Ex-Klan Leader’s 5th Trial Begins for 1966 Murder

HATTIESBURG, Miss. —  More than three decades after the firebombing death of civil rights activist Vernon Dahmer, the man accused of being the mastermind of the attack faced his fifth trial Monday.

Attorneys at the Forrest County Courthouse began seating a panel for the murder and arson trial of former Ku Klux Klan Imperial Wizard Sam Bowers.

Dist. Atty. Lindsay Carter, as he walked to the courthouse Monday, said prosecutors want to “put some closure into this matter for the Dahmer family, and they deserve that. It has been going on for a long time. It’s time for justice to be done.”

Bowers, a 73-year-old Laurel businessman, is accused of helping plan and carry out the Jan. 10, 1966, attack on Dahmer’s home and grocery in Hattiesburg.

Four klansmen were convicted in connection with Dahmer’s murder, but Bowers, the Klan leader who was identified as ordering the firebombing, was never convicted.

Bowers was tried by three state juries and one federal jury in the late 1960s, but each one deadlocked. He served six years in prison for federal convictions in another notorious case, the 1964 deaths of civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner in Philadelphia, Miss.

Authorities, citing new evidence that they refused to characterize, arrested Bowers in May along with Charles Noble and former klansman Deavours Nix. Noble is also charged with murder and arson and Nix is charged with arson. Trial dates for the pair have not been set. All three say they are innocent.

This is the first attempt to revive a Mississippi civil rights case since a jury in 1994 convicted white supremacist Byron De La Beckwith in the 1963 murder of civil rights leader Medgar Evers.

Two carloads of klansmen bombed the Dahmer family home and nearby store in 1966. Dahmer returned gunfire through his front door while his wife and children escaped through a back window, but he died several hours later.

The White Knights were linked to a number of firebombings, murders and harassment of civil rights leaders in Mississippi.