Lamar “Ditney” Smith knew the dangers of helping Black citizens vote in Mississippi in 1955. He had received death threats, and knew about many Black people who had been lynched in his county. In May, white men had killed another Black activist, the Rev. George W. Lee, for registering voters in Mississippi. State Democratic party chairman Thomas Tubb declared, “We don’t intend to have Negroes voting” in the August primary, and said those who did vote might get “a whipping.”
But Mr. Smith, a 63-year-old World War I veteran and farmer, kept at it. He encouraged Black citizens to vote by absentee ballot, a seemingly safer option than going to the polls.
On Saturday morning, August 13, 1955, Mr. Smith was home at their farm with his wife, Annie, when someone called and told him to come to the county courthouse in Brookhaven.
Mr. Smith was crossing the courthouse lawn at 10 am, absentee ballots in hand, when three white men surrounded him. One pressed a .38-caliber handgun against his ribs and fired.
None of the dozens of onlookers came to Ditney Smith’s aid as he lay dying. A white Brookhaven man, Tex Sample, never forgot hearing someone nearby say, “Nobody carries that n—r to no hospital.”
The sheriff heard the shots and saw a blood-splattered white man walk away but did not stop him. He took eight days to arrest three white men. They were released after a parade of witnesses, some of whom had been within 30 feet of the confrontation, falsely told a grand jury they had seen nothing.
NAACP investigators determined that Mr. Smith had walked into a trap. A half-century later, a witness told the FBI that three men had delivered whiskey to “someone who knew Smith and was instrumental” in persuading him to come to the courthouse.
After the murder, a notary public who had assisted Black voters said he was warned to stop, lest he “wind up like Ditney Smith.”
Lamar Smith was only one of the many Black leaders murdered in the 20th century in the South, in places where the numbers of Black eligible voters could have changed the outcome of elections. As was so often the case, no one was held accountable for any of the killings explored in this article. The killers included white policemen, sheriffs, businessmen, even a legislator—all part of the Jim Crow system aimed at disenfranchising Black voters. Local prosecutors usually refused to bring charges even though they knew the perpetrators of this violence. When there were prosecutions, all-white juries acquitted the guilty. The dead were blamed, falsely accused of being “rabble rousers” and Communists. Their families fled North, leaving behind their homes, farms, and businesses.