“If you don’t vote, you don’t count” was something that Mississippi civil rights advocate Vernon Dahmer Sr. often said.
Dahmer was a successful farmer and businessman. He might have passed for white but proudly identified as Black. He was active in the local and state NAACP but was also known for supporting and teaching workers of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) such as Hollis Watkins, Joyce and Dorie Ladner. He made the statement, “If you don’t vote, you don’t count,” to encourage Black residents of Forrest County, Mississippi, to get registered and use their vote.
Forrest County, named for Tennessee’s own Nathan Bedford Forrest, a founder of the Ku Klux Klan, was noted for its hostility to the Black vote. In 1961, well before the Voting Rights Act was proposed or passed, the situation there was so bad that the U.S. Department of Justice filed and won a voting rights case against Forrest County…