E.H. Hurst

Eugene Hunter Hurst Jr. (October 21, 1908 – April 20, 1990) was an American dairy farmer, politician and murderer in Amite County, Mississippi, elected as a Democrat to the Mississippi House of Representatives in 1959. He supported segregation and opposed the civil rights movement, which expanded in the early 1960s.

Hurst is noted for killing Herbert Lee by fatally shooting him mid-day on September 25, 1961 at a cotton gin. Despite witnesses of the unprovoked attack, Hurst was ruled to have acted in self-defense by the all-white jury at the inquest held that day. Lee was an African-American married man with nine children who was a charter member of the NAACP in the county, and had been trying to register black voters in Liberty, the small hometown of both men.

E. H. Hurst was born and raised in Liberty, Mississippi. He joined the Democratic Party and was elected to the state house in 1959. Hurst supported segregation and the continued exclusion from voting in state elections of blacks, who had been disfranchised by the 1890 state constitution and suffered discriminatory practices creating barriers to voter registration. A member of a white supremacist Citizens' Council in Amite County, Hurst opposed the civil rights movement, which had begun to try to register African-American voters in the South.

On September 25, 1961, in the middle of the day at a cotton gin, Hurst shot and killed his neighbor Herbert Lee, a 52-year-old married man with nine children, who had participated in voter registration classes and had volunteered to register to vote. Lee was a charter member of the NAACP in the county and had joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) campaign in Mississippi.

Inquest

At the inquest held the same day, Hurst claimed that Lee had threatened him with a tire iron, and the all-white jury returned a verdict of justifiable homicide on grounds of self-defense. The Amite County courtroom in which the inquest was held was full of armed white men, and witnesses were pressured to testify in Hurst's favor. Hurst was never charged with a crime.

Suppression of witnesses

Louis Allen, a black witness to Lee's murder, who had testified in a way that supported Hurst's "defense" claim, discussed the case with SNCC civil rights activists including Julian Bond. Learning that a federal jury was considering charges against Hurst, Allen met with representatives of the FBI and Civil Rights Commission to see if he could get federal protection if he were to change his testimony to the truth. When the Justice Department told him they could not offer him protection, Allen, afraid he would be killed, decided to stick to his original version of events. The white community heard Allen had talked to the government, however, and he was threatened, economically blackmailed, fired from his job, and harassed by law enforcement. In January 1964, the night before he was planning to move away from Liberty, Allen was murdered in his driveway by two shot-gun blasts. Investigations since 1994 have suggested that Allen was murdered by Daniel Jones, the Amite County sheriff, but no one has been prosecuted for his murder.

Aftermath

Medgar Evers, leader of the NAACP in Mississippi, was one of the speakers at Lee's funeral. In June 1963 he was shot in the back outside his home in a political assassination and died soon after, killed by a KKK member. Activists were still able to register about 1200 voters against the resistance of officials in Mississippi. Adopting a simple registration process that was typical of northern states, to show the desire of blacks to vote, they organized the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, open to all. Sixty thousand blacks joined this party, and elected 68 delegates to go to the 1964 national Democratic convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey that summer. They challenged the white-only Democratic Party delegates at the credentials committee, as white Democrats in the South had kept most blacks out of politics for more than 60 years. The national party would not accept the MFDP delegates as the official ones for the state.