shot at A. B. Westbrook’s cotton gin early that morning. The body had been left uncovered where it fell. No one, black or white, in Liberty would touch it. Finally a hearse was summoned from McComb. The few blacks at the scene were too frightened to even say the dead man’s name.
“Was it Hurst?”
“Why, yes!” Doc Anderson looked at me with perplexity and surprise. “It was self-defense. Seems Lee went berserk and attacked Hurst with a tire iron.”
“Says who?”
“There’s no point getting upset. Five people witnessed it. Three of them were Negroes. They all told the same story. Seems Lee owed Hurst some money. A coroner’s jury has already acquitted him.”
“Naturally.”
I waited for nightfall, and then Curtis Bryant and I drove the pitch-black back roads of Amite County until I found someone brave enough to talk. Louis Allen, one of the three Negroes who had seen Hurst shoot Lee, was willing to tell the truth:
“I’d been haulin’ logs in my truck that morning,” Allen said, “but it broke down, so I was walkin’ into town to get a fan belt when I come by the gin. I saw Herbert Lee drive in with a truck-load of cotton. He was waitin’ in line when Mr. Hurst nosed up behind him in an empty pickup, the blue one that belongs to Billy Jack Caston. I heard some yellin’, an’ I knew I ought to keep walkin’, but I turned my head an’ saw Mr. Hurst shoutin’ at Herbert Lee. I was standin’ off to the side by a telephone pole. I didn’t think they could see me, but I could see them. I knew I shoulda kept goin’, but I couldn’t move. I saw it all.
“Hurst come over to Lee’s truck, on the driver’s side, an’ was shoutin’ about somethin’. He waved his arms in the air; then he pulled a pistol from his belt—I think it was a .38—an’ pointed it at Lee.
“‘I’m not foolin’ with you this time,’ Hurst yelled. ‘I mean business.’
“‘Put that gun down,’ Herbert say, ‘or I ain’t talkin.’
“Hurst stuck that pistol back in his belt under his coat, an’ Lee slid across the front seat an’ got out on the passenger side. I think he wanted to keep somethin’ solid between them an’ talk to Hurst over the hood of his truck. But Hurst, he run ‘round the front, out come that pistol again, an’ he shoots Lee right in the head from a few feet away.
“I hurried on away from there as fast as I could, hopin’ nobody seen me. But they come for me at the garage an’ taken me to the courthouse. They had them a roomful of armed men, an’ the Deputy Sheriff, Daniel Jones, he tole me that what they had was a clear case of self-defense. He said they found a weapon under Lee’s body. ‘If you just say that Herbert Lee had him a tire tool,’ he said, ‘there won’t be no trouble.’”
To protect his family, Allen lied to the coroner’s jury. He said that Lee had swung at Hurst with a tire iron and that the gun had gone off accidentally as Hurst was whacking Lee on the head. The jury decided it was a case of justifiable homicide, declaring that Hurst acted “in defense of his person while being attacked by the deceased with a deadly weapon . . . known as a tire tool.”
“I didn’t run,” I saw Hurst boast to reporters, who must have noted that he was nearly a foot taller and at least fifty pounds heavier than the man who allegedly attacked him. “I got no rabbit in me.” Hurst had known Lee since they were boys; he claimed that the dispute had nothing to do with civil rights but was over five hundred dollars. “That son of a bitch owed me,” he said.
I called John Doar and told him what I had learned.
“Doc Anderson didn’t find any powder burns,” I reported.
“I’ll have the FBI photograph the body and examine the entry wound,” Doar replied. “If there were no powder burns, and this eyewitness you’ve found will change his testimony, we might have a case against Hurst.”
The next day at the funeral, Mrs. Lee, shaking from grief and with reproach in her eyes, confronted me. “You killed my husband!” she wailed. “You killed my husband!” Her words cut me to the quick, but even harder to take was the fact that none of her nine children, lined up in the front row, would look me in the face. Even though Herbert Lee was my friend, and I had wanted only the best, I felt the sting of complicity in his death. I knew that martyrs in the Movement were inevitable, but why did it have to be this good man?
Several weeks later Louis Allen came to see Steptoe and told him, “My first testimony is worryin’ me. Mr. Lee’s dead. What should I do?”
“Well,” Steptoe said, “you can tell Mr. Doar what you told Bob.”
“I am,” Allen said. “I’m gonna tell the truth.”
“That’s good. I believe you should.”
I arranged for Allen to meet me in McComb.
“If I can be protected,” he told me, “I’ll let the hide fall with the hair an’ tell what I saw.”
I called John Doar. He said he didn’t think they could guarantee protection or a conviction if Allen changed his testimony.
“What about the FBI investigation?”
“They botched it, Bob,” Doar said with disgust. “By the time the Bureau in Washington had contacted the office in New Orleans and they reached their agent in Natchez, the body was already in the ground. I’m sorry.”
“So am I.”
When a grand jury was convened to look into the case, I had to advise Allen, for his own safety, to lie again. But the case still troubled him, and several months later he asked to talk to me a third time. We drove down to the FBI office in New Orleans, and he signed an affidavit that Hurst killed Lee “without provocation.” The FBI didn’t do anything about the murder of Herbert Lee, but somehow word reached Deputy Sheriff Jones about Allen’s second thoughts and small rebellion. He was now a marked man in Liberty.
I was wracked with guilt over the death of Herbert Lee. If I had never come to Amite County, he would still be alive to enjoy his wife and children. Now black people in Liberty were afraid to even leave town, let alone confront the sheriff and the registrar at the courthouse. No one would come to the citizenship school. Steptoe was cleaning his guns in anticipation of an ambush. No Negro felt free in Liberty.
For me, the murder of Herbert Lee stood for all the indignities and atrocities unsung black people had suffered in the South for centuries. I vowed that his death would not be forgotten: by me, by SNCC, or by anyone else in the Movement. I also reluctantly decided to withdraw from Amite County for a time, but I made a promise to Steptoe before I left: “I’ll be back.”
3
During the weeks I spent in Liberty, SNCC workers had been arriving in McComb to initiate “direct action” (as if the response to voter registration wasn’t direct enough!). The McComb high school students were eager to start sitting-in and picketing. Too young to register, they were frustrated and liked the idea of confrontation. Many of their parents, however, strongly disapproved of this new turn of events, especially when at the end of August three students—Isaac Lewis, Robert Talbert, and Brenda Travis—were arrested at the Greyhound bus terminal. Robert pleaded guilty and was fined two hundred dollars and given a suspended sentence. Isaac and Brenda, who said they weren’t guilty, were fined four hundred
