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PREFACE
- University Press of Mississippi
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Z ix Z PrefaCe On January 20, 2009, Barack Obama was inaugurated as President of the United States, the first African American to win that office. How did it happen? It can’t be traced to his stirring announcement of candidacy in Springfield, Illinois, two years earlier, or even to his memorable keynote adZ dress in Boston at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. Certainly his campaign organization was superb. But what gave any African American the opportunity to put together such a broadZbased popular coalition? The antecedents of his victory go back to the Civil War and its afterZ math. The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the ConZ stitution, which were ratified in the flush of Reconstruction between 1865 and 1870, were the first amendments to give our federal government new powers.1 The Thirteenth abolished slavery and involuntary servitude. Due process and equal protection were guaranteed to all by the Fourteenth. The language of the Fifteenth could not have been clearer: 1. The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. 2. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation. The United States Supreme Court was in accord in 1886, characterizing the right to vote as a fundamental right because it was “preservative of all rights.”2 It just was not enforced for African Americans in the South once Reconstruction ended. It was not until 1957 that enforcement legislaZ tion was passed,3 and neither that statute nor followZup legislation in 1960, though pathZ breaking, was sufficient. What completed the job was the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the greatest civil rights legislation since Reconstruction.4 This is the story of the people involved in United States v. Theron Lynd, a civil rights trial in Mississippi Preface Z x Z that helped bring about the passage of the Voting Rights Act by demonZ strating the limitations of the 1957 and 1960 statutes. Marian Wright EdelZ man, who, as a young lawyer, courageously represented Mississippi blacks, has described people such as our African American witnesses in the Lynd case as “ordinary people of grace with extraordinary courage.”5 I write as one of the lawyers who prepared their case. TwentyZseven years after that first Lynd trial, I returned to Mississippi to talk again to the brave witnesses with whom I had worked preparing for their testimony in 1962. They are not household names, not even Vernon Dahmer, who was murdered because of his pursuit of the cause of voting rights. But they had stayed vividly in my memory during the intervening years. In this book you will learn what made them tick, their hopes, and their aspirations. There would have been no Lynd case without their courZ age, without their tenacity in going back over and over again to attempt to register to vote. Without them and without their counterparts in some other Deep South counties and parishes, the Justice Department could not have acted. There would have been no Voting Rights Act, and there would have been no Obama presidency. But the Lynd case was first. It was the first case brought to trial in Mississippi by the Justice Department, taking on a seemingly omnipotent registrar’s denial of the right to vote to African Americans. Since that time I have interviewed many people in Forrest County, MisZ sissippi, and elsewhere and reexamined the evidence, so that I can present this case from multiple points of view, the personal as well as the legal. ddd It was February 1962. I had passed the bar a year and a half before. I had been with the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice for less than four months when I went down to Mississippi for the first time to help prepare United States v. Theron Lynd. My role was to find new witnesses and talk with those we had already identified whose testimony would demZ onstrate the systemic discrimination against the county’s black citizens. Four years before, David Roberson, born the same month I was in 1934, had returned home to Mississippi, after serving with the U.S. Army in KoZ rea. A college graduate, intelligent and well read, Roberson had gotten a job teaching science at Rowan High School in Hattiesburg, in the southeast part of the state. But when he tried to register to...