I broke my toe last week. I was shuffling, sleep-fogged, in a dark, unfamiliar
hotel room when I cracked my little toe on a piece of furniture. It hurt
like hell, but it made a civil rights activist's description of a beating
the next day all the more vivid. If stubbing a toe hurt like that, I
wondered, what would it be like to endure a beating with a baseball bat?
As I collect stories for our television documentary, it's the violent
episodes that stand out. Two days ago I talked with Ellie Dahmer, a
woman who lost her husband Vernon on January 10, 1966, when a Klan
mob firebombed her house in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. Mrs. Dahmer was
still angry. I couldn't blame her. And as she described that awful
night, I began to wonder about the men who had done this. What could
possibly motivate anyone to pull up to a house and try to annihilate
an entire family?
It's easy to put those men in a box, declare them monsters, and forget
about them. But is it that simple? They are, after all, ultimately
human--they have mothers, they live and breathe on this earth just
as you and I and their victims once did. Those men--like it or not--are
us.
As we rolled away from Mississippi that evening, I continued to think
about these men. I made the off-handed remark that it would be interesting
to talk to one of them. Little did I know that 36 hours later I would
have the opportunity to meet one of them.
It began with a phone call. Hannah, a member of our production team,
had spoken earlier with the prosecutor for the Dahmer case, who had
given her a contact number for a man who had been part of the mob that
night. After testifying against the Klan, he had been on the run for
much of his life. Hannah phoned his house. The voice on the other end
of the line told her that he had moved to Texas. Our hopes were dashed--until
she received a call from the same number hours later. It was the ex-Klansman,
explaining that he had to make sure it was safe to talk to us before
taking the call. He agreed to an interview the next day at our site
at the capitol building in Baton Rouge.
I first spotted him through the doors of the capitol annex building,
slowly making his way up the steps. I knew immediately who he was.
He looked like he had been carrying the weight of the world on his
shoulders. I shook his hand, remembering the feeling of shaking another:
the slightly disfigured hand of Bettie Dahmer, who as a 10-year-old
barely survived the onslaught he had brought on 40 years ago.
Fighting the emphysema-induced rasp that built up in his throat,
he spoke earnestly in front of the camera, telling me his hatred for
black people hadnft come from his parents (his father was a pastor
who supported integration) but had been picked up from his peers in
the rural Mississippi town where he grew up.
He was elusive when explaining why he joined the Klan, only offering
up that as a young man, he was drawn to the excitement of it all. He
told me he began to have doubts one night when he heard the screams
of his victims coming from a burning house. But he stayed with the
Klan, believing that he would be killed if he left.
His doubts still lingered when the grand imperial wizard ordered
him to burn the Dahmers' house down. He said the screams he heard that
night have remained with him ever since.
The interview took a turn when the ex-Klansman described what he
believed was the greatest turning point in his life. It sounded like
a story out of the Bible. After many years had passed, one of Dahmerfs
sons came to his jail cell, looked him in the eye, and forgave him.
This man, fighting back the tears as he sat in the interview chair,
told me that this act of forgiveness had given him a new life.
When he visited this man who tried to wipe out his family, Vernon
Dahmer Jr. had the insight and strength to shove his anger aside and
see who stood before him: not a monster, but another human being, another
man, just like him.
