These Black Americans Were Killed for Exercising Their Political Right to Vote

It was a Thursday evening, nearing the end of a summer work week that Elbert Williams, a charter member of his town’s NAACP chapter, spent carrying out his duties as an employee of Sunshine Laundromat. Already dressed in his pajamas, Williams and his family were listening to the eight-round World Heavyweight Championship boxing rematch between title holder Joe Louis and challenger Arturo Godoy. The Williamses were likely ready to retire that summer evening when there was a knock at the door.

Well after 10 p.m., it was late to be receiving guests, but despite the hour, Annie, Williams’ wife, opened the door to their Brownsville, Tennessee, residence. The sheriff-elect of Haywood County, Samuel “Tip” Hunter, stood in the home’s entryway in full uniform and instructed Williams to come outside, where at least one other officer was waiting, taking him into custody without an arrest warrant. What happened after that is conjecture mixed with logic and the findings of a United States Department of Justice investigation.

What is known is that Williams’ lifeless, beaten and bruised body was found in the nearby Hatchie River on June 23, 1940, three days after law enforcement officers’ late-night visit. The 31-year-old had been fatally shot. His feet were tied with rope, and his head battered in. It is believed that Williams, who was never seen alive again after being detained by Hunter, was killed because of his voter registration efforts in the majority-Black town of Brownsville.

Even though African Americans made up 75 percent of the town’s population, white citizens held the power. As in other communities across America during the decades-long eras of Reconstruction and Jim Crow, that power was often maintained through terrorism, silencing any possible political influence from the Black voting bloc.

For a few years after the Civil War, Black Americans—largely a population of the formerly enslaved—used their right to vote to effect change in their communities. Between 1865 and 1876, more than 200 Black Mississippians held office, including Hiram Revels, the nation’s first Black senator. It’s no coincidence that the Ku Klux Klan officially formed during that time.

“When emancipation comes, it was a shock to a lot of white people in this country to see formerly enslaved people so eagerly embrace democracy—embrace the right to vote. Eighty percent of Black males registered to vote immediately after emancipation and began using the ballot to create real opportunities and power,” says Bryan Stevenson, executive director of the nonprofit Equal Justice Initiative (EJI). “Violence became the primary tool for pushing against that Black participation.”

Stevenson, whose organization founded the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Alabama in 2018, has documented thousands of lynchings, hundreds of which were in reaction to Black people accessing political power. According to a 2020 EJI report, more than 2,000 Black Americans were lynched across the U.S. between 1865 and 1876. EJI puts the number of total lynching victims between 1877 and 1950 at more than 4,000.

Although for many people, the word “lynching” conjures the imagery of “strange fruit” hanging from trees, as singer Billie Holiday described Black bodies dangling from tree limbs, Stevenson has also categorized those instances when bombs or guns were used to carry out lynchings: “Racial terror lynchings are lethal violence directed at people because of their race in an effort to terrorize the entire community,” he says.

Lynching in America: What is a Racial Terror Lynching?

The launch of the Brownsville chapter of the NAACP in 1939 and its Right-to-Vote Movement was met with a campaign of terror that caused many Black residents of the Tennessee town to abandon their homes and flee the area. Williams wasn’t the first to be questioned by local officers. According to the New York Amsterdam News, at least eight others affiliated with the new NAACP branch had been questioned by Brownsville law enforcement.

“This wasn’t the act of some lawless Klan member,” Stevenson says. “This wasn’t the act of some renegade. It was the sheriff and the marshal who had power only because Black people were disenfranchised.” No one was ever convicted of killing Williams, despite members of the community identifying Hunter and nine others as the ones who took him from his home.

The Alabama memorial erected by EJI lists the names of many Black voting advocates who ultimately died attempting to fully partake in the country’s democratic process by casting a ballot.

“There are dozens of people, like Elbert Williams, who lost their lives trying to advance citizenship and the rights of Black people in this country to vote,” says Stevenson.

“When we think about voting, we shouldn’t think of it as something people get to do. It’s something people are empowered to do. It’s a way to assert your freedom,” says Kellie Carter Jackson, author of We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance.

The terrorist campaign in Brownsville in 1940 successfully shuttered the town’s NAACP branch, and more than 30 families ran out of the city limits after Williams’ killing, but it didn’t keep the town’s Black citizens from voting. The NAACP pressured the federal government and requested the National Guard descend on the town that fall to ensure all eligible residents could safely vote. The Department of Justice later did send the Guard to Brownsville.

The activists’ resilience and persistence are indicative of how much they wanted to participate as full citizens and how much they believed their vote mattered, says Carter Jackson.

“If it wasn’t significant, if it wasn’t influential, if it wasn’t a form of power, nobody would be trying to deny you” your right to vote, she adds.

Referring to the voters as courageous, then-executive secretary of the NAACP Walter White wrote, “They demonstrate to the nation the fine spirit of Negro citizens in the South, who are determined to win the right to vote a fundamental element which constitutes backbone of our fight for democracy.”

The Brownsville NAACP branch reopened in 1961.

Although others had been terrorized in Brownsville, Williams was the only voting rights advocate killed in the town that summer. He likely knew he was putting himself in danger, but he may not have realized he was risking his life. Williams, acknowledged as the first NAACP member to be lynched, was not the last. For his sacrifice, many describe victims like Williams as “martyrs.”

Although some facts are in dispute given the nature of the crimes and the threats of violence facing potential witnesses, the names below represent a small number of those who were killed just days after exercising their right to vote or similarly encouraging others to do so. “Black people understand that their lives can’t get better unless they put their lives on the line,” says Carter Jackson. “Voting absolutely is an act of resistance.”

Maceo Snipes

Maceo Snipes was a World War II veteran who died with bullets in his back on July 18, 1946—not from combat, but at the hands of four domestic terrorists who shot him in the doorway of his home where he had been having dinner with his mother. She recounted that he was riddled with bullets shortly after opening the door. He died from his injuries two days later. Like many African American soldiers returning home from the war, Snipes wanted the nation to guarantee the same type of freedoms for Black citizens that it had fought to secure for those once held under the Nazi regime. One day before his killing, Snipes had exercised his constitutional right to vote in the Georgia Democratic Primary, becoming the only Black man to participate in the election in Taylor County. His killing was never investigated by law enforcement. In coroner’s court, Edward Williamson admitted to killing Snipes, alleging that he acted in self-defense. In 2008, the case was reviewed by the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department. The agency, with little to dispute Williams’ claims of self-defense, closed the case, ruling that Snipes’ vote was not a factor in his killing.

Harry and Harriette Moore

Along with his wife, Harriette, who was also an activist, Harry T. Moore investigated lynchings and registered more than 100,000 African Americans to vote as founder of the Florida Progressive Voters League. For more than a decade, he served in leadership roles with the NAACP, including being the head of its Florida State Conference, helping to organize voting campaigns in multiple branches. In 1951, the Moores were killed by a bomb that exploded under their bed on Christmas night, also their 25th wedding anniversary. Harry died at the scene; Harriet died nine days later. A replica of their home is now a museum located at the site of the actual residence. Between 1951 and 2008, five investigations looked into the bombing, which implicated four Ku Klux Klan members, but no arrests were made. The Department of Justice concluded, “Mr. Moore’s civil rights advocacy … made him a known target of the Klan.” The case was officially closed in 2011.

The Reverend George Lee

Like Williams, George Lee lived in a predominantly African American community and helped launch an NAACP branch in Humphreys County, Mississippi. He registered nearly 100 Black would-be voters. For that, his car was sprayed with gunfire while he sat in it on May 7, 1955. According to the Chicago Tribune, the town sheriff attributed Lee’s death to a traffic accident, despite the bullets pulled from his head. The cause of his death was officially reported as unknown. Although a Department of Justice investigation could not link Lee’s killing to his civic activity, some witnesses reported that Lee was among the Black residents asked to remove their names from voter registration lists by members of the segregationist Citizens Council. He refused. The two primary suspects were never arrested, and the case was officially closed in 2011.

Lamar Smith

Lamar Smith, a World War I veteran, had been threatened and warned to stop trying to register and organize African American voters in Brookhaven, Mississippi. A railroad town, Brookhaven had long been a waypoint and processing center for raw materials including cotton, lumber and gravel. Smith, 63 at the time, was fatally shot in August 13, 1955, in front of a crowd, but authorities were unable to find any witnesses to testify against three accused men.

Jimmie Lee Jackson

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Jimmie Lee Jackson’s participation in a February 18, 1965, voting rights march in Marion, Alabama, cost him his life. He and about 500 unarmed protesters were met by law enforcement officers who physically assaulted the citizens, including Jackson’s mother. He was beaten and ultimately shot and died eight days later. Outrage over his brutal death, depicted in the 2014 film Selma, reportedly motivated advocates to march on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Alabama a month later. In 2010, Alabama State Trooper James Bonard Fowler pleaded guilty to manslaughter and sentenced to six months in jail.

James Chaney

Along with fellow voting rights activists Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, James Chaney was found dead, buried near a dam in Neshoba County, Mississippi. The triple murder became a national sensation, in part because Schwerner and Goodman were Jewish, not Black, and had connections in the North.

At the time, Schwerner’s widow, Rita, publicly said as much, suggesting that “had [Chaney] been alone at the time of the disappearance, that this case, like so many others that have come before, would have gone completely unnoticed.”

The FBI took up the investigation of their deaths, and in 2005, 41 years after the crime, KKK member Edgar Ray Killen was found guilty of manslaughter in the case.

“They were a threat because they were advancing political power,” says Stevenson of all the activists who would become martyrs. “These were all people who were trying to stand up for rights, and you see this violent reaction.”