Herbert Lee was a dairy farmer in Amite County with nine children and one of the few Black residents who owned a vehicle. In the summer of 1961 he used it to drive Bob Moses, a young organizer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, from farm to farm to talk about voting. Black residents were 55 percent of the county in 1960, and almost none had ever been able to register.
Moses came to McComb in July 1961 to start SNCC's first voter registration project in Mississippi, after C. C. Bryant, a railroad worker who led the local NAACP, asked for help. The first class met on August 7 at the Masonic Temple. That morning Moses took four people to the courthouse in Magnolia, and three registered. Farmers in Amite and Walthall counties asked for schools of their own. E. W. Steptoe, who had organized the Amite NAACP in 1952, hosted classes at a small church on his land, and his childhood friend Lee was a charter member.
September 25
Lee drove a load of cotton to the Westbrook gin outside Liberty. E. H. Hurst, a state legislator who had known Lee since boyhood, confronted him over his work with SNCC, drew a pistol and shot him in the head in front of about a dozen men. Hurst said Lee had come at him with a tire iron. An all-white coroner's jury cleared him within a day, and the sheriff had pressured the Black witnesses to back his account. At the funeral Lee's wife blamed Moses; he later said he had no answer. Steptoe and Moses had warned the Justice Department's John Doar that Hurst had threatened Lee, and afterward the local FBI office refused Doar's request for an investigation three times. The organizers left southwest Mississippi until 1964.
Louis Allen
One witness was Louis Allen, an Army veteran and logger. At the inquest he backed Hurst. He later told Moses, Steptoe, the FBI and Doar that the room had been full of armed men, that he feared for his family, and that Lee had been shot without provocation. He faced harassment and economic reprisals for the next three years. In August 1962 he and two others were shot at while trying to register at the Amite courthouse, and Daniel Jones, a deputy who became sheriff in 1964, arrested him in 1962 and again in 1963. On January 31, 1964, the night before he was to move to Milwaukee, he was shot in the head at the gate of his own land.
The record
The FBI closed its first, brief investigation in May 1964, finding that federal law would not support a prosecution. It reopened in 2006, and its leading theory pointed to Jones and two others. Jones, who denied involvement, died in 2013. In 2015 the Justice Department recorded that the statute of limitations barred charges and that the other suspects were dead. No one was ever prosecuted for Lee's killing or for Allen's. The Westbrook Cotton Gin was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on November 10, 2010.
The Natchez movement of 1965 to 1967 is told at the Natchez Museum of African American History and Culture.