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. 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. 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.
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. 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.
Early life
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. 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.
Murder of Herbert Lee
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. 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).
In August 1961, Moses filed charges against Billy Jack Caston, cousin to Sheriff Daniel Jones and son-in-law of pro-segregation state legislator E.H. Hurst, for an assault against him and other civil rights activists by a white mob. It was the first time that an African-American had legally challenged white violence in Amite County. The all-white jury acquitted Caston, and Moses was escorted to the county line, ostensibly for his own safety. Moses left the county in January 1962. Steptoe consulted with Justice Department agents in Jackson about intimidation tactics used by Hurst and other prominent whites in the town of Liberty.
On September 25, 1961, Hurst shot and killed an NAACP member named Herbert Lee at the Westbrook Cotton Gin. Allen and eleven other men witnessed the murder. When a coroner's inquest was conducted hours later, in a courtroom filled with armed white men, Allen and the other witnesses were pressured into giving false testimony. They supported Hurst's claim of shooting Lee in self-defense, leading Hurst to be cleared of any wrongdoing. However, Allen later told fellow activists the truth behind Lee's killing. 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. 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?'"