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  Frinks tried to nurture a similarly pragmatic and expansive vision inside the ranks of the freedom movement at a historical moment when its forces had fragmented. Deeply committed to nonviolence, Golden Frinks’s aggressive organizing style sought to bridge the gap between civil rights preachers and Black Power militants. Though he had worked for Dr. King’s SCLC for many years and walked faithfully in the path of nonviolent interracialism, no one could question his mettle or call him an Uncle Tom. Frinks remained close to Floyd McKissick of the Congress of Racial Equality, a fellow North Carolinian, a lawyer and World War II veteran who had helped lead the mid-1960s revival of black nationalism.

  The Black Power generation, some of whom like McKissick were not so young, rejected interracialism, often to the point of dogma; Frinks did not think that there was so much white support that there was any reason to bicker about it, but that eventually everyone would have to learn to live together. While Frinks knew plenty about guns, he tended to think the youthful embrace of armed self-defense provided more political problems than physical security; he and many other members of the older civil rights generation were also well armed but felt no need to talk about it. Racial separatism, as a philosophical position, made no sense to Frinks at all. But he shared the Black Power cohort’s militant opposition to white domination, their sensible emphasis on economic uplift, and especially their fiery assertion of African American pride. He knew that much of the old order’s power to oppress black folk came from the lingering self-loathing bred by white supremacy, and he said it loud, black, and proud, nearly as often as James Brown.

  For that reason, and because he was an extremely engaging person, the Black Power militants respected Frinks. He befriended Stokely Carmichael, Howard Fuller, Ben Chavis, and the other young black radicals who chanted “Black Power” and often denounced their elders, taking them into his home and feeding them good counsel and collard greens. The young firebrands listened to him, even though they did not always agree. “Whether they admit it or not,” he reflected in later years, “they were stealing, getting ideas, replenishing their aggressiveness. And then they went and killed the movement.” In the late 1960s, Goldie Frinks donned a golden dashiki in the manner of the Black Power crowd, but he always wore a good-sized cross around his neck, too. And in Oxford, Frinks detected a moment of Divine purpose and historic opportunity for the shaken movement to pick up the disparate threads of protest and restitch freedom’s quilt.

  “This was at a period when sacrifices had to be made,” Frinks reflected, “and everybody has a purpose for being born.” Though the murder of Henry Marrow was a tragedy, he said, the sorrow “was supposed to bring that kind of feeling to his daughters, that kind of showing of the weeping of his wife, until a reconnection among the people come. And I was—some kind of way—I was destined to go in there and raise the devil and dust it up and move on. I was supposed to go in there and leave the community but dust it up a little bit so they would have the memory.” It may seem ludicrous to suggest that Marrow, who was not even an activist himself, died in order to energize the movement. But Frinks saw himself as a man of history caught up in a moment of destiny. “And after Oxford, we could all look back and say, ‘You gonna be a symbol to us for a long time.’ ” Opponents of the movement had moved the nation into a reactionary posture, and the movement’s most important voice and symbol, Dr. King, had fallen to an assassin’s bullet. “If Oxford had not been protested,” said Frinks, “it would have given legitimacy to stay with the backlash. This was going to revive us and bring us together and get us moving again in North Carolina, was the way I saw it unfolding.”

  Frinks hurried to town at the invitation of Elizabeth Chavis, Helen Amis, and other African American women in Oxford. “Those women had got together down in Oxford, don’t you know,” Frinks recalled. “They were some mighty tough black women down there. They believed in the civil rights.” Those women must have been slightly dismayed Saturday afternoon, however, when the hour for Henry Marrow’s funeral had arrived but the illustrious Golden Frinks had not. Hundreds of mourners overflowed the New Light Baptist Church and crowded the grounds, where latecomers could listen to the service through loudspeakers. “I think near about all of black Granville County attended the funeral,” Ben Chavis recalled.

  My father and Thad Stem appear to have been the only white people who came to the service. “There may have been another member of the Human Relations Council there,” Chavis speculated to me years later. “But the only white people I remember was your daddy and Thad Stem.” In any case, neither the city nor the county government dispatched a representative, sent flowers, or shared a word of condolence, a fact that did not go unnoticed among African Americans in Oxford. Daddy thought this was not only wrong but criminally stupid. With the entire community teetering on the brink of racial cataclysm, not one leader of the white-controlled political and economic system of Granville County had the foresight to show his face at the funeral—unless Thad’s familial ties in the Democratic Party qualify him. I personally don’t think anyone over fifty who wears tennis shoes to church counts as an elite.

  Golden Frinks, on the other hand, was a kind of North Carolina civil rights celebrity. When Frinks finally arrived at New Light Baptist, a cordon of state highway patrol cars and officers had already surrounded the church and denied him and his entourage of young people entrance to the grounds. Over the loudspeakers, Frinks could hear the service commencing without him. To Frinks’s frustration, the minister who was speaking was “less than impressive,” and he was desperate to get inside the barricade and take the pulpit himself. “It seemed like that preacher was restraining himself,” Frinks recalled, “trying to say, ‘Well, I don’t want to upset the white folks, don’t want to stir up the black folks, I just want to get this thing over with and get this young man in the earth.’ ” Frinks sidled up to a white trooper with a crew cut and grumbled, “That’s a sorry sermon that man is preaching.”

  The trooper shook his head in agreement but averred that the preaching should “pick up right much directly” because “they’re expecting Golden Frinks to come in here and stir this thing up. That’s why all of us are here, because they think Frinks is going to show up and get this thing on the move.” Laughing, Frinks identified himself and shook the officer’s hand warmly. “Well, I guess you’re supposed to be over in there,” the trooper said with a grin, waving him through the barrier. It was like a drama in which everyone played a part, but not all of the characters were as predictable as Hollywood and history books usually suggest. Ducking under the barricade, Frinks hustled to the church, where he did not disappoint his new friend the state trooper.

  At the end of the service, people started getting in cars to go to the graveside, but Frinks held up his hands and stopped them. “I said, ‘Now, wait, we don’t want to ride here, we want to march. Ben, Leon, all of y’all come up here.’ ” He gestured to Ben Chavis and Reverend Leon White, a United Church of Christ minister and another leading activist in eastern North Carolina, then beckoned to Thad Stem and Daddy. The black activists spread the word through the crowd that they planned to march to the cemetery. “They just gave over to me,” Frinks said. The black firebrand, who knew the small-town South like Ray Charles knows the keyboard, asked Thad and my father to talk to the police and get their approval for the march.

  Daddy and Thad strolled over to the captain of the state highway patrol and Chief of Police Nathan White, who were standing by the rope barrier around the cemetery smoking cigarettes. Hands stuffed deep in his pockets, Thad greeted everybody, introducing my father all around. He wasn’t Major Stem’s boy for nothing, and he knew local politics. After he’d made a couple of pleasant inquiries about the health of Chief White’s family and that sort of thing, Thad lit a Camel, lowered his voice, and got down to business. “Nathan, they want to march downtown,” Thad said, snorting tobacco smoke. “I believe you ought to lead them down there. Seems to me we’d rather have this thing official than u
nofficial.”

  “They’re going to have to get a permit,” White answered. “They can’t have a march without a permit. I don’t have enough men on duty to handle that kind of thing. The captain here would have to bring in some state troopers. It might take a couple of days to handle the paperwork.”

  “They didn’t have a permit to break every goddamn window in Oxford the other night, either,” Thad said bluntly. “If you let them march, maybe they won’t burn the place down tonight. You know as well as I do that tightening the valve ain’t gonna keep the boiler from blowing. If they let off a little steam, we might just get past this thing and everybody keep their job.” This last point, no doubt rendered with a certain class condescension, seemed to focus Chief White’s attention, and the sweet light of reason descended upon him.

  “Tell ’em they can march, but they have to keep it orderly and they have to stay in the right-hand lane,” White growled. “I am going to need a few minutes to put up some roadblocks.” He spat on the ground. “You tell Frinks they can go ahead on to the cemetery any time they want, we already got that covered, but he better not take one goddamn step past there until I give the go-head.” Having routed Chief White while permitting him to preserve some semblance of authority, Thad walked with my father back over to where Frinks and his lieutenants were huddled, let them know that the police had okayed the march, and then joined the mourners.

  The hearse drove slowly as the wet-eyed throng plodded the several blocks to the graveyard. My father walked alongside Thad, neither of them quite knowing what their part might be at such a moment. All around them the tone of the funeral was shifting from mourning to protest, and the days of white clergymen marching across the Selma bridge with Dr. King were over. For my father, like for most white liberals, his marching days had ended before they had really begun. Most white advocates of civil rights were, as Daddy had feared they would be, too late. The tragic irony was that by the time mainstream white liberals had mastered a few verses to “We Shall Overcome,” the young Black Power insurgents had begun to sneer that the lyrics should be changed to “we shall overrun.” Daddy walked uncomfortably, though no one tried to make him feel unwelcome. “We were glad to be there, but it was a little awkward,” Daddy recalled.

  “We walked slow, you know, impressive,” Frinks said. “The hearse going along slow, here we come right behind it, walking strong. Got to the cemetery, let the preacher say ‘ashes to ashes,’ and bam-bam. But then I said, ‘Hold up, now.’ ” Frinks stepped up beside Henry Marrow’s grave, alongside Willie Mae Marrow, the weeping widow, and he climbed onto the pile of earth that would soon cover the casket. Calling on the black community to make this tragedy meaningful by uniting in a campaign for justice, Frinks summoned the deep emotions of the moment. “Back then you played on the feelings to bond people together,” he recalled decades later. “You had to create such an emotional, sad moment in your delivery, in your oratory, act like you were gonna cry, and then they’d be ready to go again.”

  Frinks reminded the crowd of their loss and its meaning. “This young man was a husband, he was a daddy,” he said, gesturing toward the pregnant Willie Mae Marrow and her two children. “And he was a son, an uncle, and a cousin.” Stressing the word “cousin,” Frinks looked directly at Ben Chavis, the handsome young leader, knowing that Ben had taken a new level of leadership among the young people in recent days and mindful of the Chavis family’s friendship to Marrow and their historic prominence in the African American community. “I had to do that because Ben was kind of a cousin to the young man, and Ben was coming on up,” Frinks recalled. “And then I said, ‘Come around here hand in hand, and sing “We Shall Overcome.”’ That was an impressive thing. And I knew my thing was working.” When Golden Frinks called for the crowd to sing “We Shall Overcome,” Daddy and Thad crossed their arms like everyone else, reached for the nearest black hand, and sang along. “And I said, ‘All right, now you can go ahead and cover him up,’ ” Frinks told me. “ ‘And we’re going on uptown. Now, we ain’t got no permit, ain’t got nothing. But we’re going to march on.’ The thing I wanted was to go back down to that big old Confederate monument, you see. That’s what I knew we needed to do.”

  Daddy and Thad, on the other hand, had come to pay their respects and to try to get Henry Marrow buried without further bloodshed. If it had been 1963 instead of 1970, it is possible that Daddy and Thad both would have made their debut that day as civil rights marchers. That would have been unusual, even in the early years of the movement. Most of the white people who appear in film footage of civil rights marches were brave followers of Leon Trotsky or radical Catholic sisters or saintly kooks of one description or another, and almost all of them were from somewhere else. very few whites actually joined their own local civil rights demonstrations; local whites never thought the protests were well timed or appropriately organized. Daddy hadn’t been there, either. But if he had found himself thrust into the march like this, he probably would have been crazy enough to pay the price. Thad was a federal employee, belonged to an affluent, old-line Oxford family, was on speaking terms with many of the state’s most powerful Democrats, and did not give a damn what people thought anyway. Daddy would have been risking his pulpit, of course, but he was used to that. In 1970, however, with young black people chanting “Umgawa, Black Power” all around them, finding themselves walking in a sea of black fists bristling upward in the Black Power salute, neither the white man of letters nor the white man of the cloth knew quite what to do.

  As the flow of black marchers poured into the street and headed toward the Confederate monument downtown, Thad muttered to Daddy that he felt “like the one-legged man at a public tail-kicking.” When the march neared the corner of Front Street, where both men would have turned to walk home, Thad asked if Daddy might like to stop by the house for a sandwich and a bowl of soup. The two of them ducked out of the march and turned toward home, and out of history, for there was nowhere else to go. One problem was that they had not had the experiences in interracial coalition politics that would have enabled them to disagree with some parts of a black political agenda and support other parts, for example, and hammer out their differences while finding common ground. Nor was there anything like a ready welcome from blacks. Not knowing about the real history of the South, few blacks and even fewer whites knew that these problems had been confronted before, and with some success. In some respects, the split between white liberals and black radicals was a failure of memory. This tragic parting of the ways occurred across the country. That may have been inevitable, but it would have mixed and enduring consequences for American history.

  As Daddy and Thad split off from the procession, the marchers continued toward the Confederate monument. The old Rebel soldier in the town’s main intersection was more a monument to white supremacy than to the Confederacy and in 1970 most whites either liked it or simply did not think about it. But neither white supremacy nor the Confederacy had always unified the white population. The monument’s appearance in 1909 had marked the consolidation of the new social order of segregation and the establishment of a new degree of racial solidarity among whites, who had been deeply divided by the Populist upheavals of the late nineteenth century and the changing politics of race in the decades after the Civil War.

  Before the war, Granville County had 1,348 farms, with an average size of 327 acres. virtually all of the men who owned these farms lived on them and managed them, though many of them enslaved other people to work the fields. By 1890, however, the size of a farm in the county had dropped to 119 acres and most of the land had changed hands; the majority of farmers, black and white, were now sharecroppers. White farmers, their land forfeited to falling prices and rapacious banks, became so desperate that they began to see their black neighbors as potential allies—and to contemplate leaving the Democratic Party, “the party of the fathers,” the party of the Confederacy, the party of “the South” as they had always known it.

  Hundreds
of these dispossessed white farmers joined the Populist movement in the 1890s, established their own newspaper, the Granville County Reformer, and founded an Alliance cooperative tobacco warehouse. They even made common cause with African American farmers, though most white Populists were reluctant to accept the former slaves as civic equals, a tragic failure that led to their defeat. Black and white farmers came to this Fusion coalition for different reasons: the white dissidents focused more on economics, while black men sought access to the ballot box and protection from terrorism. Despite these persistent differences and their enduring prejudices, white Populists helped elect a number of black Republicans to office in Granville County in the Fusion coalitions of 1894 and 1896. The most famous of these, Henry Plummer Cheatham, was the only African American to serve in the Fifty-second Congress; the interracial coalition held on longer in Granville County than anywhere else in the South. “For a time,” write two local historians, “the politics of economic interests and universal rights took the place of the politics of race in the county.” In a sense, my father and Thad Stem were the political heirs of this Fusionist interracialism; seventy years earlier, they would have had little trouble finding a political home for themselves. But the problem was that the Fusion coalition was defeated so utterly at the turn of the century, crushed by violence and fraud, and then blotted out of the history books, that seventy years later, most North Carolinians could not remember their interracial past and found it hard even to imagine a realistic interracial coalition. In the case of white liberals, this amnesia meant they could only imagine themselves as paternalists, not authentic little- d democrats.