George W. Lee

When the sheriff refused to accept their poll taxes, which were required for voter registration, they took him to court. Between them, Lee and Courts registered nearly all of the county's ninety black voters in 1955. Whites were enraged by the previous year's decision by the U.S. Supreme Court's in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), ruling that segregated public schools were unconstitutional. Whites in Mississippi were determined to resist efforts at integration, particularly in black-majority areas of the Delta. They founded the White Citizens Council, with chapters throughout counties in the Delta. Whites were aggressively purging the few blacks from the voting rolls through intimidation and economic pressure; in some places, they had black activists fired from their jobs and evicted from rental housing. Lee and Courts continued their work.

During the 1930s and the Great Depression, Lee accepted a call to become a preacher in Belzoni, Mississippi, where he led a Baptist congregation. The town was located in Humphreys County in the heart of the Mississippi Delta. Most blacks in the state lived in this region and the majority in extreme poverty as farm workers. Lee continued to work to improve himself; he joined with local black business and community leaders. Serving as pastor at four churches, he also opened a small grocery store. Lee considered both vocations as serving the African-American community. In a back room of his house, he and his wife, Rosebud, set up a small printing business. These efforts provided enough resources that Lee felt he had a base for entering the battle for civil rights in the early 1950s. As a part of the NAACP, Lee worked tirelessly in trying to register African Americans to vote.

George Wesley Lee (December 25, 1903 – May 7, 1955) was an African-American civil rights leader, minister, and entrepreneur. He was a vice president of the Regional Council of Negro Leadership and head of the Belzoni, Mississippi, branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. He was assassinated in 1955 in retaliation for his efforts to register African Americans to vote. Since 1890 they had been effectively disenfranchised in Mississippi due to a new state constitution; other states across the South passed similar acts and constitutions, excluding millions of people from the political system and establishing one-party states.

Born in 1903, George Wesley Lee grew up in poverty in Edwards, Mississippi. His mother was a plantation worker who married after Lee was born; his stepfather was abusive. After Lee's mother died when George was young, he was taken in by her sister. Lee graduated from high school, a rarity for blacks living in his circumstances. Afterward he went to the port of New Orleans, where he worked on the banana docks and took a correspondence course in typesetting. Lee was typical of a generation of activists who came to civil rights after they had made a success in business. Like so many in this category, he came up the hard way through backbreaking work, thrift, determination, and luck.

Lee was the first black in memory to register to vote in Humphreys County, Mississippi (where blacks were a majority of the population but had been effectively disfranchised by provisions of the 1890 constitution, particularly due to white implementation of poll taxes and literacy tests). In 1953, Lee and Gus Courts, another black grocer, co-founded the Belzoni chapter of the NAACP.