Count Them One by One: Black Mississippians Fighting for the Right to Vote (Margaret Walker Alexander Series in African American Studies)

299 Pages·2010·2.76 MB·English

by  Gordon A. Martin Jr.

Count Them One by One
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Count Them
One by One
ddd
Black Mississippians Fighting for the Right to Vote
Gordon A. Martin, Jr.
university press of mississippi • jackson
Margaret Walker Alexander Series in African American Studies
www.upress.state.ms.us
The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the Association
of American University Presses.
Copyright © 2010 by Gordon A. Martin, Jr.
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
First printing 2010
∞
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Martin, Gordon A.
Count them one by one : Black Mississippians fighting for the right to vote /
Gordon A. Martin.
p. cm. — (Margaret Walker Alexander series in African American studies)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-60473-789-9 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-60473-790-5 (ebook)
1. African Americans—Suffrage—Mississippi—History. 2. Suffrage—
Mississippi—History. I. Title.
JK1929.M7M37 2010
324.6’2089960730762—dc22 2010013096
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available
For my daughter, Constance, who as a baby moved to Washington with
Stephanie and me and who never lost interest in this book
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COnTenTs
preface ix
prologue In the Office of Registrar Luther Cox
“How Many Bubbles in a Bar of Soap?” 3
1. Race-Haunted Mississippi 6
2. A Civil Rights Division in Justice 19
3. Civil Rights and the 1960 Campaign 30
4. Theron Lynd and the End of an Era 36
5. Preparing for Trial 39
6. The New Judge in the Southern District of Mississippi 53
7. The First Witness, Jesse Stegall 63
8. For the Defendants
Dugas Shands and M. M. Roberts 77
9. The Burgers of Hattiesburg 86
10.The Other Young Turks
David Roberson and Chuck Lewis 94
11. Eloise Hopson
“I’d Like to See Them Make Me Change Anything I Want to Say” 109
12. Hercules and Its Inside Agitator, Huck Dunagin 116
13. Huck’s Men
The Black Workers at Hercules 130
14. B. F. Bourn, Storekeeper and Freedom Fighter 154
15. The Reverends James C. Chandler and Wayne Kelly Pittman 157
Contents
16. The Reverend Wendell Phillips Taylor 167
17. The Leader, Vernon Dahmer 176
18. The White Witnesses and the Women Who Registered Them 179
19. “Negro or White Didn’t Have a Thing in the World to Do with It”
Theron Lynd Takes the Stand 190

20. Ike’s Fifth Circuit
Getting On with the Job at Hand 199

21. After the Trial 213
22. Mississippi Today 231
epilogue 234
acknowledgments 236
notes 238
bibliography 260
index 265
- viii -
PrefaCe
On January 20, 2009, Barack Obama was inaugurated as President of the
United States, the first African American to win that office. How did it
happen? It can’t be traced to his stirring announcement of candidacy in
Springfield, Illinois, two years earlier, or even to his memorable keynote ad-
dress in Boston at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. Certainly his
campaign organization was superb. But what gave any African American
the opportunity to put together such a broad-based popular coalition?
The antecedents of his victory go back to the Civil War and its after-
math. The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the Con-
stitution, which were ratified in the flush of Reconstruction between 1865
and 1870, were the first amendments to give our federal government new
powers.1 The Thirteenth abolished slavery and involuntary servitude. Due
process and equal protection were guaranteed to all by the Fourteenth. The
language of the Fifteenth could not have been clearer:
1. The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or
abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color,
or previous condition of servitude.
2. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate
legislation.
The United States Supreme Court was in accord in 1886, characterizing
the right to vote as a fundamental right because it was “preservative of
all rights.”2 It just was not enforced for African Americans in the South
once Reconstruction ended. It was not until 1957 that enforcement legisla-
tion was passed,3 and neither that statute nor follow-up legislation in 1960,
though path- breaking, was sufficient.
What completed the job was the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the greatest
civil rights legislation since Reconstruction.4 This is the story of the people
involved in United States v. Theron Lynd, a civil rights trial in Mississippi
- ix -