Blood Done Sign My Name Page 11
We arrived in Oxford at a moment when African American freedom movements across the region had begun to galvanize black folks in Oxford to press harder for equal citizenship. There had been little in the way of visible victories, although the movement had begun stirring twenty-five years earlier. Resistance to white supremacy went back to slavery days, but the black South’s longstanding protest traditions emerged full-blown during World War II because international politics gave black Americans fresh perspectives and new leverage. “The problem of the Negro in the United States is no longer a purely domestic question,” A. Philip Randolph observed in 1943. “We have become the barometer of democracy to the colored peoples of the world.”
African Americans wielded these contradictions as weapons in their own war on the home front. Randolph, a crucial link between the “New Negro” militants of the 1920s and 1930s, the civil rights generation of Martin Luther King Jr., and the Black Power rebels that followed, argued during World War II that there was “no difference between Hitler of Germany and Talmadge of Georgia or Tojo of Japan and Bilbo of Mississippi.” NAACP membership grew nearly tenfold during the war years, and the number of branches tripled, three-quarters of the new branches arising in the South. CORE organized nonviolent direct-action campaigns against segregation in northern cities that laid the groundwork for its important Southern campaigns in the 1960s. Circulation of black newspapers increased by 40 percent during wartime, and the black press kept the pressure on the federal government by publicizing the widespread violence that occurred around military bases across the South.
These same tensions and transformations came to Granville County during the war. Camp Butner, a large training camp, brought thousands of black soldiers from across the country, many of them “not familiar with the laws and customs of this section,” the editors of the Oxford Public Ledger complained. In fact, most of the black soldiers were quite familiar with the rules of segregation, but their refusal to obey them made enforcement “utterly impossible,” officials at the North Carolina Utilities Commission protested in 1943. When white bus drivers attempted to enforce the segregation ordinances, black soldiers at Camp Butner overturned the buses. The Oxford Police Department purchased tear gas, riot equipment, and a tripod-mounted .50-caliber machine gun.
That machine gun came in handy one Saturday night in June 1944. A black private named Wilson stationed at Camp Butner had accompanied a fellow soldier into Oxford. Walking into a downtown café, the two black GIs asked for a beer. Told that there was no beer, Private Wilson tried to buy a package of Lucky Strike cigarettes. The white proprietor claimed that he told the black soldiers, “We only serve white patrons,” an unlikely choice of words if I ever heard one. As Wilson and his comrade stalked out the door, one of them muttered that the proprietor was a “poor white son of a bitch.” Chief of Police H. J. Jackson, who’d been eating meat loaf in one of the booths, ran outside, collared Private Wilson from behind, and clubbed him to the sidewalk with his pistol. Wilson’s friend escaped back to Camp Butner while Chief Jackson dragged the black private to the jail in the basement at the rear of the courthouse.
Less than an hour later, sixty black men from Camp Butner launched what the Raleigh News and Observer called “an unsuccessful effort by a squad of Negro soldiers to storm the Oxford jail and release one of their number.” Huddling in the shadow of the Confederate monument, the soldiers sent two representatives toward the double front doors of the courthouse to negotiate Private Wilson’s release.
Chief Jackson met the two black soldiers on the steps, pistol-whipped one of them to the concrete, and jabbed the barrel of the gun hard into the face of the other. The two men retreated into the crowd of black enlisted men. Chief Jackson loudly ordered the troops to disperse, and police fired tear-gas grenades into the crowd, but the black soldiers decided to rush the courthouse doors. Swinging the doors wide, Assistant Chief J. L. Cash confronted the oncoming phalanx with the large, tripod-mounted machine gun Oxford had purchased “expressly for such a purpose,” according to the Oxford Public Ledger. Only in the face of certain annihilation did the black soldiers scatter and flee, thus averting another tragedy of the kind that was all too common around Southern training camps during the war. Across the World War II–era South, dozens of black G.I.s died in uniform at the hands of their own countrymen.
Racial clashes, though frequent, did not entirely define the wartime experience in Granville County. During the war, a sewing room operated by the Works Progress Administration in Oxford quietly employed white and black women alike, and they worked side by side in apparent harmony. White men went before the county commission in 1941 to insist that the sewing room comply with the segregation statutes. The men insisted that the room be segregated, if only by having a curtain hung down its center. But the women who worked there enjoyed their subversive camaraderie. The white woman who supervised the sewing room firmly resisted the men’s segregation proposal, arguing that the white women really did not mind and that the black women especially needed the work. Finally, the county commission let the matter drop. In an all-female space, “race mixing” did not threaten to become “amalgamation,” apparently; in any case, the women simply would not comply.
After the war, local black veterans came home determined that the war for democracy abroad would expand democracy at home. Randolph Johnson and James Gregory, two black veterans, organized voter-registration drives in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Though some whites recognized the contradictions in denying the ballot to black men who had risked their lives for democracy, they remained silent. Black registration drives met with considerable resistance. “Out in the county,” recalled Richard C. Shepard, a local black funeral home director, “you had to go to some of these stores to get registered. A lot of them was Klansmen, and they would give you the long way around to get registered.” The black freedom movement had never confined itself to mere citizenship rights, however, but also sought to bolster a new black sense of self. Randolph Johnson, who had “nothing but brains,” in the words of a former employer, not only tried to register votes but also broadcast a local weekly radio program entitled Negroes in the News, in which he featured both local and national achievements by African Americans. Like the Black Power militants who came afterward, black World War II veterans struggled against internalized white supremacy, defeatism, and apathy in their own communities.
During the late 1950s and early 1960s, black churchwomen in Oxford rallied against that apathy in a series of church meetings and soon affiliated themselves with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference led by Martin Luther King Jr. Elizabeth Chavis, Helen Amis, and quite a few others met regularly and supported the movement in Oxford and across North Carolina. “They believed in the civil rights,” SCLC field secretary Golden Frinks recalled. “Some of them had come out, had gone to other demonstrations in places like Ayden and Edenton, had come way down there in eastern North Carolina, wherever we was needing them to demonstrate or cook or whatever needed doing. Elizabeth Chavis was very strong. These were some strong women.”
Young black people in Oxford also responded to news of the growing movement in the South. “Yeah, we was listening to Tv, that’s how we got involved in the first sit-ins in Oxford, because we saw on Tv they was doing it up in Greensboro,” Eddie McCoy recalled. Soon afterward, he and two friends went to a local department store and sat down at the segregated counter. “We told them we wanted to be served,” he said, “but they didn’t pay no attention to you. And we said again we wanted to be served, and they said we don’t serve no niggers here.
“The funny thing,” McCoy continued, “is that if they had served us, we didn’t have no money. If it had been fifty cents, we would have been in trouble.” McCoy and his friends knew that the police would arrive soon. “We even knew who would come,” McCoy recounted. “They gonna send Nathan White. He’s one of those white guys that’s like a diplomat, he want to work with everybody, he don’t mean no harm, that’s just his nature
.” The police officer’s response was classic small-town South. “When he come in he looked at us and asked who our parents are,” McCoy said, “and then we told him, and that rang a bell, so he said come on outside and work this thing out.” They walked out to the sidewalk, where White told the young men to go home and warned that he would contact their parents, whereupon they left. “But when we went back again, they decided they just didn’t serve anything in the afternoon to anybody. They started taking up the stools.”
Soon afterward, a group of young black high school athletes in Oxford organized a sit-in at Herring’s Drugstore, right next door to the barbershop where Robert Teel worked. After asking to be served, the young black men were shocked to see the white proprietor quietly drop their hamburgers onto the flat grill and their french fries into the deep-fat fryer. Again, McCoy wondered how they would pay for the food if the manager actually served them. But as they sat watching their lunch sizzling on the grill and wondering what might happen, the proprietor made a short series of telephone calls. “We knew damn well he wasn’t calling up people to tell them he done seen the light of integration,” McCoy laughed. A large group of Klansmen began to arrive in the drugstore and gather around the seated young men, making menacing remarks. “They was getting ready to flat kick our ass,” said McCoy, who told his teammates that when he gave the signal, they should all dash out the door. As they fled, the white men gave chase.
Most of the young black men easily outran their pursuers, but James Lyons found himself cornered in an alley and was forced to take cover in the back entrance to the Oxford Police Department. Needless to say, in 1960 this was not widely considered a safe haven for black revolutionaries. As Lyons careened through the back door, he lost his footing and landed at the feet of the desk officer, panting, “Please don’t let them kill me, please don’t let them kill me.” In seconds, the mob crowded into the room around the prostrate young black man. The police officer began kicking and stomping Lyons in full view of the crowd, but using the flat side of his foot and making only light contact; even at that terrifying moment, the young black man realized that the officer was putting on a show for the crowd so that they would not kill him. “Y’all go on, now,” the white cop told the angry mob, kicking the fallen black man again. “I can take care of this black bastard.” When the men had all filed out the back door, the policeman looked down at Lyons and spat, “I ought to have let them kill you.” Such was the strange debut of nonviolent direct action in Granville County, North Carolina.
James Lyons, Eddie McCoy, and quite a few of the other young African American men joined the sporadic campaigns of picketing and boycotting against segregated businesses in downtown Oxford in the early 1960s. In fact, their efforts closed the lunch counters for a time. “We shut down the lunch counters,” McCoy said. “And we was happy with that. Everybody was treated equal.” In the wake of that limited success, a group of the young men tried to desegregate the Orpheum Theater and the police took them into the alley and beat them with nightsticks. “I knew that won’t gon’ work,” McCoy recalled. “It’s an alley, blacks had go down the alley to go upstairs. Whites went in the front door. But when my friends bought tickets and tried to go in like the white people, the police came and beat them up.”
But the young men were not alone. Local women of their mothers’ generation formed the backbone of the early movement in Oxford. “Ben Chavis’s mama, Mrs. Elizabeth Chavis, she got out there, and her sister Eunice and all of them, and her other sister Helen, and some of their friends, they was up on it,” Golden Frinks recalled. “They was up on what was happening.” These movements, which were not directly linked to efforts by national organizations like the SCLC and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), met with occasional and sometimes temporary success. In June 1963, inspired by the SCLC’s campaign in Birmingham, hundreds of black citizens in Oxford took to the streets in a series of protests aimed at segregation at local restaurants, lunch counters, and the Orpheum Theater. Many of the demonstrators confronted violence at the hands of local whites, including the Oxford Police Department. When the police attacked protestors in 1963, blacks fought them in the streets and the demonstration “became a riot,” according to a report from the governor’s office.
Tom Ragland, the city manager of Oxford and a lifelong resident, considered his hometown fairly typical. “Oxford was like most Southern towns in 1963 and 1964,” he said a few years later. “We had demonstrations and boycotts by the Negroes against segregation in stores, restaurants, theaters. We set up a Human Relations Commission to try and set up some communication between the races. And I think there was some communication.” The problem, of course, was that white Southerners may have needed “communication” as a way of congratulating themselves on their paternalistic generosity toward “the Negro,” but black Southerners needed what amounted to a whole new social structure, one that did not stigmatize and impoverish them. “We had changed it some,” Eddie McCoy reflected. “But then they messed it up and went back to how it was. They just went back to the old ways again.”
Whether or not there had been any real “communication,” the local Good Neighbor Council, the Bi-Racial Commission, and the Human Relations Council—it is hard to distinguish among these overlapping and evanescent committees—accomplished almost nothing. The Good Neighbor Council, with four black and four white members, focused on creating jobs for blacks, but managed to come up with less than a dozen. The Bi-Racial Commission, with five whites and five blacks, approached one hotel and three motels, asking them to drop the color bar; the establishments agreed to integrate, but withdrew their commitments when demonstrations failed to cease immediately. One drive-in restaurant undertook a thirty-day trial period of integration but discontinued the process after two days; three other drive-ins committed to thirty-day trials that never even began. None of the sit-down restaurants in Oxford would consider opening their doors to black customers. Segregation persisted not only at restaurants and hotels, but also in the local hospitals, the all-white chamber of commerce, and the all-white Merchants Association. So much for committees.
On our first Race Relations Sunday in Oxford, Daddy invited the head of the state Good Neighbor Council, Dr. David Coltrane, to speak at our church. Thad was not impressed. Coltrane was a distinguished gray-haired financier who worked for Governor Terry Sanford, the most progressive white liberal politician in the South. Coltrane traveled the state, putting out political fires and making pleasant noises about “good race relations” while trying not to rub anybody the wrong way. A moderate by temperament and inclination, Coltrane tended to stress the importance of “communication” between the races, as if slavery and segregation had been some terrible misunderstanding. The “race problem,” his calm words suggested, could be solved if the right people were on the committee. “Best damn sermon I ever heard in this church,” Thad whispered playfully as he walked past Daddy on his way.
In fact, according to Daddy, Coltrane’s complacent pronouncements about racial “progress” troubled Thad deeply. That night, Coltrane spoke again at Methodist Men; Thad didn’t show up. At about nine-thirty, my father cut out the lights in the fellowship hall and headed home. Driving down College Street toward the monument, Daddy saw Thad shuffling down the sidewalk. It was February and a little nippy, and Daddy stopped to offer him a ride home.
“Where you been this evening, Preacher?” Thad asked, getting into the Pontiac. Daddy could smell the whiskey.
“I’ve been down at Methodist Men,” Daddy replied, still delighted with the evening. “You should have come, Thad. Dave Coltrane had a good word for us, and the Methodist Women served pecan pie.”
“He ain’t nothing but a damn fool,” Thad growled, shaking his head. “Terry Sanford, Dave Coltrane, and all them political do-gooders are off on another fool’s errand. What he and all the rest of them need to understand is that we were wrong about the Negroes, and I don’t mean mistaken. I mean we were wrong, as wrong as David wa
s when he sent Uriah off to be killed so he could take Bathsheba for himself, and there ain’t a committee or a commission in the world that is going to change that. We’re about three hundred years late for the goddamn ‘Good Neighbor Council.’ ” The two men rode home for three blocks of awkward silence, and my father dropped Thad off in front of his house.
Daddy went home, got out of his suit and tie, and read the newspaper at the kitchen table in his underwear by himself. Everyone else was already asleep. At around eleven o’clock he went upstairs and crawled into bed beside my mother. Just as he started to close his eyes, Daddy heard a knock on the front door. Putting on his old purple bathrobe, Daddy clambered back down the stairs and opened the front door. There stood Thad Stem. “Come in, Thad, come on in,” Daddy said.
“No, I won’t come in, thanks,” Thad said.
“What is it, Thad?” my father asked. “What’s wrong?”
“I’m the damn fool,” Thad muttered. “The truth is, I’m the damn fool. Good night, Preacher.” And then Oxford’s illustrious man of letters turned and headed back out into the night.
Thad still lived on the street where he was born, and wrote his books in a dusty office above Hall’s Drugstore. He was the prodigal son of the late Major Thaddeus Stem, a lawyer and then judge who had been an almost legendary figure in the state’s Democratic Party. He taught me, with his unforgettable stories, that the poet and the preacher—if they’re both doing their jobs—are only working different sides of the same street, even if Thad was pretty sure that his side was more fun.