Word: forrestic
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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This was not, however, a case where local lawmen winked and looked the other way. Forrest County, named after Nathan Bedford Forrest, the Confederate general and patron saint of the K.K.K., charged 14 Klansmen with murder and arson. Five were convicted or pleaded guilty and received life sentences. But not Sam Bowers, the Klan's Imperial Wizard for Mississippi, whom prosecutors accused of ordering and planning the murder--and whom Klan experts describe as the most dangerous man ever to don a white hood...
What got Dahmer killed, though, was helping blacks register to vote at a time when that was perilous work. In 1960 fewer than 100 of Forrest County's 8,000 voting-age blacks were registered. Dahmer would drive neighbors to the courthouse and watch in frustration as the white registrar found reasons to turn them away. Eventually, Dahmer got the sheriff to sign out to him a poll-tax receipt book, and Dahmer announced over the radio that blacks could register at his grocery. "I said, 'I wouldn't do this if I were you,'" recalls J.C. Fairley, a friend...
Lawrence Arrington, the lawyer who defended Bowers in the previous Dahmer trials, hopes to do so again. He is 81 and lives in a Hattiesburg retirement home, but the former Forrest County D.A. is confident that he could make all the difference. "If I'm in the case, there's a 2-to-1 chance of winning," he says. "Without me, it's about even...
...thing that is different, as Arrington indicated, is black voter registration--a gateway to jury service. Up from fewer than 100 in 1960, black voters today number more than 18,000 in Forrest County--about 30% of the total. The attacks by Bowers and other Klansmen on civil rights workers only served to accelerate their efforts to win full participation for blacks in public life. In that sense, whatever happens in court to Sam Bowers, he and his kind have already lost the great struggle of their lives. Vernon Dahmer...
Ping-pong: Pool has Fast Eddie Felson; ping-pong has Forrest Gump...