Black people officially won the unrestricted right to vote in the US in 1965 but many still encountered hurdles on their path to the ballot box: 11 states in the south quickly introduced a poll tax requiring an annual fee to be allowed to vote. The practice unambiguously targeted poor Black communities in an early form of thinly veiled racist voter suppression. Vernon Dahmer wouldn’t stand for it. In January 1966 the Hattiesburg, Mississippi-based Black activist and NAACP chapter head promised to cover the fee for those struggling to afford it. “It’s a proclamation that we here, that we matter,” he says in an early scene in By Any Means, a considered, if blunt, drama inspired by the real-life aftermath of Dahmer’s murder by the Ku Klux Klan.
It is Mississippi in the mid-60s and Wayne Strider (a sturdy Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) is new to the local FBI unit, having recently moved back to his home state from Chicago, and is dealing with bosses who turn a blind eye to racist crimes. “White guys can get away with murder,” says one Black colleague while shaking his head. After his boss receives a message from President Johnson to prioritize the Dahmer murder case, Strider is teamed up with a widely feared mobster, Gregory Scarpa (Mark Wahlberg with a rather distracting prosthetic nose), who has been shipped in from Brooklyn as part of an off-book mission to track down the Klansmen and bring justice to the killers.
