Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, February 7, 1994 TAG: 9402070036
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: JACKSON, MISS. LENGTH: Medium
Dahmer's father was also a victim of a racially motivated murder in the 1960s, and the son - now a Baton Rouge, La., businessman - is among those who hope that the conviction of Evers' killer will encourage the reopening of other, similar cases.
"Maybe this Evers case is an indication that the citizens of Mississippi are willing to deal with these cases the way it should have been done 25 or 30 years ago," Dahmer said.
Some civil rights leaders expressed similar hopes, some comparing the long-dormant race killings in the South to the deeds of Nazi war criminals. The statute of limitations, they say, will never run out.
"There ought to be no refuge in space or time," said Circuit Judge D'Army Bailey of Memphis, Tenn., founder of the National Civil Rights Museum. He spoke one day last week while attending the trial of Evers' killer.
Byron De La Beckwith, an unreconstructed segregationist and steadfast racist, was convicted Saturday of murdering Evers, the Mississippi field secretary for the NAACP, in 1963.
Vernon Dahmer, a cotton grower and grocery store owner in Hattiesburg, was active in encouraging blacks to register to vote, and for that the Ku Klux Klan firebombed his home on Jan. 10, 1966. Dahmer died.
Thirteen people were charged in the crime, but only six went to trial. Of those, four Klansmen were convicted and sentenced to prison. But the alleged mastermind, Sam Bowers, then Imperial Wizard of the Klan, was tried twice for murder and both times the juries deadlocked 11-1 for conviction.
Bowers did serve a prison term in a separate case of three slain civil rights activists that inspired the film "Mississippi Burning."
by CNB