Vernon Dahmer Sr. always knew the nightriders would come for him. He was a civil rights activist when that could mean a death sentence in Mississippi.
Most nights Dahmer and his wife, Ellie, were ready. They slept in shifts, shotguns at the ready, their curtains pulled back, the better to see anyone approaching.
The day before his killers finally attacked his house on Jan. 11, 1966, Dahmer had announced at Shady Grove Baptist Church that, for the first time, blacks could pay their $2 poll tax at his grocery store rather than have to go to the county office. The fee was a prerequisite for registering to vote.
News of Dahmer’s plan spread quickly. For years, the state had strategically placed spies in black communities throughout Mississippi to monitor civil rights workers such as Dahmer. Information was forwarded to the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, a state agency that then funneled the information to employers, law enforcement officials and others, including the state’s most violent enforcer, the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.
On March 17, the secret files of the long-disbanded Sovereignty Commission will be unsealed, revealing the extent of the state’s efforts to thwart court-ordered integration in Mississippi. At last, the Dahmers and the families of other civil rights workers will learn the names of people–blacks and whites– who infiltrated organizations and snitched on their friends and neighbors.
“Many people were damaged by the actions of the Sovereignty Commission,” said David Ingebretsen, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Mississippi, which led a 20-year court battle to force the state to release the files. “By opening the files, these people have a chance to seek justice. If illegal acts were committed against them, they can sue the state or the actors who performed those deeds.”
At the same time the reopening of this violent chapter of history promises Mississippians and other Americans a painful encounter with their past, not unlike the wrenching experience over the last decade of East Germans, Czechs and other Eastern Europeans after the Berlin Wall fell and secret police files were opened, exposing betrayals by friends and loved ones.
Nothing in Mississippi’s recent history may have prepared people in this corner of the Deep South for what the commission’s files could contain.
Other Southern states also established Sovereignty Commissions, but none was as notorious as Mississippi’s, which was created by the state Legislature in 1956 and not disbanded until 1977. In its heyday, the commission organized the national campaign against passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Citizens earned $100 to $150 for a tip. Newspaper editors exchanged information for paid subscriptions. Sometimes, civil rights workers reported on each other.
“The agency spied on people, played dirty tricks on them and tried to do anything it could to disrupt the civil rights movement,” said Ingebretsen. “They notified employers if someone was involved in a demonstration, they spread false rumors and threatened people. They were like the Keystone Kops of intelligence, but they caused a lot of harm.”
The Sovereignty Commission kept files on 250 organizations and more than 10,000 people throughout the United States. The state of Mississippi, which originally wanted to destroy the files, fought to keep them sealed until 2027 to protect the privacy of those involved. In 1996, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to block the opening.
Between the mid-1950s and the 1970s, hundreds of terrorist acts were committed against civil rights workers throughout the South as white supremacists fought to retain power. Nowhere were the attacks more numerous than in Mississippi, where 15 murder cases still are unresolved, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center in Birmingham, Ala.
Buried within the 132,000 pages of the Sovereignty Commission files, kept for two decades in a locked room in the basement of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History in Jackson, prosecutors hope to uncover information that could help them solve the murder of Dahmer and other violent acts in the state during the tumultuous 1960s. Dahmer is listed more than 80 times among the 85,000 names of victims and informants included in the files, according to the ACLU.
Ellie Dahmer, 72, is certain that her husband, a former president of the local NAACP, was closely monitored. A successful businessman and commercial farmer, Dahmer owned a 200-acre farm, another 300 acres of cotton and a sawmill. That, she said, coupled with his civil rights work, led to their house being set afire.
When the killers came that January night in 1966, the Dahmers were caught off guard. The Klan’s activities had seemed to quell in recent weeks. There had been no threatening phone calls, no signs posted on trees, no suspicious cars cruising along the stark road leading to the Dahmers’ farmhouse.
Shortly before 2 a.m., as the family slept, two carloads of Klansmen arrived and firebombed their home. On the way, the nightriders had stopped up the road and torched the family’s small store, where Dahmer’s 80-year-old aunt resided upstairs. Dahmer, 57, died of burns and smoke inhalation later that day in a Hattiesburg hospital. Ellie Dahmer, the three children who were home and Aunt Rainey escaped with minor injuries.
Ellie Dahmer recalls the night as vividly as she did 32 years ago.
“I looked in the living room and it was burning,” she said recently, sitting in the dining room of the large brick house the Chamber of Commerce helped her rebuild. “Vernon jumped up and grabbed a gun and kept yelling to me, `Jewell, (her middle name) get the children out while I hold them off.’ They were shooting at us, and he was shooting back through the doors and windows. He sacrificed his life so that we could get out.
“The pain won’t go away,” she said, fighting back tears. “I still wake up at night hearing my daughter scream. I still wake up at night seeing the fire.”
A retired schoolteacher who believes she was blacklisted in Hattiesburg and Forrest County until her husband’s death, Ellie Dahmer has chosen not to dwell on the fact that people she trusted may have betrayed her family. She and her six children have instead spent the last six years seeking justice against the man suspected of ordering the murder–Sam Bowers Jr., 73, the Klan’s notorious former imperial wizard. Bowers’ murder trial in 1968 ended in a mistrial. He was retried twice, both ending with hung juries.
Eighteen men eventually were indicted on federal or state charges in connection with Dahmer’s murder, but only eight were tried. Of those, four were convicted and one pleaded guilty. Three ended in mistrials. At the family’s urging, Forrest County prosecutors reopened the case in 1991.
The Dahmer family hopes the unsealing of the Sovereignty Commission files finally can help convict Bowers, who authorities contend not only masterminded the Dahmer attack, but numerous other assassinations, firebombings and violent acts in Mississippi in the 1960s.
“We have never sought revenge. We want justice,” said Vernon Dahmer Jr., 68, Ellie’s stepson. “After this trial, if we are satisfied that a good effort was made by investigators, we will go away. We will take whatever the decision is and put some closure to this.”
A year after the Dahmer murder, Bowers and six other Klansmen were convicted on federal conspiracy charges for killing three civil rights workers in 1964. He spent 6 years in prison during the 1970s.
Bowers did not return messages left on the answering machine at his video game and vending machine business, Sambo Amusement, located in a black community in Laurel outside of Hattiesburg, a two-hour drive from Jackson. For reasons no one can explain, Bowers has lived for years in a rundown shack in the heart of this poor black neighborhood, authorities said.
Information obtained from a small section of the Sovereignty Commission files kept at the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg helped prosecutors convict white supremacist Byron De La Beckwith in 1994 of the 1963 murder of Mississippi civil rights activist Medgar Evers. The files revealed that the commission may have screened jurors in De La Beckwith’s 1964 mistrials in which the juries deadlocked.
Recently a former Klansman, who was the state’s key witnesses in Bowers’ earlier trials, turned himself in after authorities issued warrants for his arrest. Billy Roy Pitts, 53, who pleaded guilty to murder in the Dahmer case, reportedly never served the life sentence imposed by the state. He was released from prison in 1971 after serving 4 years of his federal sentence on conspiracy charges and was never returned to Mississippi to serve his life sentence for murder.
But without original court transcripts, which prosecutors had in the De La Beckwith trial, old testimony cannot be recounted. Much of the old evidence has been lost, and unless there is new evidence or witnesses, it is unlikely the Dahmer case can be retried.
As Mississippi residents brace for the unsealing of the Sovereignty Commission files, a spokesman for Gov. Kirk Fordice said the governor had no comment.
But in the rest of the state, people cannot say enough about one of the most remarkable events in the recent history of Mississippi.
“There will be a lot of people who are extremely upset by this and are putting pressure on anyone they can to keep these files shut. But truth begins the healing process,” said Rev. Kenneth Fairley, a Hattiesburg minister.
“We feel for Mrs. Dahmer because she is deeply hurt. She’s constantly shaking hands and hugging people that she knows betrayed them.”
