Beware of Limbo Dancers: A Correspondent’s Adventures with the New York Times

17. The Story Changes

CHAPTER 17 The Story Changes Writers habitually look for turning points. This or that battle that changed the direction of a war. A congressional victory for the forces of liberalism or conservatism. The University of Arkansas football team defeating its hated opponent the University of Texas, proving finally that the little guys have a chance. There was a turning point in the South’s racial violence that we were slow to recognize. It was when the Klan finally overreached on one cold night in the winter of  and murdered a Negro whom it should have left alone. The victim was Vernon Dahmer, a prosperous farmer and businessman near Hattiesburg, Mississippi. He was very light-skinned, a detail that probably made a difference. A firebomb was thrown into his house while the family slept. The flames destroyed his house and nearby store. His ten-year-old daughter was seriously injured. The father ran to the porch and fired several gunshots at the fleeing car. He died of his injuries half a day later. The Klansmen who murdered him must have been surprised at the reaction. Instead of open applause or quiet approval from their fellow white people, they found themselves denounced. The Hattiesburg Chamber of Commerce demanded that the killers be apprehended and punished. The local paper called the murder “a revolting cowardly crime.”The three local banks collected a memorial fund for the Dahmer family. Those white leaders chose to overlook the fact that the murdered man was not merely a respected black citizen. He was also active in the civil rights movement. He had been the president of the Forrest County branch of the NAACP. He had given shelter in his home to  Northern rights workers, the hated“outside agitators.”But he himself was not seen as an agitator. He was a local man with solid standing in the community.White people dealt with him as an equal. Some probably had to stop and think to remember that he was “colored.” The FBI went after the killers and arrested them in the late spring of . Their charismatic leader, Samuel Holloway Bowers Jr., went into hiding for a while, then turned himself in. I risked my life for the story on the day he was arraigned in Hattiesburg. Jack Nelson and I learned only a few hours ahead of time that Bowers was going to appear in court. We jumped on a plane in Atlanta and flew to New Orleans. There we rented two cars—Avis’s most powerful vehicles, a pair of Chryslers—and sped to Hattiesburg at eighty miles an hour. The route from New Orleans to Hattiesburg was not a mere farm-to-market road, but it was no interstate highway, either.Somehow we made it unscathed and arrived five minutes before Bowers was brought into the courtroom. Punishing the Klansmen in a Mississippi court proved difficult, of course. Bowers was tried four times and never convicted. However, in  he and several other members of the vicious White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, his creation, were convicted in a federal court of violating the civil rights of the three rights workers in Neshoba County, the young men whose bodies were found in the dam of a farm pond outside Philadelphia. Bowers served six years for that. He left prison and became a Sunday-school teacher and quiet citizen for the next twenty-two years. In ,with new leadership at the state level and with black voters making their voices heard from Tennessee to the Gulf of Mexico, Bowers was finally found guilty of the murder of Vernon Dahmer. He was sentenced to life in prison. He died there in  at the age of eighty-two. His organization was effectively put out of business by the Dahmer murder and its aftermath. But it must be acknowledged that Samuel Holloway Bowers Jr. made his mark on history. The FBI credited him and his White Knights with nine murders and three hundred beatings, burnings, and bombings. Bowers was a shocking rebuttal of the old notion that the Klan was  THE STORY CHANGES a mob of white trash and common thugs.We didn’t know it at the time, but he was from an affluent and educated family. One grandfather was a member of Congress for four terms. The other was a planter. Bowers himself was a small businessman. He seemed to be well read. He was also...