CIVIL RIGHTS : New Facts on ’66 Slaying of Rights Leader Reach Light of Day : FBI releases sealed documents on unsolved murder of Vernon Dahmer. Family has been seeking retrial of klansmen who escaped conviction.

On the June night in 1963 that Medgar Evers was killed, Vernon Dahmer sat up all night in his home 85 miles away, waiting. They took Medgar. Maybe they would come for him next.

The civil rights leader need not have worried that night. Although Dahmer and his family long endured threats and broken windows, another three years passed before the nightriders decided it was his time. Ku Klux Klansmen firebombed his house on Jan. 9, 1966. Dahmer, 57, died of seared lungs and smoke inhalation he suffered while returning their gunfire, allowing his family to escape.

Now, almost 30 years after his murder, Dahmer’s family is trying to reopen the case. Emboldened by the successful retrial and conviction last year of Evers’ killer, they want to retry klansmen who escaped conviction either because charges were dropped or because all-white juries could not decide on a verdict.

Dahmer’s murder was part of a wave of racist violence against civil rights activists across the South. The perpetrators were terrorists of a different sort than those whose bombing of an Oklahoma building last week has so gripped the nation. Then, again, maybe not.

A definitive link has yet to be established between last week’s bombing and the “Turner Diaries,” the racist novel that depicts an almost identical bombing and which has become the blueprint for revolution used by some far-right extremist groups. But the line between the bombing and the Southern reign of terror of the 1960s--with its bombings, torchings and shootings, sometimes of innocent children--is plain to see.

“It just shows that the same hate that killed my daddy is still alive,” said Vernon Dahmer Jr.

The Rev. Kenneth Fairley, who heads a group of community leaders who support the Dahmers, shared the sentiment. “My hope is that the people of Oklahoma won’t have to wait 30 years before justice is done,” he said.

As the search for the Oklahoma bombers continues, the FBI on Tuesday released 40,000 pages of previously sealed documents from their investigation into Dahmer’s death 29 years ago. It caps a four-year push by the family to gain access to the files and advances their efforts to retry Sam Bowers, the former Ku Klux Klan imperial wizard who, according to court testimony, ordered the firebombing.

The Mississippi FBI office also said Tuesday that it would assist local authorities in pursuing the case and would help locate witnesses, including those who are in the witness protection program for their safety.

During the 14 years that passed between the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that outlawed school desegregation and the 1968 assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., at least 40 civil rights activists were killed by racist extremists, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. Churches were bombed. Cars were ambushed. Men were lynched, their bodies mutilated. In many cases the killers were never brought to justice.

Calling her husband “just a common man trying to get people the right to vote,” Ellie Dahmer, Dahmer’s widow, said of those years. “This was not a heroic thing. We weren’t brave. We were scared that what did happen would happen.”

For this reason, they took precautions. They kept loaded guns in every room of the house, she said. They slept in shifts so that they could not be taken totally unawares.

And Dahmer, a farmer and businessman, never stood for long near windows for fear snipers would pick him off. In the end, however, the precautions did not help.

Testimony in the murder trials pointed to Bowers, leader of the White Knights of Mississippi, as ordering the firebombing, but two all-white juries deadlocked.

Bowers allegedly had boasted that no white man could be convicted of killing a black person in Mississippi, but three klansmen were convicted in the Dahmer case. A fourth pleaded guilty. Charges against nine other men were dropped for lack of evidence. Never before had whites been convicted of killing a black person in the state.

Bowers headed the most violent klan group in Mississippi. It was involved in a rash of violence and killings, including the 1964 murder of three civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Miss., the case that inspired the movie “Mississippi Burning.”

The way that case was handled by local law enforcement was more typical of the era. State murder charges were never brought against any of the 19 men, including law enforcement officials, who the federal government said participated. A year after Dahmer’s death, Bowers and six other men were convicted on federal charges of violating the civil rights of the three murder victims. He served six years.

Bowers today lives in an old house with peeling paint and boarded-up windows in the middle of a black neighborhood in Laurel, Miss. He operates a business next door, the Sambo Amusement Co., although no sign designates it as such.

Some of his neighbors know who he is, but they don’t seem to care.

“I don’t know too much about what happened back then,” said the black woman who works at a convenience store across the street. “You never ever see him during the day. Later tonight you’ll see him drive up in an old, beat-up blue car and park it there behind the pickup truck and go inside.”

Bowers did not return telephone messages left on his answering machine.

While Ellie Dahmer and her children are optimistic that the FBI files will help in their efforts to bring Bowers to trial, some of their supporters are more skeptical. Fairley accused Forrest County Dist. Atty. Glenn White of foot-dragging.

He said his organization had located a number of witnesses willing to help in the case, including one man who claims to have participated in practice drills before the firebombing and who he says gave detailed descriptions of events leading up to it.

“I’m no investigator,” Fairley said, “but if we can come up with this kind of information you wonder what the prosecutors are doing. . . . It’s very evident that there are some people still in the area that do not want this to surface again. They want it to go away.”

White previously has said that a number of obstacles stood in the way of reopening the case. They included the lack of an investigator to handle the case and the loss of the original trial transcripts. Without the transcripts, he said securing the FBI documents was essential.

But Fairley criticized White for hiring an inexperienced investigator when the state allocated money to create a new position.

He also noted that it was his organization--not White--that successfully lobbied for the money and that it was the intervention of U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) and the Congressional Black Caucus that persuaded the FBI to release the files. The family had first requested them in 1991.

At a press conference Tuesday at FBI headquarters in Jackson, the state Capitol, White gave no timetable for reopening the case and said his decision would be made after perusing the documents. The inquiry will not focus on Bowers exclusively, he said, growing agitated at reporters for repeatedly asking questions about the klan leader.

“We’re looking at the whole picture,” he said.

When Dahmer was killed, Hattiesburg’s white community leaders reacted with outrage. Cynics allege this was in part because the firebombing was carried out by klan members from neighboring Jones County after local klansmen allegedly refused Bowers’ order to carry it out.

Not only did authorities actively pursue the case at the time, but the Chamber of Commerce raised funds to rebuild the Dahmer home.

After black leaders called for boycotts and picketing of local white-owned businesses, city and county officials began to reform hiring policies and ease segregation of public facilities.

Dissatisfied with the mixed verdicts on state charges, the U.S. Justice Department filed charges against 11 of the defendants for violating the 1965 Voting Rights Act. A federal jury acquitted three of the defendants and could reach no verdict for the remaining seven. After the trials, Ellie Dahmer tried to go on with her life.

“I had two small children I had to raise,” she said. In addition, she said: “You have to go back and look at the atmosphere in Mississippi at that time. We were lucky to have any of them go to trial.”