Theron Lynd

Theron Carl Lynd (May 30, 1920– January 31, 1978) was an American circuit clerk and voter registrar in Forrest County, Mississippi, who refused to register Black people during the civil rights movement. Lynd was the first southern voter registrar to be held in violation of charges of discrimination under the Federal Civil Rights Acts.

Lynd attended Mississippi State University to study business and graduated in 1943. In college he was a member of the Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity. Lynd was elected Forrest County Circuit Clerk in 1959, replacing Luther Cox, who had died in office. Lynd reported to and was surveilled by the Hattiesburg Citizens' Council and the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, a state agency established to fight desegregation efforts, these two organizations wanted to insure segregation was still happening in the court system.

In March 1962, a Federal District Court injunction hearing was held in under Judge Harold Cox. and Department of Justice lawyer and chief counsel John Doar handled the case for the federal government. The court case concluded that discrimination existed but it did not acknowledge the plaintiff's request for a preliminary injunction, so the Justice Department appealed Judge Cox's decision to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in the Southern District (S.D.) in Houston. Lynd's litigation continued until 1967. They had no children.

Lynd was over 6 feet tall and over 300 pounds. He was obese and a diabetic, and later in life had an amputation of both legs, around 1977. The following winter hundreds of people protested Lynd’s refusal to register Black voters at the local courthouse on “Freedom Day”. Gordon A. Martin, a former Civil Rights Division attorney, judge and professor, wrote chapters on Lynd and the events in his book, Count Them One By One; Black Mississippians Fighting for the Right to Vote (2010). Lynd is also profiled in the William Sturkey book Hattiesburg: An American City in Black and White (Harvard University Press, 2019).