The Reverend George Lee (1903-1955) was a pioneer in the early Mississippi civil rights movement, a vice president of the Regional Council of Negro Leadership, a co-founder of the Belzoni NAACP branch, and a powerful public speaker. A prominent minister and successful entrepreneur in Belzoni, he became the first black citizen to register to vote in Humphreys County, where blacks were a majority of the population. In 1953, Lee and Gus Courts, a black grocer and early activist, co-founded the Belzoni branch of the NAACP. When Lee and Courts tried to register to vote and the sheriff refused to accept their poll taxes, they reported the case to federal authorities, then registered successfully, angering local whites. Together they registered nearly all of the county's black voters in 1955 despite threats of violence and economic pressures. The Regional Council of Negro Leadership pressed for voting rights and organized a successful boycott of gas stations that refused to install restrooms for blacks. In the spring of 1955, Lee addressed a crowd of 10,000 at a voter registration rally in Mound Bayou, and at the Council's annual meeting there he urged people to vote, saying the Delta would someday send a Negro to Congress. Two weeks later, on May 7, 1955, while driving on a street in Belzoni, assailants pulled up alongside his car and shot him in the face; he crashed and died on the way to the hospital. No one was ever charged. Lee's wife and others demanded an FBI investigation, which built a circumstantial murder case against two men, but the local prosecutor refused to take the case to a grand jury. Sheriff Ike Shelton insisted Lee died in a car crash and said the lead found in his jaw was dental fillings, but an examination by two black physicians found that two to three rifle shots had been fired, including one at point-blank range into the cab, tearing away the lower left side of his face. Medgar Evers and others called on Governor Hugh White to investigate, but he refused. The killing went unchallenged locally but was reported nationally. Lee's widow, Rosebud Lee, chose an open-coffin ceremony for her husband, influencing a similar decision later made by Mamie Till-Mobley after Emmett Till's death. Many consider George Lee the first martyr of the modern civil rights movement.
