Honoring the True Heroes of the Civil Rights Movement

BOOK REVIEW: From 2003 to 2006, I was a law professor at the University of Mississippi, teaching, among other things, civil rights. I am confident I learned every bit as much as I was able to teach, likely a great deal more. I was in the sweltering summertime heat of Philadelphia, Miss. when Edgar Ray Killen was convicted - finally - by a jury of his peers for his role in the 1960s murder of Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman. To me, this incident encapsulated what I had learned and felt about Mississippi. As the epicenter of American apartheid, Mississippi had a sad and ugly past, and as that famous Mississippian William Faulkner famously observed: "The past isn't dead. It isn't even past." Yet I also could not believe how far the state had come in a relatively short time. Signs of progress were unmistakable: my black and white students in Mississippi had grown up with, and understood each other better, than anywhere else I have ever lived. To me, this was a testament to both the power of law and people's ability to change. It is too easy for people who have never lived in the South to look down on it; like all things, the truth is far more complicated.

These themes present themselves in Gordon Martin's book "Count Them One by One: Black Mississippians Fighting for the Right to Vote" (University Press of Mississippi 2010). Martin, most recently a state judge in Massachusetts, was a young lawyer in the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice who brought the case of United States v. Theron Lynd, a civil rights trial in Mississippi that helped bring about the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. It is a thoughtful work that simultaneously demonstrates the capacity of people and society to change. But it also pulls no punches in portraying how difficult this actually is, and how hard (yet possible) it is for law to lead people in the right direction.

Martin opens his book by illustrating the situation in Forrest County in the early 1950s. This was a time, in Martin's words, of "state-financed investigators, spies, and informers intimidating and punishing any black citizens in the state bold enough to assert their rights, even by trumping up false charges and applying outrageous prison sentences for them." Luther Cox, the Circuit Clerk and Registrar of Voters, routinely asked would-be black registrants "How many bubbles are in a bar of soap?" and denied their applications when they did not answer to his satisfaction. After one futile attempt at a lawsuit, nine black leaders in Forrest County prepared affidavits about their experiences, which were sent to Thurgood Marshall at the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. These affidavits (and more that followed) ultimately worked their way to the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, which at the time was in its infancy.

This set a chain of events in motion, which ultimately led to a lawsuit brought by the Department of Justice against Theron Lynd, Cox's successor as Registrar of Voters. This resulted in the first conviction of a southern registrar for contempt of court. This case served as a model for others, and was part of an overall movement toward the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Martin tells this story by offering the twin perspectives of an active participant in the trial, as well as a historian who returns many years later to interview key participants.

Among those who write about this era, one tendency is to glorify the lawyers who conceived integration campaigns. More recently, scholars have reversed this, and questioned whether this elite-led lawyer driven strategy is an accurate depiction of history. Some accounts question whether formal law can ever truly bring social change. Refreshingly, Martin's book does none of these. Rather, in looking at the struggle of blacks to vote, it presents the main protagonists as the 16 black witnesses who fought for their right to this important civil right by testifying at trial. Ultimately, it was their efforts that tipped the balance. The true stories belong to Vernon Dahmer, a civil rights advocate who eventually got killed for his advocacy; Jesse Stegall, the first witness in the case, and the Rev. Wendell Phillips Taylor, who had two degrees from Columbia but was still denied the right to vote. Martin's book ably details their struggles and triumphs in admirable detail. Without them, the lawyers in Lynd would have no case.