Count Them One by One

Black Mississippians Fighting for the Right to Vote

Gordon A. Martin Jr.

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN:
  9781604737899
• eBook ISBN:
  9781604737905
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African American History
• Index: History

Forrest County, Mississippi, became a focal point of the civil rights movement when, in 1961, the United States Justice Department filed a lawsuit against its voting registrar Theron Lynd. While thirty percent of the county's residents were Black, only twelve Black people were on its voting rolls. United States v. Lynd was the first trial that resulted in the conviction of a Southern registrar for contempt of court. The case served as a model for other challenges to voter discrimination in the South and was an important influence in shaping the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Count Them One by One is a comprehensive account of the groundbreaking case written by one of the Justice Department's trial attorneys. Gordon A. Martin, Jr., then a newly minted lawyer, traveled to Hattiesburg from Washington DC to help shape the federal case against Lynd. He met with and prepared the government's sixteen Black witnesses who had been refused registration, found white witnesses, and was one of the lawyers during the trial. Decades later, Martin returned to Mississippi and interviewed the still-living witnesses, their children, and friends. Martin intertwines these current reflections with a commentary about the case itself. The result is an impassioned, cogent fusion of reportage, oral history, and memoir about a trial that fundamentally reshaped liberty and the South.

Table of contents

• CONTENTS
• PREFACE
• PROLOGUE: In the Office of Registrar Luther Cox: “How Many Bubbles in a Bar of Soap?”
• 1. Race-Haunted Mississippi
• 2. A Civil Rights Division in Justice
• 3. Civil Rights and the 1960 Campaign
• 4. Theron Lynd and the End of an Era
• 5. Preparing for Trial
• 6. The New Judge in the Southern District of Mississippi
• 7. The First Witness, Jesse Stegall
• 8. For the Defendants
• 9. The Burgers of Hattiesburg
• 10. The Other Young Turks
• 11. Eloise Hopson: “I’d Like to See Them Make Me Change Anything I Want to Say”
• 12. Hercules and Its Inside Agitator, Huck Dunagin
• 13. Huck’s Men: The Black Workers at Hercules
• 14. B.F. Bourn, Storekeeper and Freedom Fighter
• 15. The Reverends James C. Chandler and Wayne Kelly Pittman
• 16. The Reverend Wendell Phillips Taylor
• 17. The Leader, Vernon Dahmer
• 18. The White Witnesses and the Women Who Registered Them
• 19. “Negro or White Didn’t Have a Thing in the World to Do with It”: Theron Lynd Takes the Stand
• 20. Ike’s Fifth Circuit: Getting On with the Job at Hand
• 21. After the Trial
• 22. Mississippi Today
• EPILOGUE
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX