.”
The speech electrified the audience, but it also intensified the danger surrounding him.
A few days before his murder, George W. Lee reportedly received a death threat. He refused to abandon his campaign to register African Americans to vote.
On the night of May 7, 1955, while driving through Belzoni, Mississippi, another vehicle pulled alongside Lee’s car. The occupants opened fire with a shotgun, blasting through the driver’s side window. Buckshot struck Lee in the face, shattering his jaw and causing him to lose control of the vehicle. His car veered off the road, and he died before reaching the hospital.
Although the autopsy recovered buckshot pellets from Lee’s face, Humphreys County Sheriff Ike Shelton attempted to dismiss the killing as a traffic accident, outrageously claiming the pellets were actually dental fillings knocked loose in the crash. Civil rights leaders rejected the explanation, arguing that Lee had been assassinated in retaliation for his efforts to register African Americans to vote. Despite a federal investigation that identified credible white suspects, no one was ever charged with his murder.
Lee’s murder sent shockwaves through Mississippi and beyond. For many African Americans, it was another painful reminder that in the Jim Crow South, even trying to exercise a constitutional right could be a death sentence.
When George W. Lee was laid to rest, his widow, Rosebud, made one final stand on his behalf. She insisted that his casket remain open so mourners could see the devastating injuries inflicted by his killers. The images that appeared in Black newspapers shocked readers across the nation, turning Lee’s funeral into more than a farewell. It became a powerful indictment of the violence used to preserve white supremacy and deny African Americans their most basic rights.
Although his killers escaped justice, they failed to silence the movement. Instead, Lee’s murder exposed the deadly lengths to which white supremacists were willing to go to keep African Americans away from the ballot box. His death strengthened the resolve of activists across Mississippi, including Medgar Evers, who continued organizing despite knowing the risks.
Today, George W. Lee is remembered as one of the first martyrs of the modern Civil Rights Movement. He was not a wealthy politician or a nationally famous figure. He was a preacher, a grocer, a businessman, and a community leader who believed that ordinary people deserved an equal voice in their own government.
Sources:
https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/rev-george-lee/
https://www.civilrightsteaching.org/resource/george-lee
https://calendar.eji.org/racial-injustice/may/7
