Vincent Dahmon

Vincent Dahmon, 65, of Natchez, was shot and killed by Ku Klux Klan members during the period of the 1966 “March Against Fear,” the roughly 220-mile walk from Memphis, Tennessee to Jackson, Mississippi that James Meredith began to encourage Black voter registration and that continued after he was shot and wounded on its second day. Dahmon's killing first came to the FBI's attention not through a contemporaneous police investigation, but through a 1966 article by Lincoln Lynch, then a national director of the Congress of Racial Equality, describing it to fellow CORE members. No specific suspects were ever identified. When the DOJ's Civil Rights Division reopened the case decades later, the FBI contacted Mississippi state agencies, the Southern Poverty Law Center, the NAACP, the Mississippi Crime Laboratory, and local newspapers, and issued a public press release seeking information; nothing further surfaced, and the case was closed in 2010.

Natchez, MS · Adams County

• 1966: Case opens — victim reported missing or found.
• Documented milestones (renewed investigation, media coverage, family advocacy) to be added as sourced.
• Present: case remains unresolved. No named suspect has been convicted.

• Victim identity and the general 1966 timeframe of the killing, per the DOJ's public case file, drawing on a contemporaneous CORE publication.
• No suspects were ever identified, despite an extensive later FBI outreach campaign including a public press release, per the same file.

• No specific date, location details, or suspects for the killing were ever documented beyond the general connection to the March Against Fear.
• Why local law enforcement at the time did not generate any investigative record that survived to the DOJ's later review was never explained.

• U.S. Department of Justice — Notice to Close File
• Project Cold Case
• Murder Accountability Project
• NamUs