been effectively disfranchised by provisions of the 1890 constitution, particularly due to white implementation of poll taxes and literacy tests). In 1953, Lee and Gus Courts, another black grocer, co-founded the Belzoni chapter of the NAACP. When the sheriff refused to accept their poll taxes, which were required for voter registration, they took him to court. Between them, Lee and Courts registered nearly all of the county's ninety black voters in 1955. Whites were enraged by the previous year's decision by the U.S. Supreme Court's in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), ruling that segregated public schools were unconstitutional. Whites in Mississippi were determined to resist efforts at integration, particularly in black-majority areas of the Delta. They founded the White Citizens Council, with chapters throughout counties in the Delta. Whites were aggressively purging the few blacks from the voting rolls through intimidation and economic pressure; in some places, they had black activists fired from their jobs and evicted from rental housing. Lee and Courts continued their work. Lee was a vice president of the Regional Council of Negro Leadership, a leading black organization in the state. The Council promoted self-help, business, and civil rights. It pressed for voting rights and social justice. It organized a boycott of gas stations that refused to install restrooms for blacks and was successful. The head of the Council was Dr. T. R. M. Howard, one of the wealthiest blacks in the state. Medgar Evers worked as an organizer; he was later state chair of the NAACP. In April, Lee spoke at the Council's annual meeting, which drew a crowd of more than 7,000 to the all-black town of Mound Bayou, Mississippi. Lee's "down-home dialogue and his sense of political timing" were said to have "electrified" the crowd. "Pray not for your mom and pop," Lee suggested. "They've gone to heaven. Pray you can make it through this hell." Death and investigation Less than a month after his famous speech, Lee was shot and killed while driving in his car in Belzoni, Mississippi. An unidentified shooter pulled alongside Lee's car and fired three times from a shotgun, shattering Lee's jaw and causing his car to leave the road. Lee died before arriving at a local hospital. According to the autopsy, lead pellets extracted from his face were consistent with buckshot. A few days before, Lee had received a threatening note. The sheriff, Ike Shelton, wanted