Louis Allen

Civil rights activists had come to Liberty that summer to organize for voter registration, as no African-American had been allowed to vote since the state's disenfranchising constitution was passed in 1890.

Mississippi's state constitution, enacted in 1890, politically disfranchised African-Americans, using provisions such as poll taxes, literacy tests and grandfather clauses to raise barriers to voter registration and exclude blacks from voting.

(No black person had been allowed to vote in Amite County since 1890.) Following this incident, a white businessman threatened Allen, saying, "Louis, the best thing you can do is leave. Your little family—they're innocent people—and your house could get burned down. All of you could get killed."

When Allen reported the death threats, the FBI – which had limited jurisdiction over civil rights cases at the time – referred the matter to Sheriff Jones's office.

Louis Allen (April 25, 1919 – January 31, 1964) was an African-American logger in Liberty, Mississippi, who was shot and killed on his land during the civil rights era.

Louis Allen was a native of Amite County, Mississippi, where he was born in 1919.

The county's population was majority African-American, with an economy based on agriculture: cotton, dairy farming and logging.

Allen was harassed and jailed repeatedly by Amite County Sheriff Daniel Bryant Jones (January 3, 1930 – July 26, 2013).

The day before he planned to move out of state, Allen was fatally shot on his property.

Since the late 20th century, his case has been investigated by Tulane University history professor Plater Robinson.

Many blacks left before World War II because of poor economic opportunities, racial violence, and social oppression under Jim Crow, decreasing the black population by 29% from 1940 to 1960, following earlier declines.

More than six million blacks left the Southern United States in the Great Migration to the North, the Midwest, and, beginning in the 1940s, the West Coast.

Allen served in the United States Army during the war; he enlisted at age 23 in the service at Camp Shelby on January 12, 1943.

After his return to Mississippi, he worked as a logger and farm laborer.

Allen and his wife Elizabeth had four children together, including a daughter and a son named Henry (called Hank).

He built up his own logging business, doing well enough also to buy his own land, where he and his family raised produce and cattle.

In the early 1960s, a local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was founded by E. W. Steptoe for the purpose of registering black voters.

He was soon joined by Bob Moses of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).

He had previously tried to register to vote and had allegedly talked to federal officials after witnessing the 1961 murder of Herbert Lee, an NAACP member, by E. H. Hurst, a white state legislator.

On September 25, 1961, a pro-segregation state legislator, E.H. Hurst, shot and killed an NAACP member and SNCC supporter named Herbert Lee at the Westbrook Cotton Gin.

Louis Allen and eleven other men witnessed the murder.

Hurst's side of the story made the claim that Lee attacked him with a tire iron, causing him to shoot to protect himself.

When a coroner's inquest was conducted hours later, in a courtroom filled with white men, Allen and the other witnesses were pressured by the circumstances and by the local authorities into giving false testimony.

They supported Hurst's claim of shooting Lee in self-defense, and this incorrect retelling of Lee's murder alongside a piece of iron being "discovered" underneath Lee's body by the same local authorities that coerced the witnesses' testimony led to Hurst being cleared of any wrongdoing.

However, Allen later told fellow activists the truth behind Lee's killing.

He saw that Hurst approached Lee, who had driven up in his truck, and after a limited amount of discussion, Hurst aimed and shot his pistol at an unarmed Lee.

He also discussed the incident with Julian Bond, who encouraged him to tell his story to the FBI.

Bond was aware that, in the racially charged atmosphere of Amite County, Allen was at high personal risk if it became known that he had talked to the Bureau.

The FBI did so despite an agent acknowledging in a 1961 memo that, "Allen was to be killed and the local sheriff was involved in the plot to kill him."

Allen then allegedly became a target of harassment by Jones.

In August 1962, as Allen and two other black men tried to register to vote at Amite County Courthouse, they were shot at by an unknown assailant.

The case was reopened by the FBI beginning in 2007 as part of its review of civil rights-era cold cases.

In 2011 the CBS program 60 Minutes conducted a special on his murder as well.

Their work suggested that Allen was killed by Jones.

However, no one has been prosecuted for the murder.

Interviewed in 2011, Bond said:"'He lied [at Hurst's inquest] because he was in fear of his life...If he had implicated a powerful white man in a murder of a black man, he was risking his life...I tried to encourage him to tell the truth, but you know, it was like saying, 'Why don't you volunteer to be killed?''"Learning that a federal jury was to consider charges against Hurst, Allen talked to the FBI and the United States Commission on Civil Rights in Jackson, asking for protection if he testified.

An FBI memo reported that Allen "expressed fear that he might be killed", but the Justice Department said it could not give him protection.

Allen chose to repeat the official version of events which exonerated Hurst.

Although Allen had not cooperated with the Justice Department, rumors of his visit in Jackson quickly spread among Liberty's white community.

Local whites shunned Allen and cut off customers for his logging business.