When Evil Lived in Laurel: The "White Knights" and the Murder of Vernon Dahmer
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4.1 • 7 Ratings
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
One of NPR's Best Books of the Year
Finalist for the 2022 Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime
The inside story of how a courageous FBI informant helped to bring down the KKK organization responsible for a brutal civil rights–era killing.
By early 1966, the work of Vernon Dahmer was well known in south Mississippi. A light-skinned Black man, he was a farmer, grocery store owner, and two-time president of the Forrest County chapter of the NAACP. He and Medgar Evers founded a youth NAACP chapter in Hattiesburg, and for years after Evers’s assassination Dahmer was the chief advocate for voting rights in a county where Black registration was shamelessly suppressed. This put Dahmer in the crosshairs of the White Knights, with headquarters in nearby Laurel. Already known as one of the most violent sects of the KKK in the South, the group carried out his murder in a raid that burned down his home and store.
A year before, Tom Landrum, a young, unassuming member of a family with deep Mississippi roots, joined the Klan to become an FBI informant. He penetrated the White Knights’ secret circles, recording almost daily journal entries. He risked his life, and the safety of his young family, to chronicle extensively the clandestine activities of the Klan. Veteran journalist Curtis Wilkie draws on his exclusive access to Landrum’s journals to re-create these events—the conversations, the incendiary nighttime meetings, the plans leading up to Dahmer’s murder and its erratic execution—culminating in the conviction and imprisonment of many of those responsible for Dahmer’s death.
In riveting detail, When Evil Lived in Laurel plumbs the nature and harrowing consequences of institutional racism, and brings fresh light to this chapter in the history of civil rights in the South—one with urgent implications for today.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist Wilkie (The Fall of the House of Zeus) delivers a tension-filled account of an FBI informant's efforts to bring a notoriously violent chapter of the Ku Klux Klan to justice in the 1960s. Wilkie traces Tom Landrum's decision to infiltrate the White Knights in his hometown of Laurel, Miss., back to his disgust over seeing how enthusiastically a local crowd cheered for the execution of a Black prisoner in 1951. Fourteen years later, Landrum, after serving in the U.S. Air Force, playing college football, and returning home to become a teacher and youth court counselor, was recruited by an FBI agent to go undercover with the White Knights. In 1966, Vernon Dahmer, a grocery store owner and founder of a local NAACP chapter who was leading a campaign to register Black voters, was killed when the White Knights firebombed his house. Landrum's meticulous note-taking and insights into the inner workings of the White Knights helped bring some of those responsible for Dahmer's murder to justice, though imperial wizard Sam Bowers wasn't convicted for ordering the killing until 1998. Drawing on Landrum's contemporaneous journals, FBI reports, and interviews with Landrum and his wife, Wilkie vividly conveys the turmoil of the era and the high stakes of the mission. This real-life thriller is a worthy tribute to the courage of those who put everything on the line for civil rights.
Customer Reviews
Challenging
The book chronicles a time we Mississippians are not proud of and was a story that should be told.
It is full of facts but there is a lot of repetition and at least for me it was difficult to follow the many characters
and events. Obviously very well researched.