Pillar of Fire (96 page)

At year's end, Vernon Dahmer and J. C. Fairley went to see Sheriff Bud Gray about one remaining obstacle. Dahmer was so busy with it that there were unopened Christmas presents stacked in his room on Saturday night, January 8, when he placed a notice on local radio that Sheriff Gray had signed out one of the poll-tax receipt books to him, as the county regularly did for the Jaycees and downtown stores during citizenship drives. Although the poll tax was on the verge of being voided nationwide as unconstitutional, registered Mississippians would need a poll-tax receipt to obtain a ballot through the 1966 elections, and Dahmer encouraged citizens to stop by his general store in Kelly Settlement. He could collect their poll taxes for the county, sparing them a trip to the courthouse, and he offered to pay the $2 fee for hardship cases so they could vote.

Preachers repeated his announcement from Negro pulpits Sunday morning, and shortly after two o'clock that night, shotguns and pistols blew out windows along the front of the farmhouse. As the Dahmers ran from their bed to scoop up Bettie from her nearby room, some attackers threw torches and open bottles of gasoline inside, while others kept up the fusillade. Inside, the Dahmers ran into walls of flame at every door. “Jewel!” shouted Dahmer to his wife. “Get the children out while I hold them off!” He grabbed his shotgun from the closet. Firing from window to window through the smoke, he aimed at masked figures behind trees and at a Pontiac in the front yard, beyond which he could see his general store also in flames. Harold, an older son on Army leave, retrieved Dennis and pushed the family out a back window where the ground sloped downward a story below. Dahmer kept shooting in retreat from the fire, then jumped himself. He and young Bettie were badly burned about the hands and face. As cars roared off in the front, Harold helped the family stumble through the woods for help. The house and store burned to the ground, leaving two chimneys.

FBI Agent J. L. Martin arrived at Forrest General Hospital an hour later to interview the five Dahmers. He knew the family, having arranged transfer to Hattiesburg in 1965 to escape twelve years of bureaucratic torment under John Malone in the New York office. Martin went before dawn to the charred crime scene, where officers discovered a pistol that had been dropped in the chaos, and a Ford on the road nearby with two tires flattened by shotgun pellets. The Ford was registered to a Klansman from Laurel, Mississippi, in neighboring Jones County. Its abandonment led to an argument among the White Knights about whether it was more humiliating to have been disabled by Dahmer or by friendly fire between attack groups.

J. C. Fairley reached the hospital before daybreak. Reverend Robert Beech, still with the Ministers Project two years after Hattiesburg Freedom Day, arrived later in the morning from out of town. Vernon Dahmer described the attack from his hospital bed, his bandaged arms raised by pulleys. “They finally got me,” he told Fairley, and said he was worried about his daughter Bettie, heavily sedated in the same room with skin burns more severe than his. “I think I made a mistake,” Dahmer told Beech, reminding him that he had always said it was unwise to be too far out front. The visitors departed. Dahmer went to sleep, then swiftly into cardiac crisis and death at 3:45
P.M.
Doctors explained that he suffocated because hot smoke and acrid fumes had seared too much lung tissue.

Hattiesburg Negroes nearly rioted at the courthouse. Some local whites banded to rebuild the family properties, but one woman advised the newspaper that charity should be reserved for needier families. “Since the Negroes have equal rights now,” wrote Mrs. J. V. Sanford, “it's about time they started looking out for their own.” Some of Dahmer's white siblings were moved to break the color line for the funeral; others stayed away. Roy Wilkins claimed Dahmer's memory for a fundraising drive, which revived family and movement quarrels over the NAACP's fidelity to Dahmer. (“There has been no effort by NAACP to exploit the Dahmers in any way,” Director of Branches Gloster Current would write to Reverend Beech.) Attorney General Katzenbach announced on the Monday that many officials in the Justice Department had known Dahmer personally and admired his work in “the highest kind of citizenship.” President Johnson sent a telegram. That week in Jackson, the all-white Mississippi legislature continued debate on emergency bills designed to neutralize the Voting Rights Act. Floor speeches analyzed the potential vote of “a certain group” by euphemism, wary of new federal sanctions against racial gerrymandering, but some members from safe districts breeched the understanding to protest sacrificial adjustments. “We all know the Negro situation was the main factor,” a Chicasaw County representative declared on Thursday, January 13, 1966.
*

The Dahmer criminal investigation folded into the two protracted murder cases from the 1964 Freedom Summer: the Chaney-Goodman-Schwerner murders and the Lemuel Penn highway ambush in Georgia. Roy Moore, the FBI's SAC for Mississippi, summoned agents to occupy a block of Hattiesburg motel rooms beginning the night of January 10. They swarmed over Klansmen of the White Knights, who were believed to be active even while under indictment in the Neshoba County murders, concentrating on a Jones County klavern in nearby Laurel, hometown of Imperial Wizard Sam Bowers. By February, suspects were threatening each other as likely informants, and issuing public manifestos of innocence. (“I am very sorry about the bombing of the Damer [sic] nigger”), which protested “the brutality of these men with the FBI.” A klavern official confessed the plot on March 2, stating in part that he was troubled because Imperial Wizard Bowers had violated an agreement not to send Jones County men elsewhere without his sign-off. This confesson led to a second, which was withdrawn under Klan duress, then to a third.

On the afternoon of March 28, 1966, the Justice Department authorized SAC Moore to arrest and file federal charges against Imperial Wizard Bowers and thirteen members of the Jones County White Knights. The timing was significant. That morning, the Supreme Court had reinstated federal indictments in the Lemuel Penn and Neshoba County murders, a year after U.S. district judges William Bootle and Harold Cox had vacated them as unconstitutional applications of powers reserved to the states. An FBI memo recorded that John Doar was “quite enthusiastic” about the decision, which rehabilitated the civil rights statute for the Dahmer prosecution as well as the two earlier ones.

The Penn case reached trial first, after further delays. Lawyers separated defendant James Lackey on grounds that he had repudiated his 1964 confession, then removed defendant Herbert Guest on arguments related to the lack of federal registration for his shotgun. Both defendants won acquittal at a trial apart from the alleged shooters, Howard Sims and Cecil Myers. In the interim, family violence produced an urgent FBI cable on May 5: “Sims went to Athens hospital where wife employed in nursery and shot her in the face with a pistol. Preliminary report indicates wife will survive. Athens PD presently attempting to apprehend Sims, said to have departed hospital in his car containing a number of firearms.” In July, nearly two years after the random ambush of Lt. Colonel Penn on a Georgia highway, a federal jury in Athens convicted Sims and Myers of civil rights conspiracy. They began serving the maximum ten-year sentence upon the exhaustion of appeals in 1968.

In Mississippi, the Dahmer and Neshoba County cases languished into 1967, largely on new defense claims that the indictments were legally invalid for lack of black people on federal grand juries in Mississippi. Prosecutors managed to obtain proper indictments by February. Meanwhile, the White Knights expanded the targets of violence. A bomb destroyed Jackson's Temple Beth Israel synagogue in September. Weeks later, beginning on October 9, Justice Department lawyers at long last prosecuted seventeen alleged conspirators for the Neshoba County murders of 1964.

Cecil Price was confident enough of the outcome to be running for sheriff against one of his fellow defendants, but the mood of the Meridian courtroom tightened dramatically on first sight of prosecution witness Delmar Dennis, Province Titan of the White Knights, who testified that he had spent the past three years working both for Imperial Wizard Sam Bowers and for the FBI. Doar admitted in his closing argument on October 18 that he had tried very few criminal cases and was there because of his commitment and the office he held, “to speak directly and frankly to you about the reason for the extraordinary effort the federal government undertook to solve this crime….” In the end, Doar adapted words from the Gettysburg Address. “What I say, what the other lawyers say here today…will soon be forgotten,” he told the jurors, “but what you twelve people do here today will long be remembered.”

The jury stayed out two days, once sending a message that it was deadlocked, before the foreman returned a verdict on October 20 of not guilty for seven defendants, including Sheriff Rainey, deadlock on three, and guilty for Deputy Sheriff Price, Imperial Wizard Bowers, Alton Wayne Roberts, and four others. Authorities declared the seven convictions to be the first by any Mississippi jury against Klansmen for race crimes.

Judge Cox released the convicted men pending appeal. Violence continued. In November, bombs damaged the parsonage next to Saint Paul's Church in Laurel (where opera singer Leontyne Price had belonged as a child) and the home of the Beth Israel rabbi in Jackson. On December 20, a constable who spot-checked a parked car in the small town of Collins came upon Imperial Wizard Bowers and a twenty-one-year-old unknown named Thomas Tarrants, with a .45-caliber machine gun. Tarrants, a solo bomber for the White Knights, disappeared upon release, and Bowers headed to trial for the murder of Vernon Dahmer, where Delmar Dennis would testify. FBI agents renewed investigative pressure, and a supplementary confession of Billy Roy Pitts—the Klansman who had dropped his pistol on the Dahmer property—brought one of four shocks in the demise of White Knights terror in 1968. Pitts verified the identity of the Pontiac driver as Charles Wilson, president of the Laurel Jaycees, owner of an investment firm and a company that manufactured artificial limbs. Shortly after Wilson received Laurel's Distinguished Service Award in January of 1968, his arrest made stunning news for Mississippi: a prominent citizen charged as the alleged shotgunner on a Klan murder squad.

Also in January, a Forrest County grand jury indicted eleven Dahmer suspects on state arson and murder charges, and all-white juries later handed down murder convictions at three trials. The defendants, including Charles Wilson, received life sentences that were upheld on appeal—another first for Mississippi. Feelings about the trials ran so high in Hattiesburg that local prosecutor James Dukes and his brother, an FBI agent, walked to a downtown Klan hangout and “called out” threatening Klansmen to fight or show chicken in front of a noontime street crowd. This was their crest. In May of 1968, a jury deadlocked 11-1 for conviction of Sam Bowers, after defense witnesses accused the FBI of supplying state witness Billy Roy Pitts with Hollywood starlets. Bowers survived a second mistrial, 10-2, then another. Local headlines turned against the prosecution witnesses: “Pitts ‘Sings Again' in Dahmer Slaying.” Hung juries became the rule. One defense lawyer claimed that FBI agent Martin had secretly poisoned Dahmer at the hospital on orders from LBJ.

White Knights terror centered upon Meridian, in apparent retaliation for convictions there in the triple murder. Klansmen burned a store run by FBI informant Wallace Miller in February of 1968, arsoned two black churches, and in May bombed the largest Meridian synagogue. On June 28, 1968, police and FBI agents surprised two Klan bombers at the home of a prominent Jewish target in Meridian. A shootout gravely wounded Thomas Tarrants, the young Klan bomber who had been arrested with Sam Bowers, and killed his companion of more than one previous mission, Kathy Ainsworth. An investigation convinced authorities that Ainsworth, an elementary school teacher in Jackson, had hidden a Klan life from her family, and the death of a respectable female on a White Knights murder team was a third shock for Mississippi. The fourth would remain a secret until 1970, when reporter Jack Nelson of the
Los Angeles Times
disclosed that Jewish groups, working through FBI agents, had paid $30,000 for a precise warning before the bomb attempt in Meridian—to Klansman Alton Wayne Roberts, who was free on appeal of his own conviction in the Chaney-Goodman-Schwerner murders.

Klan bombers and prosecutors collapsed, leaving behind a five-year toll by FBI reckoning of nine murders connected to the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, plus seventy-five church burnings and at least three hundred bombings and assaults. Trials died out in the Dahmer case after a federal jury deadlocked on ten conspiracy defendants in 1969. Charles Wilson served a year at Parchman Penitentiary before receiving a series of gubernatorial leaves in 1970-71, then a grant of work-release to his home in 1972 from Governor William Waller, who had defended him in one of his trials. Waller commuted Wilson's life sentence to time served in 1976. The two others sentenced to life in the Dahmer case were paroled in 1978.

Sam Bowers and Alton Wayne Roberts surrendered with the five others convicted in the Chaney-Goodman-Schwerner case, and served six years before receiving mandatory parole in 1976. Bowers returned to Laurel as a reclusive theologian of racial purity. “When a priest sees the heretic,” he said in a rare 1994 interview, “he can do only one thing: he eliminates him.” Upon the conviction that year of Byron de la Beckwith for the murder of Medgar Evers, three decades after Beckwith's previous mistrial in 1964, Ellie Dahmer petitioned Forrest County prosecutors to reopen cases against Bowers and other indictees who were either mistried or never yet tried for Vernon Dahmer's murder.