Count Them One by One: Black Mississippians Fighting for the Right to Vote

21. After the Trial

Z 213 Z chapter 21 afTer The TrIaL It was a very warm, sleepy August evening in the early nineties in MontZ gomery, Alabama. There was no traffic in the streets and the sidewalk in front of the Civil Rights Memorial was empty. But the water flowed conZ stantly down the black granite wall of Maya Lin’s graceful memorial onto the circular table inscribed with the names of forty people who had died in the struggle. My wife and I walked slowly around the edge, looking for the name we had come to see: Vernon Dahmer. Soothing as the flowing waters were, they had also largely washed the paint out of the letters of Dahmer’s name, making it easier to trace with our fingers than to read. But this seemed fitZ ting: compared with many of the names on the monument, Dahmer’s was then little known. On January 10, 1966, the top civil rights story of the day was the refusal of Georgia’s legislature to seat RepresentativeZelect Julian Bond for his opZ position to continued U.S. military involvement in Vietnam. That night Vernon Dahmer was murdered at his home in Kelly Settlement. There had been a radio announcement that Dahmer, long Forrest County’s leading proponent of black voting rights, would collect poll taxes from wouldZbe voters to turn in to local officials. That was believed to be the impetus for his murder. There was actually an element of futility in the sequence of events: a federal court would soon declare the state’s poll tax unconstitutional. On March 28, 1966, the top civil rights story of the day was the Supreme Court decision upholding the federal government’s right to prosecute, unZ der the Reconstruction conspiracy statute, the alleged killers of civil rights workers Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney in Neshoba County. That day agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation arrested thirteen members of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan— the “secret” Klan splinter group based next door in Jones County—for vioZ lating Dahmer’s civil rights by murdering him. Still being sought was the ringleader, White Knights’ imperial wizard Sam Holloway Bowers, Jr., who after the Trial Z 214 Z surrendered a few days later. FBI sources described Bowers as “armed and dangerous.”1 “The vernon dahmer Project” and the Prosecutions of sam Bowers Six bored, unemployed Confederate veterans began the Ku Klux Klan near Nashville, Tennessee, in 1865.2 It was first an almost farcical mystical sociZ ety, but the sheets they wore as they galloped their horses through town created the stir they had hoped for and, understandably, scared black onZ lookers. But within two years, other, older men began using the Klan as a vehicle for guerrilla action against the South’s hated conquerors. With the entire South but for Tennessee divided into five military disZ tricts under army rule, and close to 200,000 southern white voters disenZ franchised for aiding the Confederacy, even some respected leaders such as General Nathan Bedford Forrest, in whose name Mississippi would create Forrest County in 1912, seized on the Klan as their “patriotic” organizaZ tional vehicle. Forrest, one of Robert E. Lee’s legendary cavalry officers, became the first Grand Wizard of the Tennessee Klan in April 1867. But the Klan would not be merely a political force. Lynchings and other murders, floggings, and mutilations erupted across the South in all their savagery. Within two years, General Forrest was so sickened by the vicious conduct he had helped unleash that he ordered the Klan to disband.3 It was too late. His voice was no longer heeded. However, major civil rights legislation enacted by Congress beginning in 1866 and including the Enforcement Act of 1871, known as the Ku Klux Klan Act, as well as strong executive action by President Ulysses S. Grant in South Carolina in the early 1870s, helped check Klan terrorism; and the restoration of political rights to almost all former Confederates in May 1872 deprived the Klan of one of the festering sores that had provided its impetus.4 For a time the Klan receded as a force in American life. It made its forZ mal return in 1915, chartered by the state of Georgia and headed by Atlanta promoter William Joseph Simmons. The cross that soon burned over nearZ by Stone Mountain symbolized the Klan’s twentiethZcentury incarnation. The Klan was antiZCatholic, antiZSemitic, antiZimmigrant, but its greatZ est impact was upon...