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

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.

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.

On September 25, 1961, a pro-segregation state legislator, E.H. Hurst, shot and killed an NAACP member and SNCC supporter named Herbert Lee at the Westbrook Cotton Gin.

When a coroner's inquest was conducted hours later, in a courtroom filled with white men, Allen and the other witnesses were pressured by the circumstances and by the local authorities into giving false testimony.

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.

'"Learning that a federal jury was to consider charges against Hurst, Allen talked to the FBI and the United States Commission on Civil Rights in Jackson, asking for protection if he testified.

"[4] 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.

[6] Moses wrote to Assistant Attorney General John Doar about Allen, making reference to "a plot by the sheriff and seven other men.

[4] 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.

Alfred Knox Sr., an elderly black preacher in Liberty, who reported that Jones had recruited his son-in-law, Archie Lee Weatherspoon, to kill Louis Allen.

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.