Vernon Ferdinand Dahmer Sr. (March 10, 1908 – January 10, 1966) was an American civil rights movement leader and president of the Forrest County chapter of the NAACP in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. He was murdered by the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan for his work on recruiting Black Americans to vote.
Early life and family
Vernon Dahmer was born on March 10, 1908, in the Kelly Settlement, Forrest County, Mississippi to Ellen Louvenia (née Kelly) and George Washington Dahmer. George Dahmer, whose parents were German immigrants from Hesse-Darmstadt, was known as an honest, hardworking farmer of integrity. Vernon's mother Ellen was of mixed race: Her father, Warren Kelly, was of mixed ancestry, the son of mulatto Green H. Kelly, ultimately descended from John Kelly, a white settler; and her mother, Henrietta (McComb), was biracial, born out of wedlock to a white slave owner and one of his slaves and given to be raised by a black family, the McCombs. His cousin, Iola Williams, became the first African-American member of the San Jose, California, City Council in 1979.
Dahmer attended Bay Spring High School until the tenth grade; he failed to graduate. He was light-skinned enough to pass as a white man, but he chose to forgo the privileges of living as a white man and as a result, he faced the daily challenges of being a black man in Mississippi during that time.
Dahmer was married three times. His first wife was Warnie Laura Mott (1910–1975); their marriage of seven years ended in divorce in 1935. In 1938, Dahmer remarried; this time to a woman named Ora Lee Smith (1919–1950). Unfortunately, Ora died after a long illness in 1950. Ellie Jewel Davis (born June 27, 1925) was his third and final wife; she was a teacher from Rose Hill, Mississippi, and had recently moved to Forrest County. The couple met after working on the school board together and married in March 1952. The couple had two children together, Dennis and Bettie, to add to the six children Dahmer had with his first two wives (three children from each marriage), making a total of seven boys and one girl. The family and their home was located north of Forrest County and was part of the Kelly Settlement, close to the Jones County border; the settlement (named for Dahmer's maternal grandfather). Ellie Dahmer taught for many years in Richton, Mississippi and retired in 1987 from the Forrest County school system.
Dahmer was a member of Shady Grove Baptist Church where he served as a music director and Sunday School teacher. He was the owner of a grocery store, sawmill, planing mill, and also cotton farm. His main objective was to make a living for himself and to provide work for somebody else. He would hire local individuals from the community to work for him and did not discriminate between black or white.
Civil rights activism
During the civil rights movement, Dahmer served two terms as president of the Forrest County Chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and led voter registration drives in the 1960s. His wife Ellie said "He was a good progressive Christian man. He wasn't a mean, bitter Civil Rights worker, because he saw good in white as well as he did in black." As president of the Forrest County Chapter of the NAACP, he had personally asked the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) to send workers to help aid the voter registrations efforts being made by African Americans in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. SNCC had sent two workers, Curtis Hayes and Hollis Watkins, to Hattiesburg. The act of calling SNCC to help aid the efforts made by the NAACP would eventually cost him his NAACP presidency.
In 1949, Dahmer was in the process of making out his new registration card when Luther Cox denied his attempts to re-register. Luther Cox was the authority figure in charge of registered voters in Forrest County and was a white segregationist. Cox would only authorize a registration of a black person if they could answer the question "How many bubbles are in a bar of soap?" In 1950, fifteen leaders of Forrest County's black community, including Dahmer, filed a lawsuit against Cox for his administration of the voting laws; preliminary injunction. Twelve years later, in March 1962, the preliminary injunction was in motion of being viewed by the court of law. Dahmer had testified in court against Luther Cox and his testimony helped demonstrate the pattern of discrimination in the county.