When Evil Lived in Laurel
The "White Knights" and the Murder of Vernon Dahmer
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When Evil Lived in Laurel
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Narrated by:
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Stephen Graybill
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Written by:
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Curtis Wilkie
About this listen
One of NPR's Best Books of the Year
A 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’ 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 recreate 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.
©2021 Curtis Wilkie (P)2021 Random House AudioWhat the critics say
"Vivid.... [N]ow the virulent white supremacy that once coursed through Laurel has reached into the center of our embattled democracy. Maybe that evil will also be brought down and peace built on its ruins. Or maybe our current crisis should force us to see that the evil of the Knights had never really been broken at all." (Kevin Boyle, Washington Post)
"When Evil Lived in Laurel is set during the civil rights movement of the 1960s, but its concerns could not be more central to our current moment: voting rights, white supremacist terror, and the ground-level mechanisms of white radicalization. With meticulous research and all the tools of a novelist, Curtis Wilkie chronicles the Klan-ordered murder of activist Vernon Dahmer, and Tom Landrum’s infiltration of the White Knights. Read this book if you want to understand how racist words and ideas turn into violent, murderous action." (Patrick Phillips, author of Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America)
"I’m a longtime admirer of Curtis Wilkie’s deep and insightful work, and his chilling journey through the KKK’s murder of Vernon Dahmer will stay with you long after you close this book. This kind of violence is where tacit encouragement of extremists leads, and Wilkie shows you how." (Greg Iles, New York Times best-selling author of Natchez Burning)