Freedom Summer - Bruce W. Watson [162]
The ensuing years had seen violence in Mississippi wax and wane. Yet whenever white rage exploded, it strengthened the Mississippi movement and hastened the future. One dark night in January 1966, the gentle Hattiesburg farmer Vernon Dahmer, whom volunteers remembered for his Fourth of July picnic during Freedom Summer, was brutally murdered. When Klansmen threw flaming jugs of gasoline into Dahmer’s home, Hattiesburg’s local hero stood in the blaze, firing back at his assailants, allowing his wife and children to escape. Consumed by fire and bullets, Dahmer died the next day. Yet as a signal of how things were changing, Mississippi style, Governor Johnson denounced “these vicious and morally bankrupt criminals,” and within months, the FBI charged fifteen men with Dahmer’s murder. Among the accused was the soft-spoken businessman who had issued the order to get “Goatee,” Klan Imperial Wizard Sam Bowers.
The following June, James Meredith returned to Mississippi vowing to march from Memphis to Jackson to encourage voter registration. Meredith was just inside the Mississippi border on his one-man “March Against Fear” when he was ambushed by shotgun. His wounds were superficial but the outrage drew civil rights leaders from across the country. Martin Luther King, Stokely Carmichael, and others came to Mississippi to continue Meredith’s march, steering it through the heart of the Delta, drawing thousands who walked, sang, and registered.
In October 1966, after the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously reinstated the Neshoba murder case, the defense came up with another twist. The grand jury, it seemed, had been all white. Again the case was postponed until a new grand jury could hand down more indictments. This time the list included the Klan’s gentlemanly, homicidal Imperial Wizard. By then, Mississippi was deeply divided on the case that had brought it national shame. The state still refused to press murder charges, yet many hoped justice would come in federal court. Just as many, however, continued to see the defendants as heroes standing up for the sovereignty of their embattled state. Even as the FBI sent more undercover agents to infiltrate the Klan, Sheriff Rainey and Deputy Price attended fund-raising dinners among hundreds eager to back a desperate defense of Jim Crow. By the time their trial on “civil rights violations” finally began, after three years of preparation, appeals, and dismissals, it was remarkably short.
Inside the courtroom, Judge Harold Cox, the notorious racist who had ranted against “niggers on a voting drive,” sat before a huge mural depicting Mississippi history, including slaves picking cotton. Cox was silent as prosecutor John Doar led informants through the same stories they had told the FBI—of Klansmen armed with the “elimination” order, of “Preacher” Killen convening the lynch mob, of cars chasing “Goatee,” pulling the three over, taking them to Rock Cut Road. But the judge soon served notice of how things were changing. Early in the trial, a defense attorney questioned a black minister. Hadn’t Michael Schwerner advocated “the burning of draft cards” ? Wasn’t he an atheist? Hadn’t he tried to “to get young Negro males to sign statements that they would rape one white woman a week during the hot summer of 1964 here in Mississippi”? Judge Cox had heard enough. “Who is the author of that question?” he snapped. Preacher Killen, who had suggested it to lawyers, meekly raised his hand.
“I’m not going to allow a farce to be made of this trial,” Cox said. The accused donned straight faces, yet continued to joke and smirk during recesses. All were stunned, however, when the Imperial Wizard’s most trusted aide stepped into the witness box to testify for the prosecution.
Delmar Dennis, a tall, stalwart Methodist minister, had joined the Klan because