Word: dahmer
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...Vernon Dahmer stood out from his neighbors of both races. The son of a mulatto mother and a white father, he was light-skinned enough to eat at whites-only restaurants. But Dahmer chose to live as a black man. He inherited land and in time farmed 400 acres; he also ran a sawmill and grocery store. His success brought respect from some whites, including prominent businessmen, and resentment from others...
Sitting now at her dining table, reaching back three decades, Ellie Dahmer can speak calmly of the night the Ku Klux Klan came to kill her husband. Two cars of white-hooded men burst out of the darkness on Jan. 10, 1966, firing guns and hurling flaming jugs of gasoline at her house in Hattiesburg, Miss. "It happened so fast," Ellie recalled, that she turned to her husband Vernon and said, "I believe they've got us this time." He held off the attackers with a shotgun while she led their children out the back. Everyone escaped, but Vernon...
...private pain of the Dahmer (pronounced DAY-mer) family was also a national tragedy. Vernon, a prosperous businessman, headed the Hattiesburg branch of the N.A.A.C.P., so the Klan targeted him with a "No. 3" and a "No. 4": shorthand for arson and murder. At his funeral, thousands of admirers poured into Shady Grove Baptist Church. President Johnson sent Ellie Dahmer a telegram mourning her husband and calling for a federal investigation...
Bowers was tried twice by the state in the 1960s for Dahmer's murder, but by votes of 11 to 1 and 10 to 2 to convict, juries failed to reach the unanimous verdict required to send him to jail. A federal trial also ended in deadlock. Prosecutors say they suspected witness tampering by the Klan but couldn't prove it. Bowers, now 73, is a free man living in Laurel, just 30 miles up the interstate from the Dahmer family...
...similar case, Byron de la Beckwith had escaped punishment for the 1963 murder of civil rights icon Medgar Evers. But he was finally convicted in 1994 after leaked documents revealed that the commission may have blocked civil rights sympathizers from sitting on his jury. Dahmer's family, which has battled for years to bring all his killers to justice, hopes that the records released last week will contain evidence that could lead to Bowers' retrial...