Belzoni was the site of the murder of an early civil rights pioneer. The Rev. George W. Lee, an African American minister who was seeking voting rights for the disenfranchised blacks of the Mississippi Delta and registered to vote, was murdered in 1955 in "Bloody Belzoni" by white residents committed to upholding segregation. His killers were never found, as the governor of Mississippi, Hugh L. White, refused to investigate the case. Many consider Lee the first martyr of the modern civil rights movement.