Louis Allen

In 2007, the FBI reopened Allen's case as one of a number of civil rights-era cold cases it was examining. Its staff identified Jones as the prime suspect. As of 2011, the FBI has been unable to collect enough evidence to prosecute. In April 2011, the CBS newsmagazine 60 Minutes broadcast a report about the Allen case. Correspondent Steve Kroft had traveled to Liberty to interview local residents and was largely met with silence. Kroft interviewed Jones on his property; the elderly man denied killing Allen, and he invoked the Fifth Amendment when asked about his alleged Klan membership.

In January 1964, after his mother died, Allen arranged to leave Liberty and move in with his brother in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, as he feared for his life. On January 31, the night before his planned departure, Allen was ambushed at the cattle grid at the border of his property. He was killed by two shotgun blasts to the head. His body was found by his son Hank. Interviewed in 2011, Hank said, "He [Sheriff Daniel Jones] told my mom that if Louis had just shut his mouth, that he wouldn't be layin' there on the ground. He wouldn't be dead."

When Allen was released from jail, he filed an assault complaint with the FBI against Jones. He summarily testified before an all-white federal grand jury; as blacks had been prevented from registering and voting, they could not serve on juries. The jury dismissed his complaint. Allen stayed in Liberty because he was caring for his elderly parents. Among his associates was Leo McKnight, who had worked with him and twice tried to register to vote with him. In February 1963, McKnight and his family died in a suspicious fire that local blacks believed was a murder. In November 1963, Jones arrested Allen again, falsely charging him for bouncing a check and having a concealed weapon. Law enforcement officials threatened Allen with three to five years in prison; after three weeks, the NAACP raised the bail for Allen.

Although Allen had not cooperated with the Justice Department, rumors of his visit in Jackson quickly spread among Liberty's white community. Local whites shunned Allen and cut off customers for his logging business. In August 1962, as Allen and two other black men tried to register to vote at Amite County Courthouse, they were shot at by an unknown assailant. (No black person had been allowed to vote in Amite County since 1890.) Following this incident, a white businessman threatened Allen, saying, "Louis, the best thing you can do is leave. Your little family—they're innocent people—and your house could get burned down. All of you could get killed."

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:

When Allen reported the death threats, the FBI – which had limited jurisdiction over civil rights cases at the time – referred the matter to Sheriff Jones's office. The FBI did so despite an agent acknowledging in a 1961 memo that, "Allen was to be killed and the local sheriff was involved in the plot to kill him." Allen then allegedly became a target of harassment by Jones. In a later interview, Hank Allen described Jones as "mean", recounting how he arrested his father on trumped-up charges and beat him outside his home. On one such occasion in September 1962, Jones broke Allen's jaw with a flashlight. Moses wrote to Assistant Attorney General John Doar about Allen, making reference to "a plot by the sheriff and seven other men." Jones' father was a high-ranking Exalted Cyclops in Liberty's chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. FBI documentation from the 1960s claimed that Jones was also a Klan member.

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.

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.

Louis Allen (April 25, 1919 – January 31, 1964) was an African-American businessman 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.

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.

No thorough investigation into Allen's murder was conducted until 1994. That year, Plater Robinson, a history professor at Tulane University, began examining the case files. Robinson's research in the following years pointed to Jones as a likely suspect in the killing. In 1998, Robinson conducted a tape-recorded interview with Rev. Alfred Knox Sr. (April 29, 1904 – June 16, 2006), an elderly black preacher in Liberty, who reported that Jones had recruited his son-in-law, Archie Lee Weatherspoon (May 27, 1927 – October 13, 2001), to "kill Louis Allen". When Weatherspoon refused Jones' request to "pull the trigger", Jones allegedly killed Allen himself. Both Knox and Weatherspoon have since died.

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).