Belzoni, Mississippi, a town of about 2,000 people, is known as the 'Catfish Capital of the World'; it is also known as the site of one of the first civil-rights-era lynchings. On May 7, 1955, two members of the local White Citizens' Council shot into the cab of Reverend George Lee's car; the bullets ripped off the lower half of his face. Lee had been a co-founder of the town's NAACP chapter and the first Black person to successfully register to vote in Humphreys County since Reconstruction. He'd also registered about 100 of his fellow Black citizens to vote, a remarkable feat given Belzoni's size and the ever-present threat of violence against Black people throughout the South who dared to exercise their franchise during the Jim Crow era. The Mississippi NAACP, led by Medgar Evers, began to investigate the death as a murder. But the county sheriff rejected the idea that there had been any foul play, instead suggesting that Lee had died in a car accident and that the lead bullets...
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