Private: Count them One by One: Black Mississippians Fighting for the Right to Vote

By Gordon A. Martin Jr., a retired trial judge and an adjunct professor at New England School of Law. Martin will discuss his book, Count Them One by One: Black Mississippians Fighting for the Right to Vote, at a Civil Rights Movement Author Event in Washington, D.C. on April 28. Click here to learn more.

In 1962 in Forrest County, Mississippi, only 12 of the 7,500 adult black citizens had been permitted to register to vote. That year, I made my first trip to the Deep South as one of the trial lawyers in Robert Kennedy’s Civil Rights Division. I was less than two years out of law school. The Justice Department was about to try its first case against a Mississippi registrar of voters for discrimination against blacks. Together with my section chief, Bob Owen, I interviewed prospective witnesses, including factory workers, ministers, and teachers with master’s degrees, who had been ruled “not qualified” to vote by Forrest County Registrar Theron Lynd. 

The trial took place before Judge William Harold Cox, a longtime friend and supporter of then-Senate Judiciary Committee Chair James O. Eastland. Just eight months earlier, Cox had been appointed to the U. S. District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi by President Kennedy at Eastland’s insistence. Far from being impartial, Judge Cox showed repeated instances of his scorn for black people and his satisfaction with the status quo, both evident in the transcript of the trial. 

The opposing lawyers, DOJ’s John Doar, Lynd’s M.M. Roberts and Mississippi Assistant Attorney General Dugas Shands, were in many ways larger than life. We presented 16 courageous African American witnesses who had been rejected for registration and 16 contrasting white witnesses who had either been registered without being subjected to the literacy test or been given a brief easy section of the Mississippi Constitution to interpret. When Judge Cox granted a continuance to the defendants, refusing to enter an injunction after three days of testimony, Doar immediately appealed to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. Eisenhower appointees Tuttle, Brown and Wisdom, along with Truman appointee Rives, had changed the outlook of that court, which ruled against Lynd. It would be nice to say that resolved things, but Theron Lynd violated the order within days.

It took three more trials, two for contempt, to deal just with Forrest County. It became painfully clear that with 82 counties in Mississippi and 128 in Georgia, a county-by-county approach would not work in our lifetimes. The radical answer, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, abolished the scam of the discriminatory literacy test and authorized federal registrars. There was some resistance, but before the end of the decade the shame of the caste system in southern racial voting had ended.

I went home to practice law in Boston and ultimately became a judge, but I never forgot the witnesses in United States v. Lynd and the courage they showed in attempting to register and testifying about their rejection. I returned to Mississippi and renewed my acquaintance with them, and also talked with the relatives of those who had died, including Vernon Dahmer, who had been murdered by the White Knights of the Klan. For the first time, I met the white shop steward at the Hercules Powder plant, Huck Dunagin, who had stood behind the black workers who tried to vote, guaranteeing to them that their jobs would be safe.

In the Mississippi State Archives and the library of the University of Southern Mississippi, I found documents such as reports of the State Sovereignty Commission and incendiary letters from Roberts, which further illuminated the tensions in the society the Civil Rights Division lawyers confronted. Count Them One by One: Black Mississippians Fighting for the Right to Vote is the account of those 16 African American men and women who testified, of the trial that led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act, and of how Mississippi has changed.

We cannot be complacent about the access achieved then. The ballot must be intelligible to all, particularly new citizens. Voter ID laws such as those in Georgia and Indiana, and proposed in Wisconsin, must be scrutinized carefully. Felon disenfranchisement laws that are an impediment to meaningful re-entry to society should be eliminated. And each generation of new voters must recognize the efforts made by many of their forebears to be able to vote, and understand that their vote does count and may make a difference.

Civil rights, Democracy and Elections, Equality and Liberty, Racial Justice, Voting Rights