ABSTRACT
In 1961, we heard that Bob Moses had gone to McComb, Mississippi to work on voter registration. The frame-up and execution of Willie McGee in 1951, the lynchings of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till in 1955 in Money, Mississippi and twenty-three-year-old Mack Parker in 1959 in Poplarville were examples that had received national attention. Herbert Lee, an activist in Liberty, Mississippi, twenty miles from McComb, was murdered on September 25, 1961 by E. H. Hurst, a Mississippi state representative. Activists in Mississippi were totally unprotected from white terror. In 1988, Alan Parker produced his racist film Mississippi Burning, a story of the finding of the bodies of the murdered three, starring Gene Hackman and Willem Dafoe as two white members of the FBI. The Mississippi Challenge had failed: the segregated white Democratic Party delegation had been seated at the Democratic National Convention instead of the delegation from the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.
