Open Season by Ben Crump

Author:Ben Crump
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2019-08-25T16:00:00+00:00

It was 1961. Herbert Lee (no relation to Rev. George Lee), now fifty, had sacrificed and struggled to build his Mississippi cotton farm into a thriving business that supported his wife and nine children. Although he was not a learned man, his wife had taught him how to sign his name, and Lee was one of the few registered voters in Liberty, Mississippi. He wanted a better world for his children and knew that, although he had come from very little, through perseverance and hard work he had created a legacy for his family.

Even though Lee didn’t talk much about civil rights, he attended NAACP meetings without fail, even when threats kept many others away. Not only did Lee attend the meetings; he also used his vehicle to help other Blacks register to vote.

On September 25, 1961, Lee stopped at a cotton gin outside of Liberty to deliver a truckload of cotton. As several people watched, Mississippi state representative E. H. Hurst approached Lee, took a gun out of his shirt, and shot Lee in the head. Hurst claimed self-defense and was never arrested.

A witness to the shooting, Louis Allen, a Black farmer and timber worker, was later shot and killed in his driveway on January 31, 1964, a day before he was to move to the North. No one was arrested for his murder.6

These are just two of the many casualties of the Black suffrage movement whose stories are not often told. The United States has a long, shameful history of disenfranchising what has been, at times, a majority of its population by preventing nonlandowning white men from voting. The Civil Rights Act of 1866 granted citizenship to all native-born Americans, but did not give these newly recognized citizens the right to vote. After passage of the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1869, African American men gained the right to vote. In practice, however, as these two stories illustrate, attempting to exercise this right nearly a hundred years after the Fifteenth Amendment was enacted could still prove deadly.

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