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17. The Leader, Vernon Dahmer
- University Press of Mississippi
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Z 176 Z chapter 17 The Leader, vernOn dahMer At first glance, Vernon Dahmer did not stand out among our witnesses. His tenthZgrade education at the Bayside School in the Kelly Settlement paled beside the master’s degrees of the teachers assembled by Principal N. R. Burger at Rowan High School. Dahmer had no connection with the city’s major employer, the Hercules Powder Company. He was not a minister like the Reverends Taylor, Chandler, Pittman, or Hall. But Dahmer, along with B. F. Bourn, was the mainstay of the county’s tiny, furtive but durable NAACP chapter, and he was its president until the year before his death. Most of all, he was the community leader: generous, courageous, respected. While he owned property on Mobile Street, in the midst of black Hattiesburg, his major holdings, his home and his heart were in the open farmland north of Hattiesburg, almost to the Jones County border, known as Kelly Settlement. There he had two hundred acres of the best land east of the Delta. His thirtyZacre cotton allotment was Forrest County’s largest. His mechanical cotton picker was one of only five in the county. And he didn’t keep it to himself. J. B. Smith, a white man about Vernon’s age, farmed three hundred acres five or six miles away up in Jones County. When Dahmer bought a new mechanical cotton picker, he moved it to Smith’s field because Smith had the earliest cotton in the area. Dahmer kept it there for three days, picking that cotton.1 Ellen Dahmer, Vernon’s mother, had inherited land from her father WarZ ren Kelly, a descendant of the white slave owner, O. B. Kelly. Like a number of white slave owners, O. B. Kelly had sired children by a black woman. She was Vernon’s greatZgreatZgrandmother. But unlike most of these white men, Kelly had left significant property to his black children. Kelly’s black descendants were sophisticated and educated. When George Dahmer, recently arrived in Forrest County, asked Warren Kelly for his daughter Ellen’s hand, his future fatherZinZlaw made it clear to him that The Leader, vernon dahmer Z 177 Z to make himself eligible Dahmer had best get himself off to Jackson State to get some education. Vernon was the eighth of their twelve children. George Dahmer owned his own large farm with cotton, and some corn, the cash crop. Vernon Jr. told me his grandfather emphasized to him: “When you’ve got the land, you can survive . . . but once you lose the land, you’ve lost control of your own life. You have your responsibilities: to yourself and to those around you, your family and your community. ” And I think that really reflects what my dad was with the civil rights movement. When I was growing up in the early forties, my daddy identified himself as a Republican, because that was the party of Abe Lincoln. He let you know what was right and what was wrong. And he was a leader; he didn’t send you no place he wouldn’t go himself. We went to Sunday School, where he taught, every Sunday. He was always involved in those things that represented the best part of the individual and of the community , sort of a Boy Scout leader for the community kids.2 Vernon Jr. had been in the middle of his twenty years of air force service when I was visiting his father often in the early sixties, but I had known his brother Harold at the time. Jay Goldin, another young Civil Rights Division lawyer who later was New York City’s comptroller, was sometimes with me when I stopped by. Nothing delighted Vernon more than getting two city boys up on his tractor to demonstrate the farming life. Vernon and his first wife, Winnie Laura Mott, had divorced. In 1949, his second wife, Aura Lee Smith, died after a long illness. Ellie Jewell Davis was his third wife. She attended Alcorn for two years and finished up at TennesZ see A&I in Nashville. In 1950, she came to Forrest County to teach at the Bayside School where Vernon had gone to school and had come to serve on the school board. They were married in March 1952 and had two children of their own to add to the six Vernon had with his first two wives. “Miss Jewell,” as she became known throughout Kelly Settlement, termed her late husZ band “educated . . . widely read on...