When Evil Lived in Laurel: The "White Knights" and the Murder of Vernon Dahmer

By early 1966, the civil rights work of Vernon Dahmer, head of the Forrest County chapter of the NAACP and a dedicated advocate for voter registration, was well-known in Mississippi. This put him in the crosshairs of the White Knights, one of the most violent sects of the KKK in the South—which carried out his murder in a raid that burned down his home and store.

A riveting account of the incident and its aftermath, When Evil Lived in Laurel is a tale of obsession, in which the infamous Imperial Wizard Sam Bowers became so fixated on killing Dahmer that the bungled attack ultimately led to Bowers’s downfall and the destruction of his virulently racist organization. Drawing on the diary of a former Klan infiltrator who risked his life to help break the White Knights, veteran journalist Curtis Wilkie brings fresh light to this chapter in the history of civil rights in the South.