On the night of September 10, 1962, a mob of white people fired on the home of Joe and Rebecca McDonald, an elderly African American couple, in Ruleville, Mississippi, because they helped Black people register to vote in the Mississippi Delta.

The McDonalds were part of the Sunflower County Movement, a local voting rights campaign in Mississippi. Joe McDonald led voter education workshops at their church, and Rebecca McDonald, a member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s Citizenship Education Program, instructed members of her community on filling out voter registration forms.

In addition to voter suppression laws, Black people faced intimidation, retaliation, and violence for attempting to obtain the right to vote during the Jim Crow era. 

In 1963, Mr. McDonald, one of the few Black people in Ruleville registered to vote, testified in front of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission about the attack. He reported that he went to check on his voter registration and that the mayor of Ruleville refused to put his name on the city’s voting list. When he returned home, a mob arrived and shot into his house. The couple was forced to hide inside their bathtub during the attack. No one was ever held accountable.

In addition to this attack, Mr. McDonald was fired from his job on a cotton plantation along with the entire work crew that he led. The city of Ruleville purged Mr. McDonald’s name from the voting rolls in retaliation for the McDonalds letting three voter registration workers live in their home, including Charles McLaurin, a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee organizer and field secretary working on Black voter registration in the Mississippi Delta. 

On the same night that the white mob fired into the McDonalds’ home, the mob also attacked the homes of several other Black community members involved in voter registration, including the home of Robert and Mary Tucker, where voting rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer had stayed after she fled her own home for safety.

The white mayor of Ruleville and the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, an anti-integration state agency, denied or minimized the violence that occurred against the McDonalds and their neighbors. The mayor alleged that Black people were shooting into their own homes for publicity. A report from the Sovereignty Commission claimed that Black people and outside agitators wanted to incite violence to “paint Mississippi in an unfavorable color to the rest of the nation” to obtain federal intervention in voter registration. 

During Freedom Summer in August 1964, Mr. McDonald served as the keynote speaker at a voting rights meeting held by the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, where he said that civil rights organizing was “a way of spreading the light of freedom in the movement, for the [sake] of the future of the young people.”

The courageous actions of the McDonalds and other members in their community were part of the campaign across the South that culminated in the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which led to increases in Black voter registration and the dismantling of systemic voter suppression.