Correspondent photo / Sean Barron Joan Trumpauer Mulholland, a civil rights icon, signs a copy of a book titled “Get Back to the Counter” that her son, Loki Mulholland wrote. The younger Mulholland was at the Tyler History Center on Tuesday to show the film “Dying to Vote,” on which he was an executive producer.

YOUNGSTOWN — Two incidents that occurred 55 years apart may be distant from each other in time, but they’re perilously close in ideology and intent, a filmmaker contends.

“I felt that if we talk about voter intimidation and Jan. 6, it was a critical factor to have Bennie Thompson,” Loki Mulholland of Richmond, Virginia, said, referring to U.S. Rep. Bennie G. Thompson, D-Mississippi, who chaired the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Thompson had a critical role in Mulholland’s latest documentary, “Dying to Vote,” which he showed during a screening Tuesday at the Tyler History Center, 325 W. Federal St., downtown. The 32-minute film was finished earlier this month.

The documentary also includes Dennis Dahmer of Hattiesburg, Mississippi, son of the late civil rights pioneer and staunch voting rights activist Vernon F. Dahmer, 57, who died from smoke inhalation after two carloads of Klansmen firebombed the Dahmer home Jan. 10, 1966, because of his work in getting more blacks registered to vote.

“Dying to Vote” intersperses interviews Mulholland conducted with Thompson and Dennis Dahmer to make the point that many voter-intimidation tactics used against Vernon Dahmer and many other civil rights workers in the Jim Crow South 60 years ago parallel those that led to the insurrection in which five Capitol police officers were killed.

A glaring similarity between the two tragic events is that they were carried out largely by white people who “want to maintain power but are unwilling to share it,” Mulholland said.

Mulholland added many of them subscribe to the so-called “great replacement” conspiracy theory in which adherents falsely believe in active, covert and ongoing efforts to replace white populations in predominantly white countries.

Also, the documentary ties the Jan. 6 insurrection and the firebombing of the Dahmer residence with the element of surprise.

Vernon Dahmer and his wife, Ellie J. Dahmer, slept in shifts to protect their home and family after receiving numerous threats before the Klansmen attacked in the middle of the night.

“Vernon, Vernon, I believe they have got us this time,” Dahmer quoted his mother as saying during the firebombing attack.

Likewise, Thompson said in the film he had no idea many of those who supported President Donald Trump would be brazen enough to break into the Capitol and commit such carnage.

Mulholland also compared the coup attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election with the attempted coup Nov. 10, 1898, in Wilmington, North Carolina, which is also known as the Wilmington Massacre. On that day, an armed mob of white men, angered at a contested election, marched and set fire to The Daily Record, a black publication, before attacking many blacks in the streets. The result was the forced resignation of the city’s elected officials who were replaced with white supremacists.

Mulholland took no political position in the film and asserted that both major parties have been guilty of supporting or directly being part of voter-intimidation tactics — specifically, many Democrats during the Jim Crow era, as well as many extremist Republicans today.

“It’s not about party, but about ideology,” Mulholland said.

The Emmy-winning filmmaker, whose credits also include “After Selma,” “Emmett Till: White Lies, Black Death” and “An Ordinary Hero,” said his latest documentary is not intended for personal consumption. Instead, it’s meant to be a tool for those who wish to host a screening and then discuss race and other social justice-related topics.

Also at Tuesday’s screening was Mulholland’s mother, civil rights icon Joan Trumpauer Mulholland, who participated in the 1961 Freedom Rides and the May 28, 1963, sit-in at an F.W. Woolworth store in Jackson, Mississippi. She also was among the riders who were arrested and sent to Parchman Penitentiary in the Mississippi Delta.

Mulholland, who also has penned multiple books, said he lives by one of her driving philosophies.

“My mother once said, ‘I can’t do everything, but I can do something because doing nothing is not an option.’ For me, my part is doing these films,” he said.

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