If you know someone who hasn’t voted yet and you know they’re thinking that it doesn’t matter, that voting won’t solve anything, that there isn’t a single candidate from the top to the bottom of the ballot worth their vote, you might remind them of the price paid by so many people who were murdered for seeking to exercise their constitutional rights and helping others to do the same. Here is a short list, courtesy of the Southern Poverty Law Center.
The Rev. George Lee was one of the first blacks to vote in Humphreys County, Mississippi. From the pulpit and his printing press, he urged others to vote. He was threatened and white officials offered him protection—but only if he would end his voter registration efforts. He refused and was shot to death by people in a passing car. The authorities said he had been fatally injured in an automobile accident and that the lead pellets in his face and neck were probably from dental fillings that had come loose. FBI files released in 2000 detailed the murder case against two suspects who had been members of the White Citizens Council, the suits and ties version of the Ku Klux Klan. The county prosecutor had refused to take the case to a grand jury. The two suspects died in the 1970s.
Lamar Smith, a World War I veteran and member of the Regional Counsel of Negro Leadership, organized black voters to cast absentee ballots in a 1955 Mississippi primary to avoid violence at the polls. Less than two weeks later, he was murdered by a white man in broad daylight on the courthouse lawn of Lincoln County in Brookhaven. There were dozens of witnesses, but the killer was never indicted because not one of them would admit they had seen a white man shoot a black man.
Herbert Lee worked with civil rights leader Bob Moses to help register black voters in Mississippi. In all their efforts, they only registered one person, and he never voted. On Sept. 21, 1961, in Liberty, Mississippi, state Rep. E.H. Hurst came up to Lee, shouted at him, pulled a gun, and shot him in the head. He claimed it was self-defense and was never arrested.
Louis Allen witnessed the murder of Herbert Lee and was subsequently threatened, harassed, and jailed. He was finishing up arrangements to move out of Mississippi on the day he was killed.
James Earl Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Henry Schwerner: The three young civil rights workers were registering voters in Mississippi as part of Freedom Summer, a project organized by the Council of Federated Organizations and the Congress of Racial Equality. The three were arrested for speeding on June 21, 1964, by a deputy sheriff and then released. But law enforcement and Ku Klux Klansmen followed them, pulled them over, abducted them and shot them at close range. They were buried in an earthen dam and not found until August. The FBI was called in at the behest of Attorney General Robert Kennedy. In the process of looking for the civil rights workers, searchers found the bodies of Henry Hezekiah Dee and Charles Eddie Moore. The black college students had been hitchhiking and disappeared in May. They had been kidnapped, beaten, and murdered by whites. Also found was 14-year-old Hubert Orsby and five other unidentified Mississippi blacks. Orsby was wearing a CORE t-shirt. In Madison County, where Orsby lived, there were 32 incidents of assault against civil rights workers during Freedom Summer, and nine black churches were burned.
Jonathan Myrick Daniels, a 26-year-old Episcopal Seminary student in Boston, came to Alabama in the summer of 1965 to help with black voter registration in Lowndes County. During a protest march, he was arrested along with about 30 young black people and jailed in Hayneville. When he was released, he, a Catholic priest, and two teenaged protesters including Ruby Sales, went to a store to buy sodas. At the door, a man appeared with a shotgun and told them to leave “or I’ll blow your damned brains out!” Daniels pushed Sales out of the way and the gun discharged, killing Daniels instantly. The priest, the Rev. Richard Morrisroe, was critically injured. The shooter was Tom Coleman, a part-time deputy. The all-white jury at his trial heard him testify that Daniels had pulled a knife on him and they acquitted him in less than two hours, shaking his hand as he left the courtroom.
Vernon Ferdinand Dahmer had overcome the handicaps of an abbreviated education and racial discrimination to become a wealthy businessman. He was elected president of the local NAACP and often said, “If you don’t vote, you don’t count.” Just months after the Voting Rights Act passed, on January 9, 1966, Dahmer offered to collect poll taxes for his neighbors so they wouldn’t have to risk violence at the courthouse themselves, and he announced in a radio broadcast that he would pay the taxes for those who couldn’t afford them. He and his wife awoke that night to gunshots and gasoline bombs crashing into their house. Dahmer grabbed his rifle and exchanged shots with the gunmen while his family escaped. His home and store were destroyed, his 10-year-old daughter was hospitalized with severe burns, and his own lungs were so badly damaged that he soon died.