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Z 179 Z chapter 18 The whITe wITnesses and The wOMen whO regIsTered TheM We heard the plaintive cries of Shands, Roberts, Zachary, and Ed Cates as John Doar began examining our first white witness, twentyZtwoZyearZold John Edward Dabbs. And for once what Shands said was true. “Judge, they are changing their whole case. They are trying to make it equal protection and the Fourteenth Amendment as well as voting and Fifteenth AmendZ ment. They never told us about any white witnesses. There is not a single word about them in their last amended complaint.” Our decision to seek white witnesses who had been registered by TherZ on Lynd’s staff at the same time he was turning away our black witnesses was a late one, made after our final amended complaint had been filed on February 5. Just days thereafter, Bob Owen and I began our intensive threeZ week preparation for the March 5 trial date, visiting and preparing all of our black witnesses. We also were digging up names, using recent yearbooks of allZwhite Hattiesburg High School. Nineteen to twentyZtwoZyearZolds were likely to have registered after Theron Lynd took office on February 26, 1959, the period to which Judge Cox had limited us for the hearing. They would be interviewed by agents from the New Orleans office of the FBI. On the basis of those interviews, we would determine which ones to subpoena. We were going to meet our burden under the 1957 Civil Rights Act of showing the systemic discrimination that existed between the treatZ ment of whites and blacks seeking to vote in Forrest County. We, of course, knew that FBI agents “swarming over” Greater Hattiesburg would scarcely stay secret for long. In fact, a few of those interviewed had set off immediZ ately to alert M. M. Roberts. So we viewed those “plaintive cries” of counsel as just more of the deZ laying tactics we had suffered through since the case was first filed. We reviewed the bureau reports, did some followZup interviews of our own, white witnesses and the women who registered Them Z 180 Z interviews that would have been dangerous to conduct two years later, and issued our subpoenas. We were ready to call white witnesses, as well as black ones. Doar told the court how recently these witnesses had come to our attention and dicZ tated, in open court, a separate paragraph for each of the white witnesses, a new amendment to our complaint. John Edward Dabbs and Thomas Dabbs, twentyZtwoZyearZold twins, were the first to testify. Both had registered in July 1960, brought to the clerk’s office by their father. Theron Lynd had asked where they lived and how old they were and then filled out their affidavits and certificates to vote. The Dabbs brothers were registered in five to ten minutes, and ZachZ ary later conceded on the record that Lynd had no form for either Dabbs or for the next witness, Robert Irving Newcomer, Jr., twentyZthree. Newcomer had registered in January 1960. He was hostile to John from the outset of his testimony and declared he had interpreted a section of the state constitution. That contradicted what he had told the FBI on February 22 and turned out to be a lie. He refused to talk to Bob before testifying and had talked with Roberts and Zachary. Newcomer testified that he had found bureau agents sitting in his livZ ing room when he got home from work and that several days later, when they brought a statement to his job, he had declined to sign it. He did say that he had been registered by a woman in the office without seeing Lynd, something no black applicant had achieved. Newcomer had told the agents that she had filled out a form for him. M. M. Roberts objected that Doar was “browbeating his own witness,” but John failed to shake Newcomer’s revisionist history.1 Ultimately, howZ ever, the defendants had to produce what application forms they had for our witnesses. They made it clear for the record they were doing so only “under the direct orders of this Court.”2 There was none for Newcomer. Charles Andrew Still, Jr., twentyZtwo, testified that in May 1960 “the one who was behind the counter pulled out the large registration book from under it and asked [him] the data which is registered in that book, and I signed the book.”3 That was all it took for Still to receive...

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