Dennis Dahmer was 12 years old in January 1966 when Klansmen stormed his family home and set it on fire, murdering his father, Vernon. He still remembers the shootout; he remembers watching his father die from smoke inhalation. The trauma lingers to this day, 60 years later.
Vernon Dahmer had been a fixture in the African American community near Hattiesburg, Mississippi. He ran a successful local grocery, and, after the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965, obtained the right to register voters and collect poll taxes, which were still in effect, at his store. Members of the local White Citizens’ Council started to appear at the family farm, warning his father to stop, Dahmer told TPM, but that didn’t deter him. He recorded a radio announcement in January 1966 offering to cover the cost of poll taxes for African Americans who couldn’t afford to pay. The KKK attacked the next day.
“He would always say to us, ‘do something, dammit,’” Dahmer recalled. “‘Don’t just stand there.’”
With all that in mind, Dennis Dahmer decided late last year to listen in to oral arguments in Callais v. Louisiana, the Supreme Court case that would ultimately gut the remnants of the Voting Rights Act. The law had provided a framework for protecting minority votes in the South for decades.
“It was apparent to me that they had already made up their mind — talking about the MAGA ones for sure,” he said. “They were just laying the groundwork to justify what they were going to do.”
The Callais decision last month threatens to bring the state of Black congressional representation in the South back to the 1960s. State legislatures across the Old Confederacy are gerrymandering away political maps that allowed Black communities a voice in local, state and federal politics, and provided a means for them to elect politicians of their choosing. The rapid democratic backsliding has prompted demonstrations at Selma, the site of key actions during the Civil Rights Movement, and disbelief among Democrats at the consequences.
But for Dahmer and other survivors of people who were maimed or murdered during the Civil Rights movement, it’s deeply personal. For these families, the Supreme Court’s decision in Callais represents a return to the 1960s that isn’t abstract, but very real. They remember learning that their relatives died, they remember death threats against them and other loved ones in the aftermath, they remember how the fear and bloodshed prompted President Lyndon B. Johnson to decide that the time had come to send a Voting Rights Act to Congress. In many of these cases, justice was limited, late, or non-existent: the perpetrators were acquitted, died before they were convicted, or were only held accountable after spending decades free.
Now comes a new form of injustice: the one lasting change to American democracy that their relatives’ deaths brought about has been undone.