Vernon Dahmer

Vernon Ferdinand Dahmer, Sr. (March 10, 1908 – January 10, 1966) [1] was a leader with the Civil Rights Movement and president of the Forrest County chapter of the NAACP in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. He was murdered by the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan for his work on recruiting African Americans to vote.

Vernon Dahmer
Born
Vernon Ferdinand Dahmer

(1908-03-10)March 10, 1908
Kelly Settlement
Forrest County, Mississippi
DiedJanuary 10, 1966(1966-01-10) (aged 57)
Hattiesburg, Mississippi
OrganizationNational Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)

Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)

Council of Federated Organizations (COFO)
MovementCivil Rights Movement

Early life and family

Vernon Dahmer was born on March 10, 1908, in the Kelly Settlement, Forrest County, Mississippi to Ellen Louvenia (Kelly) and George Washington Dahmer. George Dahmer was described as an honest, hardworking farmer of integrity. His mother Ellen Kelly was biracial because of her mother, Henrietta. Henrietta was a biracial child born out of wedlock by a white slave owner, O.B Kelly, and one of his slaves. She was given to a black family, called the McCombs.[2][3] His cousin, Iola Williams, became the first African-American member of the San Jose, California, City Council in 1979.[4]

Dahmer attended Bay Spring High School until the tenth grade; failing to graduate. He was light-skinned enough to pass as a white man,[5] but instead chose to forgo the privileges of living as a Caucasian man and faced the daily challenges of being a black man in Mississippi during that time.[6]

Dahmer was married three times. His first wife was Winnie Laura Mott; their marriage of five years ended in divorce. In 1949, Dahmer remarried; this time to a woman named Aura Lee Smith. Unfortunately, Aura died after a long illness.[7] Ellie Jewel Davis was his third and final wife; she was a teacher from Rose Hill, Mississippi, and had recently moved to Forrest County. The couple met after working on the school board together and married in March 1952.[8] The couple had two children together to add to the six children Dahmer had with his first two wives, making a total of seven boys and one girl. The family and their home was located north of Forrest County and was part of the Kelly Settlement, close to the Jones County border; the settlement (named for Dahmer's maternal grandfather). Ellie Dahmer taught for many years in Richton, Mississippi and retired in 1987 from the Forrest County school system.

Dahmer was a member of Shady Grove Baptist Church where he served as a music director and Sunday School teacher. He was the owner of a grocery store, sawmill, planing mill, and also cotton farm. His main objective was to make a living for himself and to provide work for somebody else. He would hire local individuals from the community to work for him and did not discriminate between black or white.[8][9]

Civil Rights Movement

During the Civil Rights Movement, Dahmer served two terms as president of the Forrest County Chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and led voter registration drives in the 1960s. His wife Ellie said "He was a good progressive Christian man. He wasn't a mean, bitter Civil Rights worker, because he saw good in white as well as he did in black."[8] As president of the Forrest County Chapter of the NAACP, he had personally asked the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) to send workers to help aid the voter registrations efforts being made by African Americans in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. SNCC had sent two workers, Curtis Hayes and Hollis Watkins, to Hattiesburg. The act of calling SNCC to help aid the efforts made by the NAACP would eventually cost him his NAACP presidency.

In 1949, Dahmer was in the process of making out his new registration card when Luther Cox denied his attempts to re-register. Luther Cox was the authority figure in charge of registered voters in Forrest County and was a white segregationist.[5] Cox would only authorize a registration of a black person if they could answer the question "How many bubbles are in a bar of soap?"[5] In 1950, fifteen leaders of Forrest County's black community, including Dahmer, filed a lawsuit against Cox for his administration of the voting laws; preliminary injunction. Twelve years later, in March 1962, the preliminary injunction was in motion of being viewed by the court of law. Dahmer had testified in court against Luther Cox and his testimony helped demonstrate the pattern of discrimination in the county.[5]

In the 1950s, Dahmer and Medgar Evers founded a youth NAACP chapter in Hattiesburg. The student chapter did not last longer than a year. Dahmer continued to be supportive of the SNCC throughout the Civil Rights Movement. Dahmer's farm quickly became a home away from home for SNCC volunteers. The farm was also used for registration projects and helped employ the committee volunteers.[9] Dahmer was also working closely with the Coalition for Free and Open Elections (COFO) and the Delta Ministry.

Dahmer kept a voter registration book in his grocery store in late 1965 to make it easier for blacks to register. Dahmer also made a public service announcement over the radio stating that he would help the local African American population pay a poll tax for the right to vote if they could not afford to do so themselves. His mantra was, "If you don't vote, you don't count", and those words, which he repeated on his deathbed, were used as his epitaph.[10]

Murder and suspects

The Dahmers had been sleeping in shifts after receiving numerous death threats throughout the year. The Dahmers had a shotgun by their nightstand in case they heard gunshots and always had the curtains drawn tight at night to make it harder for night riders to see into their home.[8] On January 10, 1966, the Dahmer home was attacked by the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.[8] The family woke to the sound of a shotgun being discharged and the sound of gas jugs being thrown through the windows. As Ellie went to grab the children, the house erupted into fire. Dahmer returned fire from inside the house to try and distract the Klansmen while he helped hand Bettie down to Ellie. He was able to leave his burning home, but was seriously burned from the waist up; Bettie also suffered major burns to her arms. The Dahmers' home, grocery store, and car were all destroyed in the fire. Dahmer was taken to the hospital, but died due to smoke inhalation and severely burned lungs.[8] Before he died, Dahmer had told a local newspaper reporter: "I've been active in trying to get people to register to vote. People who don't vote are deadbeats on the state. I figure a man needs to do his own thinking. What happened to us last night can happen to anyone, white or black. At one time I didn't think so, but I have changed my mind."[6]

The Chamber of Commerce, under Bob Beech and William Carey College President Dr. Ralph Noonkester, led a community effort to rebuild the Dahmer home. Local and state businesses such as the Masonite Corporation, Alexander Materials, and Frierson Building Materials donated materials, local unions donated their services, and students from the University of Southern Mississippi volunteered unskilled labor. Bob Beech's second priority was to provide college funds for Dahmer's school-aged children.[6] Four of Dahmer's sons were in the United States military and had left their posts to help bury their father and reconstruct their family home.

Authorities indicted fourteen men, most with Ku Klux Klan connections, to be tried for the attack on the Dahmer home. Thirteen were brought to trial, eight on charges of arson and murder. Four were convicted and Billy Roy Pitts (Sam Bowers' bodyguard), who had dropped his gun at the crime scene, entered a guilty plea and had his gun turned in as state's evidence. Billy faced just three years of his federal sentence. However, three out of four of those convicted were pardoned within four years. In addition, eleven of the defendants were tried on federal charges of conspiracy to intimidate Dahmer because of his civil rights activities. Former Ku Klux Klan Imperial Wizard Sam Bowers, who was believed to have ordered the murder, was tried four times and each time invoked the Fifth Amendment. Each trial ended in a mistrial.[11]

Twenty-five years after the murder of Dahmer and assault on his family, the case was reopened by the state of Mississippi. The case lasted for seven years, and ended by the conviction and sentencing to life in prison of Imperial Wizard Bowers in 1998.[12] Bowers died in the Mississippi State Penitentiary on November 5, 2006, at the age of 82.[11][13]

Honors and recognition

After Dahmer's death, a street and a park in Hattiesburg were named in his honor. On July 26, 1986, a memorial was also dedicated at the park.

In 1992, Dahmer's widow, Ellie, was elected election commissioner of District 2, Forrest County. For more than a decade, she served in this position, supported by both black and white residents, in the same district where her husband was killed for his voting rights advocacy.[14]

On January 8, 2016, the Mississippi State Legislature honored the civil rights leader by designating January 10 as Vernon Dahmer Day. A commemoration ceremony, which included Dahmer's widow and family, was held in Hattiesburg on the 50th anniversary of his death. Today, his family still attends the Shady Grove Baptist Church and are very active in the community.

In January of 2020, a bronze statue commemorating Dahmer was erected in front of the Forrest County Courthouse.[15]

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References
  1. "Fire Bombs Destroy Home; Negro Leader Burned, Dies", Chicago Tribune, January 11, 1966, p7
  2. Taylor Branch, Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years 1963-65 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998), p. 58-59
  3. "The Family Origins of Vernon Dahmer, Civil Rights Activist". Renegade South. Retrieved 2015-11-16.
  4. Prodis Sulek, Julia (2019-04-07). "Iola Williams, San Jose's first black City Council member, remembered as trailblazer". The Mercury News. Archived from the original on 2019-04-08. Retrieved 2020-01-19.
  5. [Martin, Jr., Gordon A.: Count Them One by One: Black Mississippians Fighting for the Right to Vote, University Press of Mississippi, 2010, p. 178]
  6. Newman, Mark (2004). Divine Agitators: The Delta Ministry and Civil Rights in Mississippi. Athens, Georgia. ISBN 978-0-8203-4020-3.
  7. Martin, Gordon (2010). Count Them One by One: Black Mississippians Fighting for The Right to Vote. Jackson, Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi. pp. Pages217-218. ISBN 978-1-62846-049-0.
  8. Dahmer, Ellie (1974-07-02). "Oral History with Ellie Dahmer; 1974". Digital Collections. Retrieved 15 November 2015.
  9. Dahmer, Vernon (2011). "Southern Poverty Law Center". Southern Poverty Law Center. SPLC. Retrieved 15 November 2015.
  10. Vernon Dahmer's epitaph. From: findagrave.com. Retrieved November 5, 2007.
  11. Philip Delves Broughton , "Mississippi faces past in Klan trial", The Daily Telegraph, August 19, 1998, Retrieved 23 Oct 2007
  12. "Onetime Klansman convicted of murder, arson in 1966 firebombing in Mississippi", Associated Press report in The Daily News (Galveston, Texas), August 22, 1998, pA10
  13. "Former Ku Klux Klan leader dies in prison", The Daily Herald (Chicago), November 6, 2006, p14
  14. Dahmer, Vernon (2011). "Southern Poverty Law Center". Vernon Dahmer. SPLC. Retrieved 15 November 2015.
  15. "Vernon Dahmer statue unveiled at Forrest County Courthouse". 6 January 2020. Retrieved 5 July 2020.
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